"You can do your own thing at Carleton without worrying about whether people will accept you or mock you. The atmosphere here is open and friendly-I'm grateful that everyone isn't the same. It's good to be among people with diverse interests."
Nathan Senner, Anchorage, Alaska

Carleton's 400-acre Cowling Arboretum is central to Nate Senner's experience. He's a runner, so he trains for the cross country team there. He's helping Carleton with a scientific survey of the population levels of various bird species that live in the Arb, so he counts birds there. For his Population Ecology course, he and other students conducted experiments on varying ecosystems there. "I definitely know my way around the Arb," Nate says. "When I was looking at schools, the fact that Carleton had the Arb was intriguing and enticing. It helped draw me here."

Carleton's laid back nature also made an impression on Nate. He was searching for an academically rigorous liberal arts school, and realized that Carleton students were serious about school, but not caught up in themselves. "Carleton students aren't pretentious or overly zealous about academics. They can have fun and be serious at the same time."

Nate jokes that he has no time for fun, but admits he does like to play basketball, watch movies, walk in the Arb (watching for birds), and hang out with friends when he can. He's made a science of balancing academics and athletics, and brightens when talking about "the great group of guys" that make up the cross country team. The team is serious about running (Carleton's cross country tradition dates back to the 1930s), but Nate says events like Hendecah, where the athletes add a handstand to the decathlon, and the Karhu Shoe Race, where they compete with cross-town rival St. Olaf College for a 30-year-old pair of shoes, really serve to bond the team. "The traditions bring us together as a group. Our interest in running carries over to other activities and we tend to hang out together."

Carleton has expanded Nate's interests. He's always been interested in biology, but admits journalism is just as intriguing. His dream job is to be a science writer for National Geographic or Nature. As a biology major, he'll focus mostly on ecology and evolution, but there will be plenty of time for courses in history, political science, and literature. Last winter, he traveled to the Costa Rican rainforest with Professor Mark McKone's class on Tropical Rainforest Ecology. The students researched ecosystems native to the rainforest and often publish their findings in leading science journals. This winter, Nate will travel to the Galapagos Islands for a Carleton off-campus studies program in animal behavior offered there. "Going off campus is an integral part of the college experience," he says.

Whether he's researching bird predation of golden rod galls, reading a novel to grasp an understanding of the time in which it was written, or getting one-on-one help from a favorite biology professor, Nate knows that Carleton is the right school for him. "I knew it would be a close-knit school. I just wasn't prepared for how close-knit it is. That's been a nice surprise-how accessible the faculty are and how as a freshman, you can interact with seniors-they're not off in the distance somewhere."