Initiative Priority: Fostering Teaching and Mentoring
Personalized teaching and close mentoring relationships between faculty and students are at the heart of a Middlebury education. To ensure small classes, excellent advising, and meaningful mentoring, the College intends to add 25 new faculty positions, create professorships to honor exceptional faculty achievement, provide additional funds for curriculum development, and support collaborative research by professors and students.
Harry Bane ’09
- Hometown:
Marblehead, Massachusetts
Major:
Economics
Mentor:
Bill Beaney, Men’s Golf Coach
Lynks
Life’s Lesson
Harrison Bane ’09 not only overcame adversity, he triumphed in a powerful demonstration of what self-determination can do.
When golf coach Bill Beaney asked his players to go into the community and talk to schoolchildren, Harrison Bane took the opportunity to create a message that the kids can draw inspiration from.
Bane begins his talks by showing a picture of himself at age 14 wearing a complex leg brace. “But it’s not just a picture of the leg with a brace,” he says. “It’s me playing basketball or golf with it on. Their first question is, ‘How is it possible for you to be running around with that thing on and 17 pins going through your leg?’ I tell them that I wasn’t going to let it get me down. I wanted to do it, I thought I could do it, so I did it.”
Until he was 17, Bane battled an extremely rare form of bone cancer, and despite repeated surgery and incredible adversity, he emerged as a talented athlete in baseball, basketball, and golf. Last year, the New England Intercollegiate Golf Association named him New England Intercollegiate Player of the Year.
Bane says that one of the most important things he’s learned in life is to focus more on the process than the end goal. As golf captain this means intensive team building and getting to know the players personally. As a student, it means applying this approach in his classes so that he gets the most out of any project.
Among the many athletes Bill Beaney has coached, he says that Bane has distinguished himself. “Harry Bane has used his past experiences . . . to become a tireless role model and friend for all who meet him. He is, simply, the best.”