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.”

A kayak paddle perches on a mound of new wetsuits in geologist Dyk Eusden’s office in Carnegie Science Hall. The paddle, just recently returned by a geology colleague who had borrowed it, is the least of Eusden’s concerns this late April morning.

Just a few days remain until Eusden and 11 students head out for a popular Short Term course exploring the rugged Maine coast by sea kayak, and there’s a problem. The Maine Guide hired for the trip, who’s Welsh, can’t get his green card for U.S. employment. So Eusden, a 1980 Bates graduate and member of the Bates faculty since 1988, must quickly interview and hire a new guide by phone. Despite the snafu, he’s nearly giddy: Short Term is his favorite time of year. “Short Term is fantastic, especially for geologists,” he says.

For the entire five-week Short Term, students enroll in just one of 83 available courses offered by 31 departments and programs. Students must complete only two Short Terms during their four years, so fewer students are on campus than during the fall or winter semesters. Around 1,250 students are in residence this May (including varsity athletes, who can stay on campus for what they call “Sport Term”), a number that’s about three-quarters the usual 1,700 students enrolled during the fall or winter.

“It’s a whole new campus,” says Associate Director of Admissions Virginia Harrison ’63. “Students see different people, and they make new friends.”

And they have fun. Since some courses meet just nine hours a week, visitors see lots of Frisbees being flung around the Quad and dorm furniture migrating outside. Terrace parties outside the Den become more frequent, and faculty, students, and staff enjoy weekly late-afternoon picnics on the Quad. Visits to nearby Range Pond are also traditional during Short Term.

Some Short Term courses, on the other hand, are so rigorous their nicknames are embedded in Bates lingo. “Molecular and Cellular Biology,” required of all bio majors, meets every morning with labs two afternoons a week; it’s better-known as “Cell Hell.” The math department’s all-day, every-day course “Introduction to Abstraction” is nicknamed “Math Camp.”

Though Short Term has spawned some of the most adventurous Bates courses, when inaugurated 35 years ago it was hardly a teaching-driven innovation and hardly the gift to cabin-fevered Batesies it’s considered today. In 1965, with Baby Boomers hitting U.S. colleges, Bates floated the idea of a three-year course of study. Adding a shorter semester in May and June would move more students more quickly through the College. (The College course catalog suggested that taking a course in May and June was wiser than the alternative, a traditional May-September vacation, which was deemed “a considerable waste of time.”)

The three-year option was a bust. But students and faculty loved Short Term. What began as an extension of the Bates ethos of hard work became an unexpected, and at that time rare, opportunity for faculty to try out new courses and teaching strategies. During three five-day kayaking and camping excursions to Maine’s isolated coastal islands, Eusden and his students will map the varying bedrock geology around Casco Bay, Penobscot Bay, and Mount Desert Island. “I really enjoy being outdoors, getting out of this cubicle,” Eusden says in his office.

“It’s great to have your students for five weeks, all to yourself,” he adds. “In the kayaking course, they tend to form a cohesive group, learning more than just geology. They learn how to live with each other, how to cook each other’s food, how to set up campgrounds, and how to kayak and deal with adverse weather and ocean conditions.”

Indeed, the call of the kayak drew Jesse Minor ’02 of Wilmington, N.C., to Bates four years ago. Now completing a geology major, he says courses like Eusden’s sea kayaking Short Term “were very helpful in terms of readiness for thesis research.” He adds, “I grew up sea kayaking, and courses like this differentiated Bates” from its peers. “It’s also great to see different parts of Maine, to camp out, and be outdoors for a week at a time.”

“They get to see the Maine coast at a time when there’s nobody around,” Eusden says. “It’s beautiful, and birds are migrating and seals are being born. It’s way more than geology. It’s a lesson in life.”

Six Short Term courses offer significant domestic or overseas travel, and many others, like Curtis Bohlen’s environmental studies course addressing the restoration plan for a marsh in Scarborough, Maine, involve day trips. Students pay up to $3,500 for travel-abroad courses, and Bates financial grant and loan aid is available.

In the history department, for example, assistant professor Lillian Guerra spent much of the break week between winter semester and Short Term on the phone untangling red tape for her Short Term course, the “Development and Legacies of Slavery in Cuba.” Days before she and 10 students were to fly from Portland to Montreal and then to Cuba, Guerra visited a local bank to wire the group’s travel money to Cuba. There, the bank gave Guerra bad news: the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act makes it much riskier to wire funds to Cuba because the federal government will not guarantee the funds’ availability.

Typical, thought Guerra: never mind that Bates has a travel license, issued by the U.S. Treasury Department, for educational travel to Cuba and that more than 55,000 students travel to the island nation every year. “The Bates students have a great sense of humor about it, in part because it so accurately reflects the illogic of the U.S. approach to Cuba — as a pariah — when the rest of the world treats it like a normal state,” Guerra says. Rather than having their travel money safely waiting in Cuba, Guerra had to find a way to ship cash to Cuba.

“We’re studying the way the Cuban economy, culture, and systems of belief about race and gender developed around the system of slavery in the 19th century,” she adds. Yet current events can’t help but inform the past. A simple incident like not being able to wire money, she says, “becomes a lesson in itself why you should study any economic system, because it becomes the basis for every aspect of life.”

Even the many campus-based courses reach out beyond Campus Avenue and College Street. For example, Elizabeth Eames, associate professor of anthropology, reworked her service-learning Short Term course so her students could help Lewiston-Auburn social service agencies prepare for the predicted arrival of 1,000 Somali refugees from Atlanta.

The fans of Short Term aren’t limited to the faculty and students. For the Bates admissions office, whose job it is to differentiate Bates from dozens of other top-ranked liberal arts colleges, Short Term is a broad canvas on which to paint the most tantalizing possibilities of college life. Says Virginia Harrison with a sly smile: “Our standard line in admissions is, ‘When spring comes to Maine, it’s wonderful to have just one course.’”