Intersession Interview With Dr. Berryman

Intersession has undergone major changes, from Maymester, and now, to one week and four different sections. It has always served to expand experiential learning, though the purpose was blurred over the years, but has become more prominent this year.

Traditionally, Intersession was always one week, so it is now changed back, just during more weeks throughout the year, such as fall break, the first week after winter break, during spring break, or at the end of the academic year. This expands the choices and even allows students to choose more classes.

The Acronym interviewed the director of experiential learning, Dr. Luke Berryman, to learn more about the next steps for Intersession.

From a coordinator’s perspective, what do you think Intersession is? What purpose does Intersession serve for the students?

Dr. Berryman: I actually think whether it’s from the students’ perspective or from the faculty perspective, it really should be a chance to engage in experiential learning. That means that you are learning something outside of your normal academic diet, and more specifically, it means that you’re learning through a different method. So through some kind of hands-on experience, you then have the opportunity to reflect and work out what went well, what didn’t go so well, how you would do it differently, and then you go back and have another experience, and that’s how the cycle works.

By shortening Intersession, do you think that it would lessen the experiential learning?

Dr. Berryman: I don’t think so necessarily. It’s important to remember that for the bulk of its existence, Intersession was only one week long. Having it for two weeks was the unusual thing. If you speak to faculty that have been here 10, 15, 20 years, in their minds, Intersession is very much a one week block. I would also say that the new format, where there are going to be four Intersession weeks spread out at different moments in the year presents all sorts of possibilities …so I’m not sure that’s necessarily going to end up diminishing either the quality of the experience or what is offered.

For most students, they’re less interested in the classes and more interested in choosing Intersessions that their friends are in. How will allowing Intersession to take place in four different weeks change this?

Dr. Berryman: Honestly, I think that I would prefer to live in an IMSA in which students weren’t making Intersession choices based on what their friends are doing. Really, it should be about a deep dive exploration of your interests. If you can’t do it with your friend group, maybe you’ll meet new people, and maybe you’ll interact with people that you haven’t interacted with yet, and that interaction will be all the more meaningful because you both chose to be in the same place at the same time because of a mutual shared interest, as opposed to you’re all there at the same time because this is the one place that could fit you.

Many students enjoy the time staying on campus without having formal classes and where they can spend more time hanging out with their friends. Now that Intersession is shortening, students probably feel like they’re jumping straight into school very quickly. What is your perspective on this?

Dr. Berryman: I would say, first of all, that I do believe that Intersession is meant to have concrete academic value for the students, and obviously, it’s different from what’s done during the rest of the year, but there should be learning value nevertheless. You should take away something from Intersession that you didn’t have before, and if there’s a widespread belief among the students that actually Intersessions just meant to be this comfortable, soft start to the year, then it’s incumbent on me and the administrators to communicate more clearly that actually, this is the purpose of Intersession.

If you speak to the staff who’ve been here for 10, 15, 20 years, they’ll tell you that, yes, there is a sense in which Intersession is like this soft start to the year, that it’s not the same as diving straight back into hardcore academic classes, but I think it’s important not to take that too far. I think that students should not be under the impression, for example, that Intersession is optional, and that Intersession is just one rung up from doing nothing. It’s meant to be fun and different and experiential and experimental.

Until this year, most students were pretty unclear as to what Intersession was, because they want to have fun, and learning isn’t the highest priority. 

Dr. Berryman: That’s a valid point, and, like I said, it’s then incumbent on us, the administrators, to make even clearer to the students what we hope that you folks will get out of it. If you compare it, for example, to a program like SIR, it’s kind of an interesting comparison because I feel like everyone in the academy, students and faculty, have a very clear unified vision of what SIR is and what it’s meant to achieve.

But compared to Intersession, I think that Intersession means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I think part of my role here is to try and get everyone on the same page about what Intercession is and what we’re trying to get out of it. I think we took a step toward making things a bit clearer this year with the Core and Explore thing, which kind of divided the program into the “academic” side and the “fun” side of Intersession.

Was there something specific about the two week Intersession that made you want to change it back?

Dr. Berryman: I would say that with any change to the timetable, there’s very rarely a single reason behind it, and there’s all sorts of parties around the building, who have both an interest and a say in the shape of the timetable. So I wouldn’t want the student body to think, “oh there’s one simple reason that it’s been switched and that reason’s been hidden from us” or “we’ve been shut out of the conversation,” because that’s not what’s happened. The decision making is really complicated and ultimately has to be taken by Dr. Glazer to the cabinet for approval, so it’s multilayered. And student feedback is part of it as well, so that’s another thing I would say is that for every student who felt that two weeks was ideal, there’s at least one more student who was saying in surveys that two weeks is too much.

For Maymester, there was a lot of backlash, so if the same thing happened to the one week change, would it go back?

Dr. Berryman: I think, as someone who’s relatively new to IMSA, it seems to me that the academy really does everything that it can to treat its students like college level students. You folks are pushed to think and operate and exist at an undergraduate level, both in the work that you do, but also in the timetables that you’re given. If you look across the college landscape, Maymesters are actually pretty common, so I think that’s partly where the idea for the expanded Maymester came from. There was a lot of feedback from the student body, and you know, the feedback was heard and the changes were made. So as far as I’m aware, there’s been nothing like the same level of concern switching from two weeks back to one.

Are there any other potential changes besides shortening and having multiple weeks?

Dr. Berryman: I think so. I mean, we’re going to be seeking to fine tune Intersession as best we can, and that means going through all of the feedback really carefully and identifying any common themes that come up.

So one thing I’ve been discussing with Dr. Gaszak is the length of the Core classes. This year, they were three and a half hours long, and the question is, is that too long? One of the themes that was coming through in the feedback was that maybe that extra half hour at the end wasn’t needed, and so it could be the case that next year, we’ll switch the Core classes to being three hours rather than three and a half. That’s a small change, but I mean when I say that we listen to the feedback carefully. We do all of the fine tuning to make this thing run as smoothly as we can. But in terms of the big, high level changes, there’s nothing else that I’m aware of at the moment.

In the next couple of years, what types of changes do you think there might be?

Dr. Berryman: I think that the main change that I’m hoping for is that I will be able to communicate the goals and purposes of Intersession more clearly, so that it does become more comparable to something like the SIR program, not in terms of its content, but in terms of how it sits with the community. Like I said, everyone is very clear about what SIR is, what purpose it serves, how it’s conducted, and so on and so on. I would like for Intersession to be the same, so if you’re a guest at IMSA, I would like for that guest to be able to ask five different students and five different members of faculty what Intersession is, what it’s for, and why we have it, and to get roughly the same answer from each person. I think that if you were to do that little experiment now, you’d probably get 10 different answers, because Intersession means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So I hope that we can institute changes that will create more clarity and more unanimity of purpose.