Hi Admitted Students!

So you’ve been accepted to Bard Graduate Center. Congratulations! What’s next? Well, I hope you will attend Accepted Students Day on March 23, when you will have the chance to see our scholarly community in action. In the meantime, here’s a little window into all the things you could get involved with at our academic and gallery buildings on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I’ll give you some insights. Picture yourself here!

At the gallery our new spring exhibition, Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds, just opened at the end of January. It is a beautiful and complexly detailed show which showcases the extensive drawings of nineteenth-century architect Viollet-le-Duc. It took many curators, architects, scholars, historical reconstruction experts, designers, and more to bring it together. Our gallery team is already deep in preparations for our upcoming fall exhibition about fashion in the silent film era.

I’ve been getting involved in the gallery through my campus job with the Public Humanities + Research department. So far I have been recording voiceovers to play at audio tour stops around the gallery, developing an educator guide with a colleague so younger people feel welcomed to interact with exhibition materials, and building my own custom tour to give to gallery patrons and private groups. Being a part of exhibitions like this is a great way to dive deep into a subject I may not otherwise have explored, and it’s very rewarding to share the things I was most excited to learn with the public. The work experience in a gallery setting is pretty great, too.

Just a few doors down at our academic building, it is Qualifying Paper season for second-year master’s students like me. The Qualifying Paper or QP is an MA student’s crowning achievement at Bard Graduate Center. It is a passion project that grows from work you’ve done in your previous semesters at BGC, and prior to commencement you get to present your findings to your friends, family, and the BGC community. We second-years are stressed about it now—just about a month out from the deadline—but we’ll be relieved and proud soon enough. It just so happens that I am writing this note to you while snowed in at a cabin in the mountains of Kentucky, where I am doing QP research!

In an effort to build in breaks from QP stress, I’ve been attending the wonderful workshops that various departments put together throughout the semester. These workshops span a wide variety of subjects, from how to get a journal article published to how to use programs like Adobe Illustrator. I just attended one where I learned how to 3D print things, and am looking forward to upcoming workshops about making zines and audio editing. BGC’s weekly Wednesday evening lectures and Tuesday Teas are also great ways to get out and broaden your horizons. 

All this, and I haven’t even gotten into coursework. Suffice it to say, my classes (one about the politics of assembly and architecture, and one about globalism as it may or may not have existed in the Middle Ages) have been great this semester, and I’m sorry to be missing out on the wonderful line-up I’m sure is in store for the fall. 

You, however, don’t have to miss out! If you can make it, I encourage you to come to Accepted Students Day on March 23 and see for yourself all the things we have going on here at BGC. I’ll be there as well, ready to answer any questions you may have. I hope to see many of you there, and until then have fun, be safe, and remember spring is on the way!

Sending my best,
Madeline Fuentes, MA ’26
Admissions Ambassador
madeline.fuentes@bgc.bard.edu