Join us as we come together as a campus community to embark on the upcoming 2023-24 academic year during Opening Convocation 2023, taking place at Shove Memorial Chapel Mon., Aug. 28, at 9 a.m.

Opening Convocation heralds in Colorado College’s 149th academic year and serves as the First Mondays’ presentation for Block 1. Come welcome the Class of 2027 and meet this year’s inspiring honorary degree recipients.

Students and faculty will convene for the first day of classes, beginning at 10:30 a.m., following Opening Convocation.

Women’s Equality Day signifies women’s voting rights through the 1920 Nineteenth Amendment, which legally granted women the right to vote. But it was not until 1965 that Black, Native American, and Asian women were afforded full electoral equality, and Latina women continued to face barriers at the polls until 1975, in each case following long and painful struggles for equal access to the ballot. It is important to recognize that the battle for women’s equality wasn’t won with the Nineteenth Amendment.

Today, we honor all women’s contributions, seek collective progress, and remember champions like Ida B. Wells, a prominent journalist who fought against discrimination, including by refusing to give up her seat on public transportation 71 years before Rosa Parks did the same. We hope this day fosters dialogue and helps to validate marginalized identities. We must all make intentional strides to make every year incrementally better for all women.

Local events: The League of Women Voters of the Pikes Peak Region holds a free event from 5-7 p.m. Fri., Aug. 26 at the Cottonwood Center for the Arts. The event will have food, a wide selection of beverages, and a space to learn more about becoming a part of the league.

Dr. Rebecca Garcia, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, has been awarded the 2023 MAA Inclusivity Award. Garcia received this national award during the 2023 Mathematical Association of America MathFest Conference, which took place earlier this month.

MathFest is a mathematics conference hosted annually in late summer by the Mathematical Association of America. It is known for its dual focus on teaching and research in mathematics, as well as for student participation.

This summer, Colorado College students Zeke Lloyd ’24 and Michael Braithwaite ’24, with funding provided by a CC Venture Grant and the Sheffer Fund for Catholic Studies, spent a month travelling around central Europe reporting on the Ukrainian refugee crisis. They visited Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, and reported back through stories published in the Colorado Springs and Denver Gazettes. Along the way, they kept us updated on their travels and experiences.

A welcoming party greeted us upon our arrival in Batumi. As our bus pulled into the city square, a crowd of vendors surrounded its exit, advertising shops, hotels, and taxis to us in Russian as we disembarked.

It was a great introduction to the city.

Batumi was popular with Russian tourists before the war began. Its subtropical climate and Las Vegas-like attractions cater significantly to those seeking a vacation getaway. But since Russia invaded Ukraine, it’s become a more permanent destination for Russians looking to wait out the conflict abroad.

And Batumi’s streets reflect this Russian influx. Since Western financial sanctions limit ATM transactions with Russian banks, currency exchanges have become commonplace throughout the city, allowing migrants to exchange cash roubles for dollars, euros, and Georgian Lari.

Businesses, too, cater heavily to the population. Questions are asked first in Russian, and then in Georgian to patrons passing by. Menus have items written in both Cyrillic and Georgian script. Magnets depicting Josef Stalin, the former Georgian-born leader of the USSR, are sold outside shops.

It rained the entire time we were in the city, but we still left with a good understanding of its culture and its people.

CC’s Packard Hall boasts one of the finest acoustic performance halls in the state, where students and faculty present a wide variety of live performances throughout the academic year. Nestled one floor below the performance hall is a space offering a much different type of musical experience, far removed from rehearsing on a brightly lit stage in preparation for one take in front of a live audience.

The Music Department’s recording studios are state-of-the-art spaces and offer some of the latest tools and equipment for aspiring music production students. The central hub, the Pearson Recording Studio, was renovated in 2017 to create a professional recording space that includes a control room, which doubles as a music technology classroom, as well as a live room and an isolation room.

“Recording in a studio is just another diversity of experience in being a musician,” said Justin Maike, the Music Department’s technical director. “If you’re ever asked to be in a studio, you know what it’s like and how it works; small things you can be more knowledgeable about, especially the technical aspects of it. It’s so much more of a social music experience, learning to speak the creative language a little bit, and as a group, talking through the creative process. It’s not something you’re necessarily able to do in a live performance setting, unless you’re rehearsing. In the studio, we’re about to put it down, so there’s finality to the ideas.”

Huge congratulations to Katja Rivera, Curator of Contemporary Art in the Fine Arts Center Museum, for being named a Propel Program Fellow by the Association of Art Museum Curators!

Established in 2014, this respected program fosters the next generation of curatorial leaders and provides participants with learning experiences to develop their leadership roles and advocacy voices.

Rivera specializes in contemporary Latinx art and has organized a number of exhibitions at the Fine Arts Center Museum that explore art of the Americas. She was curator of “Ronny Quevedo: at the line,” co-curator of “Eiko Otake: I Invited Myself, vol. 2,” and has curated a series of new media works that expand this area of the museum’s program, including “Contested Terrains,” which is on view now through Dec. 20. Currently, she’s organizing the first solo exhibition in Colorado of work by Hương Ngô, as well as a reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection.