While MALS students occasionally start the Program soon after
graduating from college, most enter while in the middle of their
lives, drawn by the program’s flexible structure and the
chance to pursue a graduate education without disrupting their
careers or uprooting their families. They are accountants and
editors, CEOs and painters, journalists and headmasters, mothers
and fathers. They come to Skidmore to be part of an intellectual
community: to work one-on-one with Skidmore faculty and explore
ideas with other students serious about learning. This wide
range of different backgrounds and biographies gives our students
an experience of the world that makes their intellectual explorations
especially rich.
Often our students start the program when their circumstances
have shifted—a change in their career has opened up new
possibilities, or the kids have started school—and they’ve
suddenly found the room to think again about their education.
Many have spent a long time as “closet scholars”
studying the politics of community reform, wrestling with the
challenges of environmental education, digging their way through
the novels of Dostoevsky. After spending a long time in this
isolated study, they’re looking for an academic structure
that can take them farther than they could travel on their own.
For many of our students, the program offers the chance to do
something for themselves after having spent a large part of
their lives doing for others. As a new student recently wrote
in her application essay: “The time has come for me to
shift the balance from being a full-time mom to fulfilling my
own dreams.”
