Colin Leath

20 January 2006

Duke University Talent Identification Program, Summer 2006 Employment

1121 West Main Street

Durham, NC 27701

I look forward to spending an intense six weeks this summer as a Teaching Assistant at TIP with some of the best students and instructors I have yet had opportunity to study with. I know what it is like to be among gifted students, since I attended a selective high school. I am now a master’s student in English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. To TIP I bring my experience as a facilitator and as a student and my interest in community.

For the past two years, I have been fortunate to work as a Challenge Course Facilitator. My role is to present activities that stress particular areas of team or individual development. In Group Jump Rope, for example, each person in sequence must jump the rope once without a beat being missed. Success requires that the group accept and organize around members’ abilities to jump and swing the rope. The programs I have facilitated have had as participants Brownie Girl Scouts, graduates of YMCA Youth & Family Services courses, UCLA medical residents, KPMG accountants, gung-ho franchisees, Mormon youth, and High-Tech High students, among others. I also designed and led programs for a Girl Scout troop, a student advisory board, and a volleyball team, and I co-led a Fear Factor-themed summer camp.

As a student, I have transitioned from science and engineering to the humanities. My years in high school were not the best of my life. As an undergraduate, I considered how those years could be improved. I researched identity development and optimal experience. For my thesis, I created the Meaning in Life Forum, offered it through the University of Washington’s Experimental College, and evaluated its effect on participants’ experiences of meaning in life. If I, having many advantages, free to do almost anything, to live nearly anywhere, and with the ability to succeed in many fields, could not find meaning, then hollow is the freedom so many others wish they had. Since that time, I have practiced dance, the violin, and joined a choir. I advocated living without cars. I visited ecovillages and resided in different cities, eventually moving, by bicycle, to where I am near relatives. I did all that to create a more responsive and rewarding place in which to live. I focus on literature now to learn to express visions others will value, and because I enjoy exploring realms texts call forth.

Desire for health, growth, and vitality that spring because of, not in spite of, the prevailing weather and quality of soil feeds this application and my learning how to nourish fertile land. Communication, or making common, or sharing, including the effort to truly understand what is shared, is central to growth, suggest philosopher Jürgen Habermas and author Stephen Covey. Looking for life-fostering community, I lived at Earthaven Ecovillage for two months; there I learned about heartshares, Open Space Technology, and consensus minus one. I visited Madre Grande Monastery, Shakti Rising, and The Farm Community. I lived with Quakers and attended Friends’ meetings. I participated in the third Toward Car-Free Cities conference, and I helped organize several Ishmael and Integral Transformative Practice groups.

I can, therefore, contribute to courses in wisdom, utopian dreams, and leadership. However, because I am training to teach the subjects, and wish to learn them better myself, I would especially like to assist courses in writing and literature. There are other areas I have less experience in, but would still be able to contribute to, given that I have three school-free weeks to prepare prior to the start of your first term. I have enclosed a list of some of the courses that interest me.

I look forward to working with you.

Colin Leath