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Arts in all directions
Students come to Bethel to pursue multiple interests
by Melanie Zuercher
Getting involved is easy at Bethel College – in fact, many students find they have more than enough choices.
Susan Schmeichel, a junior art and Spanish major from Hurley, S.D., came to Bethel from Freeman (S.D.) Academy, a school with fewer than 100 students in grades 5-12. “I did everything,” she says, “Chamber and Concert Choirs, concert band, oral interpretation, which is what we call forensics.
“Bethel was a continuation [of Freeman], just a bit bigger,” she continues. “At first I thought I should be involved in anything and everything. I had to remind myself that I can’t do that, and I realized that when the school’s bigger, you don’t have to.”
She picked Bethel because she wanted a Mennonite college and because she had made friends with some Bethel students when they all worked as counselors at Swan Lake Christian Camp in Viborg, S.D., while Susan was still in high school. In addition, she says, “I knew I wanted to study art but also be involved in music, and I knew I could do both at Bethel.”
She played alto saxophone in the Bethel College Wind Ensemble for her first two years. This year, she is a member of the Concert Choir.
“I love Richard Tirk [assistant professor of music and director of the Wind Ensemble and Bethel College Chamber Orchestra],” she says. “He is my favorite professor ever. It was a hard decision [between orchestra and choir], but I missed singing. I knew I couldn’t do it all – only one music thing at a time.”
An art major from the beginning, she has now added Spanish because she studied it in high school and because her father, a hog farmer who is very involved with the National Pork Production Board, thinks knowing Spanish makes good business sense.
Susan agrees with him, but Spanish has meant more than merely a practical add-on for her. In order to further her language education, she spent the fall 2007 semester studying in Guatemala City with the CASAS program (Central America Study and Service), based at SEMILLA, the Latin America Anabaptist seminary.
“I originally wanted to go to Spain [for study abroad],” Susan says. “But Cari [Holliday] and Kim [Schmidt] went to CASAS, and Cari told me, ‘Spain is nice, but Guatemala will change your life.’
“I hope to study abroad again, although I’ll be paying back loans until I die. I want to keep strengthening the Spanish but it’s also great to learn from other cultures – like going to Italy with David [Long, assistant professor of art] last spring. Coming back and seeing the differences also makes you appreciate being home.”
Part of the CASAS program requires students to do a service assignment. Susan worked with children in a music program sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee and she also got to do some artwork. While she was in Guatemala City, there was a meeting of Mennonite women from all over Latin America for which Susan was asked to paint special posters for the different groups to arrange their displays on.
“They were in amazed and in awe of my being able to do art,” she says. “They were fascinated watching me.”
As much as she enjoyed working with children, teaching isn’t what Susan aspires to, at least not for now. “I would love to keep using the Spanish,” she says. “I like interacting with people, so maybe something in human relations. I also enjoy being able to produce art and sell it, which I’ve been able to do as a fundraiser for Freeman Academy.
“I still remember [Assistant Professor of History] Penny Moon saying in [a freshman class] how she is in a completely different field than where she started – she has an undergraduate degree in art, and she did drawing. It keeps reminding me that I might not end up in either art or Spanish.”
Caitlin (Welch) Linscheid, who completed her degree at the end of January and will get her diploma this May, came to Bethel College not knowing which of her two great interests – music and science – she would make a career out of. “I was trying to find a [college] where I could double major and where I felt I would get support from both departments,” she says. “At Bethel, everybody seemed excited about my interest in the other field and able to see the benefits of a well-rounded student.”
She eventually settled on science, specifically psychology with pre-medicine, because she realized she didn’t want to make music her life. The daughter of a magazine publisher and a middle school music teacher, Caitlin got married last summer to Bethel student Aaron Linscheid, a trumpeter and music major getting his teaching certification. But teaching is not where Caitlin’s own interests lie. For her, it would have been performance – “but I didn’t want to have to put up with the hours, the travel and the emphasis on appearance that I’d have to as a solo performer. I wanted to keep music something I do for fun.”
In that case, she has had a lot of fun at Bethel College. She has been in the Concert Choir all four years and played cello in the Bethel College Sinfonia (now called Chamber Orchestra) for two years. She has had roles in Bethel College productions of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the musical The Fantasticks (in which she played Luisa) and three operas: Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Gounod’s Faust and Mozart’s The Magic Flute (as the Queen of the Night). She has sung in several small informal ensembles and, though not a music major, gave both a junior and senior recital – the latter a double recital with her mother, Carolyn Welch of Lawrence.
Taking almost five years to complete her undergraduate degree was “a good choice for me,” Caitlin says. “By the time I decided to take the extra semester for pre-med, I was already engaged and planning a wedding, and Aaron would be here five years anyway [as a music major with education certification].”
Having the extra time allowed her “to explore and express a creative side of my personality I probably wouldn’t have been able to elsewhere. I’m leaving Bethel with all the tools I need to do the music I want to in the future, and I also feel prepared in psychology and pre-med.”
For the past two summers, Caitlin has done internships in HIV research at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. “It was different from anything I’d done before,” she says. “A lot of my research [at Bethel] has been in psychology but my real interest is biomedical research. This gave me in-depth exposure, working with some of the top researchers in the field.” She is currently applying to M.D./Ph.D. programs, including the one at Mt. Sinai, to which she has been accepted.
It’s a challenge, she says, “to apply to both medical schools and graduate schools and convince them you’re a good prospect.” Fortunately, “medical schools are interested in someone who has a personality outside the lab. They’re interested in medical practitioners who are well-rounded.”
Like Susan, Max Wedel, a junior majoring in both history and Bible and religion, came to Bethel from a small school – Green Fields Country Day School in Tucson, Ariz., with around 150 students in grades 3-12. Like both Susan and Caitlin, he has found plenty of opportunities to explore his interests and hone his skills in the arts.
As a current member of the Bethel College Chamber Choir (he sang in the Men’s Ensemble his freshman year), Max enjoys classic choral music. However, his main musical interest has helped to develop a genre that has been less visible at Bethel in recent years.
Max did not grow up Mennonite, but as his last name (though pronounced “wuh-DELL”) might indicate to some, he is a descendant of Cornelius H. Wedel (“WAY-dle”), the first president of Bethel College. So he had heard of Bethel all his life and his dad reminded him again that it was an option when it came time for Max to consider where he would go to college.
“When I visited, I met with [campus pastor] Amy Barker and when I told her I was in a youth group band at my church [Community Church of the Foothills], her eyes lit up,” Max remembers. “She said, ‘We need something like that here.’”
Max has been playing the piano since he was four and has sung in choirs and participated in school musicals since he was middle school age. He “picked up the guitar a [few] years ago” and played both piano and bass guitar in his youth group band.
When he decided to come to Bethel, Max quickly became involved in planning student worship and he realized what Barker meant – worship in a “contemporary” style (also called “informal worship”) could use some organizing. Max was one of the students who helped plan the cross-campus worship event Crossroads, which for its first incarnation at Bethel in April 2006 also drew students from Central Christian College in McPherson, Hesston College, Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, McPherson College, Sterling College and Tabor College in Hillsboro.
Bethel College’s contemporary worship band, Lost in Lights, developed as a result of Crossroads: in addition to Max, seniors Tyler Doerksen, Andrew Findley and Michael Unruh and junior Jesse Goertzen are in the band. The group regularly leads the weekly worship service in Bubbert’s called The Gathering. “Sometimes it’s just a couple of us on acoustic guitars,” Max says. “Sometimes it’s the full band.
“We play mostly cover tunes. We have been trying to work on some original material, but at a small college like Bethel, where everyone does everything, it can be hard to find time to practice.”
Recently, the band has been getting exposure beyond campus. “A couple of us from the Youth Ministry class got to attend the youth pastors’ meeting for the Western District Conference [of Mennonite Church USA],” Max says. “We told them we had a band that would be willing to play.” And the youth pastors took them up on it – Lost in Lights was invited for a Sunday evening youth worship event at Goessel Mennonite Church and then to play for Snow Camp at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp for the youth from First Mennonite Church in Newton.
Max’s various musical involvements are important in “helping me try to develop as a musician,” he says, but the worship band also meets a wider need: “To get contemporary Christian worship going” on campus in some regular way. “It connects with a significant population here,” Max says. “It’s great to be able to help provide that way of worshiping.”
For these three students, involvement in the arts at Bethel has led them in a number of directions, some anticipated and others unexpected, which they probably would be the first to admit is likely to continue throughout their lives.
Priorities steer Buller at Bethel
Bethel’s football team has a list of priorities that coach Mike Moore would like each of his players to put in the correct order.
No player is to have met those priorities the day they set foot on campus, but senior Jeff Buller has always been one to exceed expectations.
The list is simple – faith comes first, followed by family, academics, football and yourself. Buller is one of the few that Moore didn’t need to push to do things the right way . . .
Buller’s resume would be impressive enough if it only read “All-KCAC selection,” which he [was by] the end of the season.
But Buller, a 6-foot-3, 225-pound defensive end from Inman, is [a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics] national champion in javelin, [a two-time NAIA Daktronics All-America Scholar Athlete], a physics student who performs experiments on wind energy and an opera singer [who sang the role of Sarastro in Bethel College’s spring production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute].
. . . He is conducting research on wind energy, hoping to find a low-cost alternative energy resource for Bethel. He’ll continue his studies next year at Wichita State in graduate school.
Buller’s research includes data collecting, such as figuring out wind trends in North Newton and surrounding areas…. “We want to cut our dependency on the utility company,” Buller said. “Make Bethel College a little more green. I don’t think we’d ever be able to completely become utility non-dependent. That would be way too much money for a little college like this. But we hope to become just a little more green.”
He balances his many activities with help from his faith, which he says led him to Bethel in the first place. … “I only expected to stay two years and continue engineering, but God really called me to stay here longer.”
(The original version of this story appeared in the Oct. 25, 2007, edition of the Wichita Eagle.)