Devin Wigler’s interest in oncology began when she volunteered at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston during Short Term. She worked in the Cancer Resource Center, providing literature to patients and their families.

“I wanted to explore the possibility of a career in oncology,” Wigler said, “so I applied to the undergraduate clinical research program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City. For ten weeks I was involved in metastatic prostate cancer research at one of the oldest and largest cancer research facilities in the world. I wrote portions of a research article manuscript on the use of the Bone Scan Index for determining cancer progression and predicting overall survival. I also assembled and managed a PET scan database comparing different imaging procedures for detecting disease. I spent two weeks doing inpatient rounds, which was a very enlightening experience.”

A Ladd Internship through the Bates Office of Career Services provided the funds that allowed her to live in New York City. A Scher Fellowship further offset her costs.

“I learned so much about the biology of cancer, but as a psychology major and pre-med student, I’m also interested in its psychological impact,” Wigler said. “That’s where my internship ties into my senior thesis: I’m analyzing data regarding distress levels and psychosocial needs of newly diagnosed cancer patients for the Patrick Dempsey Center at Central Maine Medical Center. I’ve found it very convenient that Bates is so close to two hospitals – Central Maine and St. Mary’s!

“The opportunity to do undergraduate research is awesome. It should give me a leg up when I apply to medical school, but it also inspired me to engage in clinical research for a few years first.”

– Virginia Wright

The First-Year Activities Fair at Bates College reminded Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 of Colombo, Sri Lanka, “of a market back home with people selling their wares.”

Accustomed to a system that rewards status rather than ability, Dissanayake discovered that “Bates provides many opportunities to all its students.” Her first semester on campus, she directed a play with the Robinson Players, a student theater group. “I had literally just gotten off the plane,” she says. “That amazed me. Here, if you are serious about something, you can do anything you want.”

Like many international students, she chose economics as a major, but her love of the stage lingered. The Office of Career Services put her in touch with an alum whose contacts yielded a 2006 summer internship with VEE Corporation, a Minneapolis-based firm that provides live entertainment for children. Spending every spare moment attending productions at the nationally famous Guthrie Theater, Dissanayake concluded that she couldn’t live without the stage. Upon returning to Bates, she declared a double major.

“Coupling theater with something steady like economics gives my parents a little relief,” Dissanayake laughs.

Distance from family is a challenge for international students, she says. But new activities and academic rewards distract her from homesickness. “I have twice as many opportunities here as I would have had if I stayed at home,” she says. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else but Bates.”

Bates College hosts its annual Graduate and Professional School Fair from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25, in the Clifton Daggett Gray Athletic Building, Central Avenue.

The community is invited. There is no admission charge and no prior registration is required.

Recruiters this year represent 96 postgraduate and professional school programs all over the continental United States. For a list of programs, visit the Bates College Office of Career Services Graduate and Professional School Web page.

For more information about the event, please call the Office of Career Services at 207-786-6232.

Linda Pogue, a professional management development and sales training specialist, will lead a workshop at Bates titled “Presenting Well” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Pettengill Hall, Keck Classroom (G52).

Sponsored by the Office of Career Services at Bates, this workshop is open to the public free of charge. Space is limited to the first 100 reservations, which can be made by calling 207-786-6232.Formerly a marketing and promotion director at Harper’s Bazaar and W magazines, Pogue has more than 15 years’ staff experience in sales and marketing. An independent sales training specialist since 1989, she has provided workshops, individual coaching and lectures on interpersonal and communication skills for corporate clients including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Yahoo and Time Warner.

In her Bates workshop, Pogue will offer strategies for effective communication and presentation, and for facilitating relationships and advancing productivity in a professional setting. The workshop will demonstrate how to be comfortable in stressful professional situations such as interviews and corporate social events.

The workshop will be highly interactive and provide behaviors, systems and strategies that can be observed, adapted and duplicated.

Bates College presents Michael Miclon, a well-known Maine comedian and new vaudevillian, with a talk about the state’s creative economy at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 25, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, Campus Avenue.

Part of the Bates College Seminar Series on Entrepreneurship, the talk is sponsored by the Office of Career Services and is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6232.

Miclon is a juggler, humorist and slapstick comic. He and his wife, Kim, own the Oddfellow Theater, in Buckfield, an establishment featuring an eclectic range of family-friendly entertainment — including the popular variety revue, the Early Evening Show. In its first six years, the theater has presented more than 300 performances for more than 10,000 audience members.

Miclon is a member of the Odd Company, a trio with Fritz Grobe, four-time gold medalist at the International Jugglers Festival and co-founder of the juggling and dance ensemble “blink,” and Amanda Huotari, from the Boston improv comedy troupe “Juice.”

The former executive director of Maine Arts Inc., Miclon is known for his advocacy of the arts as an economic force in the state.

Miclon began his career in 1982 at age 14 as an apprentice to Benny and Denise Reehl, of the New England New Vaudeville Revue, based in Gardiner. He also studied with the late mime master Tony Montanaro at the renowned Celebration Barn Theater, South Paris.

Miclon has performed across Maine, at the Kennedy Center and the White House in Washington, D.C., the Keller Theater in Giessen, Germany, and the Festa Americana in Naples, Italy.

But there’s a real connection between the entrepreneurial spirit behind a business like Nantucket Nectars — which today employs 150 and markets its extensive juice line in 40 states, Canada, Europe and the Caribbean — and the traits nurtured at small liberal arts colleges. The successful entrepreneur, explains the director of the Bates College Office of Career Services, must be a creative and critical thinker, willing to take risks and able to handle a flood of information.

In other words, entrepreneurship is “really an exciting manifestation of what liberal arts means,” explains former OCS head A. Charles Kovacs.

The relationship between a foundation in the liberal arts and building a business is the theme of the Bates Seminar Series on Entrepreneurship (BSSE). Since 1999, OCS has presented entrepreneurs, leaders of non-profits and other experts who discuss their own ventures or shed light on diverse aspects of entrepreneurship.

“Most, if not all, of our presenters are products of a liberal arts environment. Quite a few are Batesies,” Kovacs says. Hr also noted, “all of these people have expressed their liberal arts training in new venture development.”

Speakers have included Jim Amaral ’80, whose company Borealis Breads has brought a new social consciousness to the Maine marketplace; Burt’s Bees co-founder and president Roxanne Quimby, who came to Bates to discuss market prospects for female entrepreneurs; Bates Trustee J. Michael Chu ’80, a managing partner of Catterton Partners, who addressed trends in venture capital; and, of course, the January 2003 speaker Tom First, who with Brown classmate Tom Scott launched a fruit-juice business in Nantucket Harbor.

For career-conscious students, a series focusing on start-ups only makes sense. Small businesses generate the lion’s share of new jobs in this country, with one study by the federal Small Business Administration reporting that small firms created more than three-fourths of net new jobs in the non-farm business sector between 1990 and 1995.

Moreover, in encouraging Bates students to consider going into business for themselves, the BSSE is reinforcing an existing tendency. Prior to launching the series, Kovacs explains, he and his staff realized that “there was an enormous number of Bates grads identifying themselves as founders or owners or managers of their own companies.”

According to Jeffrey A. Timmons, Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Franklin W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, entrepreneurship “enables people to pursue and realize their dreams, to falter and try again, and to seek opportunities that match who they are, what they want to be, and how and where they want to live. No other employer can make this claim.”

Or, in the words of one Bates graduate who responded to an OCS survey, “As your own boss, you have the freedom to do what you want. It’s the freedom that makes it all worthwhile.”

The next BSSE presentation features the co-founders of a New Hampshire-based firm that makes miniature industrial sensors. Whitmore B. Kelley Jr. and Alyssa B. Vitalius ’98, who started SignalQuest Inc. in 1999, come to campus for the BSSE on March 17.

Bates College’s acceptance rates for law school also are significantly higher than the national average. In 1999, 86% of recent graduates and seniors who applied were accepted and 100% of Bates seniors who applied were accepted. The national average was 69%. Among the schools Bates graduates are attending: Yale University, Cornell University, N.Y.U. and the University of California Berkeley.

“Law schools want students that can write well and have some critical thinking skills and it’s hard to think of a better place to learn those things than at a liberal arts school, Margaret Imber, chair of the Legal Studies Committee at Bates College, said.

Faculty advisors at Bates often encourage students not to go to law school right out of college and to instead get a broader sense of the real world before applying. “Very few people are born lawyers,” Imber said. “The best lawyers are those who can connect the law with something else that they’re passionate about.”