Will a week in the wild prepare you for Bates? Right after their AESOP pre-orientation trips returned to campus Aug. 31, and with traces of untamed Maine still upon them, these first-years posed for photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen. They returned with pots, pads and even some leftover pasta sauce — not to mention new skills, freedoms and friends.

To accommodate later arrivals to campus, today’s traditional AESOP opening ceremonies have been moved later in the afternoon, to 6 p.m., at the college’s Keigwin Amphitheater.

AESOP co-directors Mike Sagan ’12 and Kellen MacFadyen ’12, along with the Dean of Students, are monitoring river levels across western Maine and New Hampshire, where rainfall totals were highest. The college will make any adjustments needed to maintain the highest levels of safety on all trips.

The official National Weather Service forecast for Maine and New Hampshire for the next several days is for calm winds, mostly sunny skies, and temperatures in the 60s and 70s as a “quiet pattern sets up for the rest of the week.”

Access to residence halls

Access to residence halls is available to incoming AESOP students well into Monday evening. Access Control staff will be on hand in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall, until 7 p.m. to provide room keys and access cards to arriving students, and AESOP trip leaders will be available to let later arrivals into their dorms.

For later arrivals

Alternative trips have been arranged for students who arrive too late to join the trips they signed up for.

Students are urged to inform AESOP leaders of changes to itineraries and arrival times, whether you’ll need to be picked up at a transportation facility, and especially if you expect to arrive much later than initially planned.

• Email aesop.bates@gmail.com or call Kellen MacFadyen at 207-330-0610. If you can’t reach Kellen right away, be sure to leave a voicemail with your plans and a contact number.

Bates is closely following weather advisories regarding Irene, and will change plans if necessary to assure the safety of all students involved. Given the predicted pace of the storm, we currently anticipate that the trips will be able to leave campus on Tuesday, Aug. 30, as scheduled.

Any adjustments necessary to maintain the highest levels of safety on all trips will be made in the coming days as this situation evolves and the storm impact becomes known. Due to the storm’s possible impacts on travel plans, we’ll attempt to work with students to facilitate their arrivals and AESOP participation to the greatest extent possible.

Predicted weather

Our understanding of Irene’s progress as of 2 p.m. Friday, Aug. 26, is that the worst of the storm will pass through Maine by noon Monday, Aug. 29.

The official National Weather Service forecast for Lewiston is for rain to become heavy by Saturday night, occasionally heavy rain Sunday with wind gusts up to 45 mph in the afternoon and up to 55 mph in the evening, then clearing before dawn on Monday.

Access to residence halls

Access to residence halls is available to incoming first-year students from 8 a.m. Monday well into the evening. The Access Control Office, in Chase Hall, will be open until 7 p.m. to provide room keys and access cards to arriving students, and AESOP trip leaders will be available to let later arrivals into their dorms. That said, we urge arriving students to make safe travel their highest priority.

AESOP schedule slightly affected

The AESOP schedule for Monday and Tuesday will be slightly affected by the storm. Monday’s welcoming ceremony and dinner will take place later than originally planned, with the time to be announced.

Most AESOP trips will leave at the originally scheduled times on Tuesday — but alternative trips have been arranged for students who arrive too late to join the trips they signed up for. In short, students arriving Tuesday will go on a trip no matter what.

If your travel changes…

Most important, we urge students to inform AESOP leaders of changes to your itineraries. Please let us know when you plan to arrive, whether you’ll need to be picked up at a transportation facility, and especially if you expect to arrive much later than initially planned. Please email aesop.bates@gmail.com or call Kellen MacFadyen at 207-330-0610. If you can’t reach Kellen right away, be sure to leave a voicemail with your plans and a contact number.

Further notices will be posted on this page as warranted.

• View the slide show above by clicking the thumbnails.

Orientation for the Class of 2014 helped ease first-year students into Bates life by offering something for everyone: time to settle into residence halls, hiking in the White Mountains during AESOP, hearing greetings from President Elaine Tuttle Hansen and considering the Convocation address by Professor of Religious Studies Marcus Bruce ’77, who looked at the “Shared Vocation” that Bates’ newest students are entering into.  Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen and Matt Baker-White ’13.

[Show as slideshow]

Over the next four days, student photographer Matt Baker-White ’13 of Williamstown, Mass., will follow Bates’ newest students as they head out on the 2010 edition of the Annual Entering Student Outdoor Program, better known as AESOP, one of the very few entirely student-run outdoor orientation programs in the U.S.

Each year, about 60 percent of the class takes part in AESOP. By week’s end, the new students will have made new Bates friends and learned names like Acadia, Moosehead and Mahoosuc — even before they have to figure out the difference between Pettengill and Pettigrew here on campus.

On Monday, Baker-White (who is tooling from place to place in one of several Bates Zipcars) looked at the meet-and-greet experiences as AESOP leaders welcomed first-years to campus. Click on the thumbnails above to view the slide show.

During a pre-orientation trip in late August, new Bates students and their trip co-leaders dive into the calm waters of the Basin on the New Meadows River near Bath, Maine. To get this photo, trip co-leader Lincoln Benedict ’09 (second from left) rigged his camera to the mast and tripped it with a remote control he’s holding in his left hand. Known as AESOP, the Outing Club–run orientation program offers around 40 trips annually and is one of just a few nationally that students alone oversee. From left: co-leader Emily Chandler ’09, whose family shared their Vineyard Vixen 34 sailboat for the AESOP trip; co-leader Benedict; and first-years Ben Williams, Stephen Wright, Erin Pinover, and Monica Rodriguez. Standing near the stern is Maria Rouvalis.

Orientation 2008

Orientation for the Class of 2012, held Aug. 25- Sept. 3, helped ease first-year students into Bates life by offering something for everyone: lugging belongings into residence halls, sailing the Maine Coast by big boat, visiting a wild and crazy student activities fair, and considering Bates classicist Margaret Imber’s metaphorical Convocation talk equating love with a liberal arts education. [More...]

A t-shirt worn by AESOP leader Erin Bond '09 represents the delights of moving into Bates housing.

A monthly collection of photo highlights from September 2008.

• Click the thumbnails to view the slide show above

Orientation for the Class of 2011, held Aug. 27–Sept. 6, helped ease first-year students into Bates life by offering something for everyone: meeting returning students while lugging belongings into residence halls, exploring Maine’s Great North Woods by canoe, enjoying barbecues and inflatables, and considering Bates historian John Cole’s sly, earthy Convocation talk about the correspondence between the teenage Marie Antoinette and her mother, Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. In this slide show we share a few of these experiences.

A team-building game sends AESOP trip leaders sprinting toward other peoples' shoes. Below: the Shoe Confessions circle; in the third and fourth images, first-years and trip leaders prepare to begin their expeditions; and in the last picture, sailing on Montsweag Bay, near Wiscasset.

On a sunny lawn near the Benjamin Mays Center, 80 or so Bates students are playing a game you might call Shoe Confessions.

The game works like musical chairs, except there’s no music and no chairs. Gathered in a big circle, the students aren’t wearing their shoes — instead, they’re standing behind them. One person in the center of the ring reveals to the group something personal. And then all the people who share that characteristic have to scamper across the circle to find somebody else’s shoes to stand behind.

Since there’s one fewer pair of shoes in the circle than there are students, the individual who can’t reach any footwear goes to the center of the ring for the next round of soul-baring.

This day’s confessions reveal, for instance, that only three students have been to India and only six spent the summer in Lewiston. But most of them love the ocean and quite a few have been summer camp counselors — fitting interests for a group that would, in a few days, be leading brand-new Bates students on a variety of adventures in the Annual Entering Student Outdoor Program.

AESOP sends small groups of students hiking, camping, climbing, kayaking and canoeing across northern New England with the aim of helping the newbies make personal connections before classes start. This year’s 80 leaders, working in pairs, will bring more than 250 first-years to destinations from Isle au Haut to Baxter State Park to Vermont’s Long Trail.

“It’s a good way to introduce kids to Bates before they really get to Bates,” explains John Leavitt ’08, who is co-directing the 2007 program with Alida Ovrutsky ’08. “They meet individuals who are experienced with the school. Because, essentially, most first-years have very little experience with the school — they just know they want to go here.”

“AESOP gives you an instant social connection and an instant small group” of acquaintances, Ovrutsky adds.

The joys and challenges of the outdoors tend to forge group solidarity, Ovrutsky explains. “Even though a group might come from all diverse backgrounds, be interested in all different things, upon completing AESOP they have one thing in common: they completed this together.

“Whether it’s backpacking 35 miles on the Appalachian Trail or simply surviving four nights in the woods when you’ve never done it before, AESOP provides you with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of bonding that I don’t think a regular orientation would provide,” she says.

Games like Shoe Confessions speed the bonding. The trip leaders are learning it on this raucous August afternoon near Garcelon Field so they can play it with their first-years in the wild. The leaders will also be trained in wilderness skills and first aid, and their preparation culminates in a three-day, leaders-only shakedown expedition where they try out what they’ve learned.

AESOP showcases Bates values in action. Tapping the College’s longtime emphasis on individual initiative and personal responsibility, AESOP has been organized solely by students for years, and students lead virtually all the trips. (In a typical exception, geology professor Dyk Eusden ’80 is applying his sea kayaking expertise as co-leader of the Isle Haut expedition this year.)

“That puts us up to a really high standard,” Ovrutsky says. “And that’s another thing that makes the program as strong as it is, because everyone takes it really seriously.”

In addition, says Ovrutsky, she and Leavitt have impressed upon trip leaders the importance of keeping in mind Bates egalitarianism.

“We’ve been telling our leaders to remember, when they’re talking to their first-years about Bates life, that everyone’s coming from a different background and that everyone’s interested in different parts of Bates. So they’re catering their trips to every first-year at Bates, not just one subset of people.”

AESOP’s roots reach back to the early 1980s, and the current name of the program was in use by 1990. Expeditions last three or four days and the groups typically number from six to 10 first-years, plus the co-leaders. The trips are rated for difficulty — for instance, a backpacking trek rated Level Five, the hardest category, will include at least one 10-mile day under full pack. Of the types of activities, sailing, surfing and base-camping trips tend to draw the most interest.

This year’s trips begin Aug. 28. The Long Trail in Vermont’s Green Mountains, the oldest long-distance hiking trail in America, is a new destination. Acadia National Park, Isle au Haut and the Presidential Range of the White Mountains are popular trips. “People all want to go to the Presidentials because it’s such a storied range,” Leavitt says.

But Leavitt’s own first-year AESOP experience was on the Level 5 Mahoosuc Notch trip, which he later led as a sophomore and which the program still offers. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “I made some friends on that program that I’m still pretty close with today.”

“I was already fairly proficient in the outdoors,” he adds, “so basically I learned all about Bates.”