Students Return From Unique Orientation
Fourteen new Westmont students have returned from a unique orientation program that takes students backpacking through the North Yosemite backcountry.
The optional orientation program, Inoculum, offers students units of academic and physical education course credit. Students are assigned several readings, lead discussions on the books and write a paper later in the semester.
Though several schools offer first-year seminars or programs that bring small groups of students together with faculty, few if any offer 12 days of backcountry experience like Westmont’s Inoculum.
Inoculum was created in 1974 by then-student Dave Willis. Fellow Westmont grad and current Montecito resident Bob Ludwick came up with the name.
“You inoculate with inoculum,” explains Willis. “The idea was to give students a little introduction to the challenge of Westmont so they would do better when they encountered it.”
Willis is coordinator of Sierra Treks, a program which seeks to build Christian faith through wilderness experience, which leads the Inoculum trip every year. Tom Fikes, associate professor of psychology, and Eileen McMahon, assistant professor of biology, are the faculty leaders for this year’s team.
Fikes has been involved with the program for the past eight years and coordinated the trip the last several years. He says students on the trip talk about issues such as Christian perspectives on environmentalism, creation, wilderness ethics as well as their assigned reading.
“You can sit in a classroom on campus in an environmentally beautiful part of the world and think about that,” says Fikes, “but it’s not the same as when you’re sitting in the dirt stirring your hot chocolate and just immersed in it.”
Fikes says there’s a special spot in the Sierra where he likes to teach the students how to rock climb.
“There’s just this gorgeous wall looking over this hanging meadow at 10,000 feet and everyone can watch everyone else climb and rappel,” Fikes says. “It looks really intense.”
For many students, the program is intense. And that’s just the way Willis envisioned it more than 30 years ago.
“Inoculum is different in that it’s 12 days,” he says. “We wanted it to be an experience that the students could live in and soak in. It’s not just another roadside or trailside attraction where they can hold their breath.”
Willis says living in the backcountry can be emotionally difficult for some students. In the end, he says they almost always overcome personal differences and learn to work as a team.
“These students may not be best friends for their whole Westmont experience,” says Willis, “but they get to know some other students that they can rely on during the toughest first few weeks of school because of what they’ve done together in the mountains.”