Alex Ebstein
Junior / Art and Communication double major / Stamford, CT
We talk a lot at Goucher about the flexibility of the curriculum, the range of possibilities open to students, the opportunities our students have to plot their own course through their undergraduate years. Alex Ebstein has taken it all very literally.
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In her first three years at Goucher, Ebstein has traveled to Ghana and India on two three-week Intensive Courses Abroad. She co-founded the Goucher Review, a student-run arts and culture magazine for which she serves as vice president and art director. She won Goucher’s prestigious Eleanor Spencer Grant, designed to enable students to develop their artwork through travel, and used it to complete a photographic exploration of the landscapes of Northern India. This spring, she’s mounting an exhibition of her work at the Corrin Art Gallery on campus.
“My education has been less about the classes and more about how I can take what I’m learning out of the classes and do something with it,” Ebstein says. “The immediate application of what I’m learning is the best thing for me, the best way to know that I’m using my time well.”
Although Ebstein came to Goucher not knowing precisely what she wanted to end up doing, she knew that the academic program here would give her lots of opportunities to try out many of the things she was already interested in -- photography chief among them. Even more important, she knew that it would challenge her to broaden her horizons even further.
“It was interesting to think about what I could do -- and what I had to do, and where I’d have to stretch myself,” she says. “I knew I’d have to at least try everything.”
Trying everything meant taking classes in media with which she hadn’t experimented before. It meant using a design class as a jumping-off point to teach herself how to use the software she’d use to lay out the Goucher Review. It meant walking into the Office of International Studies one year when she knew she didn’t want to go home for the winter break, looking through the program brochures there, and deciding to head off to Ghana for a course on the culture and arts of West Africa.
Ebstein says the closeness of the relationships Goucher students enjoy with their professors was one of the big reasons why she decided to come to the college in the first place .
“I knew that I wanted to have a really personal relationship with my professors and work with people who would remember my work and my interests,” she says. “I’ve definitely found that here. I knew I would from the first time I met [art Assistant Professor] Laura Burns. She knew exactly what all of her students were doing, and what they wanted to do with their photography, and how it fit together with their other interests. That was really impressive.”
The Goucher Review is how Ebstein fits all of her interests together. She’s written articles about her travels to Africa and India, one of which Bagchi let her use as the final paper for his Intensive Course Abroad. Her photography has been featured throughout the magazine, including images she made both in her travels overseas and in her classes with Burns on photojournalism. And she has used it to highlight work by other Goucher students doing interesting things of their own.
“The magazine pretty much just grabbed the interests of everyone I knew at the time and pulled it all together,” Ebstein says. “It’s everything that I’m interested in and that other people are interested in as well. And because everyone thinks about things a little differently, it’s been very interesting to work with a variety of different people and create a product that reflects us all.”
It’s that spirit of community and collaboration that Ebstein says she enjoys most about Goucher.
“I love knowing that if I have an idea and expend some effort to make it real, there will be people who are interested in working with me,” she says. “In the end, that’s what we do with our lives, right? You go out, you find something that you want to do and people you want to do it with, and you do it.”