Over the past four years, Van Dusen has fostered communities throughout the campus, bringing skills and talents from home to the endeavor. The attention and kindness that she has lavished on those around her has not gone unnoticed.
"It has often been said that Heather is the mother of the suite," said Kathleen Evans '07, Van Dusen's friend since her first year and her current suitemate. "She looks after everyone whether or not they want to be looked after. She makes that very important to her in showing that she cares about everyone whom she's close to."
At the same time, Van Dusen has maintained a very distinct personality and stance on the issues and interests that she holds close to her. "She's someone who doesn't compromise," Evans commented. "She holds fast to things that she really truly believes in. She's here to learn and to deepen her understanding, and thus her stances on things. She really has these ideas and things that she wants to do and will follow them."
Dabbling in the liberal arts
In the academic arena, Van Dusen let her interests dictate the classes that she would end up taking during her four years at the College. Her deep interest in religion and Christianity in particular led her to take four classes with Assistant Professor of Religion Andrew Dole, her thesis advisor, and to ultimately major in religion. Van Dusen mentioned one class in particular, 20th Century Christian Thought, as being extremely helpful. "It gave me a much more cohesive understanding of modern American religious history," she explained.
Van Dusen also dabbled in other fields such as law, jurisprudence and social thought (LJST), taking two classes with Assistant Professor of LJST Martha Umphrey. She described the experience as "eye-opening." Van Dusen also took a number of applied statistics courses with Assistant Professor of Mathematics Katherine Tranbarger and later worked as a teacher's assistant for her.
"I've been able to go and do a little bit of everything," Van Dusen said of her academic experiences. "I've taken applied statistics and religion and I was able to really use that. One of my final projects for statistics last year was on the correlation of religious and political beliefs. I think that kind of ability to dabble and be a renaissance woman was really exciting."
Van Dusen's excitement was evident to her professors. "She's been in a number of my courses and she's done very well in all of them," Dole said. "She's been very enthusiastic about the material. Her idea for her senior thesis picked up on some of the material from my courses as well as work that she has done elsewhere at the College. That's a combination we like to see: a student putting together a substantial independent project out of material that has come from a variety of intellectual origins."
Outside of the classroom
During her time here at the College, Van Dusen not only pursued her academic interests, but also indulged in a number of extracurricular activities. As a first-year, she signed up with a number of clubs and organizations. From her first year until junior year, Van Dusen could often be found on the hills and fields of the College, playing Ultimate frisbee with the men's and women's teams. In her junior year, Van Dusen captained the women's team. Unfortunately, in her senior year, Van Dusen was unable to attend more than four or five practices due to thesis considerations. Van Dusen recalls her experiences with the frisbee team fondly. "We would go down to [Savannah, Ga.], every Spring Break for a week-long tournament," she said. "And we get to cook our own food, sit on the beach and play Ultimate frisbee. It was an awesome experience."
Van Dusen signed up to work as a props master for the Interterm Musical as a first-year and sophomore. In her junior year, she worked as a backstage manager. "It was really fun working backstage," she commented. "It was a cool experience working with people from all the Five Colleges. It's a pretty big endeavor for the amount of funding and time that we have for the Interterm musical. And it was really good to be a part of that and to try to make props, like papier-mâché turkeys, and to figure out what was the best décor for the sets."
In many cases, Van Dusen's extracurricular activities have been an extension of interests that she had developed back in Philadelphia. For the past four years, Van Dusen has been a member of the Amherst College Women's Chorus. "I really love singing," Van Dusen explained. "I've been in choirs forever. Singing is an emotional outlet for me. I've been doing church choir since kindergarten. The church I used to go to at home was really big, so we had an adult choir, a youth choir and a kid's choir. I actually once got to sub for the adult choir, which was a big honor because they do really hard pieces. I looked really funny in math class at school with my binder trying to learn the pieces."
It was in Women's Chorus that she met Evans. "I came into one of our first rehearsals and all of a sudden there is a girl there who has a big thing of bubbles," Evans recalls. "And she starts running around the room just blowing bubbles and I joined her. We were scampering around during rehearsal blowing bubbles. This was my first interaction with Ms. Van Dusen and we've been friends ever since."
"As she describes it, singing has always a part of her life," Evans continued, speaking of Van Dusen's passion and dedication. "She couldn't imagine her life without being able to sing, without having music. This year was a little hard for her because she was doing a lot of thesis stuff and she wasn't able to come as much as she would have liked, but, even at the end of the day when she wanted to participate in the last concert and she didn't know the music as well as she would have liked, she came in for extra rehearsals with [Director of the Amherst College Choral Society Mallorie Chernin]."
Van Dusen has also been an active member of the Amherst Christian Fellowship as well as a ringer for the Methodist Church Handbell Choir, ringing bells with them since she was a first-year. She has been ringing bells with church choirs for the past 10 years.
Matthew Pevrill '07 held up Van Dusen's participation in the Handbell Choir as an example of her dedication and congenial manner. "Heather has developed relationships with the community outside of the College," he noted. "She plays in the bell choir and she always goes, even on Sunday nights, even when she has work due the next day."
Van Dusen also explored new-found interests while at the College. During her first year, she joined the Swing and Ballroom Dance club. She later went on to serve as president for the club during her sophomore and junior years.
In some cases, Van Dusen's extracurricular, political and academic interests converged. Since her first year, Van Dusen has been a member of the annual Vagina Monologues performances. "It is such a great experience to be working with so many talented women and to be really raising a lot of awareness and a lot of money for NELCWIT, the New England Learning Center for Women in Transition," she said. "I just attended the first organizational meeting they had because it just sounded exciting. I remembered having watched a brief bit of the Monologues at home when my brother was watching and I didn't really know what to do with it, I didn't understand what was going on. But when I figured out what kind of activism it was doing, I was really passionate about being a part of them. And my family has been really supportive of that."
Synthesizing her interests
Come senior year, Van Dusen shifted most of her attention to her upcoming thesis project for her religion major. The topic of her thesis was the interaction and relationship between feminism and Christianity, in the past and in the present-day. "Most of historians are aware of and report on their interaction in the first wave [of feminism], starting in 1848," she explained. "In the second wave, they really don't talk about it and I think it is a problem. During the course of my research, I came to the conclusion that we'll probably have to figure out some other way of framing the relationship because the discussion between modern feminists and modern Christians, especially conservative Christians, have become so polarized that there's really no room for real discussion and people don't really enter into any kind of real dialogue."
In part, the ideas for her topic came from her classes at the College. However, her thesis and motivation for researching the materials was largely a result of her personal interests that extend back to before her college days.
"We did two weeks of feminist theology [in Dole's 20th Century Christian Thought]," she said. "I had never encountered feminist theology before and I thought that was really weird because I had been involved in church for my whole life. I was in church choirs … I am an elder at my church at home and I've been a feminist for as long as I've known what the term meant. And I've never heard of this thing called feminist theology, which you would think that someone like me would have come across. But, it's really confined to academics and seminarians and high levels of denominational talks. … And I said, wow, there are these feminists who are engaging Christianity in a way I've never see before and I want to know more about this."
Dole was impressed by Van Dusen's project and the effort that she put into her work. "It was a very ambitious project," he said. "The struggle in working through a senior thesis project is pulling it into a manageable form and she did quite well in that respect. It was quite a satisfying experience for both of us."
According to Pevrill, Van Dusen's thesis is representative not only of her academic efforts, but of her development in her faith and beliefs as well. "Her thesis and a lot of her academic work has been looking at Christianity and feminism specifically and looking at the connections," he commented. "I think she has enjoyed being able to tie together views of hers that she has had prior to college." Evans concurred, saying, "It was very important for her to get what she was saying exactly right."
"It is important for her that she has a real passion for the things that she has gotten involved in," she elaborated. She has always been very involved in her religion back home and she got very involved in religion here. She really wanted to delve into the things that she really believes in and the things she has a strong faith in. And I think that's a very unique thing to Heather."
Reforming corporations
After the pomp and circumstance of Commencement, Van Dusen plans to bring the skills and talents that she has developed and honed during her stay at the College with her as she moves into the world at large. The first stop on her itinerary is Europe, where she will be hopping between Iceland and Estonia, singing on tour with Amherst College's Women's Chorus and Men's Glee Club.
At the end of a week of song and cheer, Van Dusen aims to return to her hometown of Broomall, Pa., in order to look for work in the not-for-profit sector, ideally in the fields of healthcare, environmental issues or women's rights. Currently, she has set her sights on a company working to cross the bridge between non-profit work and for-profit business policies. "You can really develop a stronger sense of corporate responsibility and have businesses that are sustainable and make a profit that would not necessarily go to stock-holders," Van Dusen explained. "It would go to healthcare services, social services or shelters. That kind of social responsibility is something I am really passionate about."
Van Dusen plans to pursue her passions further in the future and is thinking about enrolling in a graduate program for social policy within the next couple of years.
Dole spoke confidently about Van Dusen's future prospects. "She's a very interesting person with a very good sense of herself that's going to serve her quite well in whatever it is she decides to do," he said. "Naturally, I hope that she'll end up in graduate school because she clearly has talents that will lend themselves to that direction."