Arielle Baskin-Sommers
I spoke with Silliman Head of College Arielle Baskin-Sommers a few days before first-year move-in. Baskin-Sommers used the summer lull to work on research, give talks and go to the beach, and by the time we spoke she was getting ready for her fourth year as head of college. I caught her in the middle of planning events for the upcoming months and preparing for students to move back in.
After working in the Psychology Department at Yale since 2014, Baskin-Sommers was drawn to the HoC position because of her friendship with the previous Silliman head of college, professor Laurie Santos, who also taught in the Psychology Department. Baskin-Sommers, who lived in New York City at the time, would often spend the night in the guest room of the HoC house so she didn’t have to commute to New Haven the next day.
“Slowly I began to see what being a Head of College was like,” she said. “I didn’t even know what the college system was when I applied to Yale as a faculty member. But being around the previous Head of College helped me see the ways that you could have fun with the students and see them in a different light.”
So when Silliman was looking for an interim head of college in 2022, and an official replacement the year after, Baskin-Sommers was an obvious fit.
The HoC role allows Baskin-Sommers to interact with students in a meaningful, non-academic way. She frequently eats in the Silliman dining hall, allowing her to build relationships with students and staff in the college. And students often chat with her parents, who live in New Haven and who, along with their two dogs, are familiar sights around the courtyard.
“And I secretly sort of love party planning, and to be able to do that with someone else’s money is especially nice,” she added with a laugh.
Planning events allows Baskin-Sommers to build and shape the community within Silliman’s walls. As an only child, she told me, the idea of found community has always been important to her. At times in her life, those communities included team sports, colleagues or different groups of friends. And now, Silliman.
“I just enjoy finding ways, either with a small touch or something larger, to build community and come together around common interests,” she said.
She’s lucky, she added, because Silliman has a large courtyard and HoC house, which helps her to think more creatively about different events and create a balance between big and small gatherings.
Winter Wonderland, for example, is a Silliman classic, which Santos and Sergio Gonzalez, the assistant director of operations in Silliman, started several years ago. It takes place in the courtyard in December, and boasts food, games and a charming atmosphere. Last year there were even goats dressed up as reindeer that students could pet. Baskin-Sommers intends to keep Winter Wonderland running for years to come. But she finds meaning in the small events, too — opening the HoC house for studying and giving out ice cream on hot days.
“I just try to be aware of what’s going on in peoples’ day-to-day lives, and look for opportunities to have events and have people come together,” she said.
Hearing her describe all of these details, I thought about all the Silliman HoC house events from my first year — the snacks and coffee during finals week, the Fall Fest, an opportunity to paint little pots and plant herbs. Carefully planned, they must have required a lot of coordination and brainstorming.
Depending on the event, Baskin-Sommers said, she typically works with Cara Vo, the service assistant in the head of college house, and Gonzalez. She sometimes also coordinates with Deanna Brunson, the head of college administrative assistant, or representatives from Silliman’s Student Activities and Administrative Committee.
“Sergio and Cara are always at the core, and sometimes they’ll come to me with ideas,” Baskin-Sommers said. Other times, she and Vo might bounce ideas off each other. “So, it really just kind of happens organically,” she said.
Last spring, Baskin-Sommers opened a random closet in the HoC house and found several unused picture frames. She thinks they were intended for a commencement event a while ago, but had since been forgotten. She and Vo started brainstorming.
“Now we have an idea for a Polaroid portrait suite event, where you can take one of these frames for free, and we’ll give you Polaroid cameras to take a bunch of pictures with your suites,” Baskin-Sommers said. “You could create a collage, and then hang it in your common room.”
The Polaroid portrait event happened on Tuesday — Sillmanders took pictures with their friends on the HoC house patio. Vo chatted with students and guided them inside to decorate their new frames and Polaroids.
In an email, Vo explained the value that she finds in planning events for Silliman. Food brings people together, she said, whether that includes making a snack some students have never had before, grabbing iced coffee between classes, building a charcuterie board or making chocolate bark.
“I will always view myself as a Facilitator of Memories that brings students together outside of classes to be themselves with one another, to give the opportunity to enjoy one another’s presence and time together,” Vo said.
Gonzalez wrote to the News discussing the meaning in planning Winter Wonderland.
“My satisfaction lies in how impactful the event is, and I do enjoy the idea of us doing some of the lift internally as there is just a greater sense of satisfaction when you put some elbow grease into something,” Gonzalez wrote.
Gonzalez recalled the process of creating Winter Wonderland, building the huts, installing them, decorating them, envisioning a menu. It’s a creative process that allows room for new ideas — like the petting goats. Gonzalez enjoys hearing feedback from students too, about how they were able to get into the holiday chair.
The physical HoC house offers ways to shape events, too. When Baskin-Sommers moved in, she worked with the college to do some renovations. One of the new additions: a bar in the back of the first floor, usually stocked with coffee, tea, orange juice or cider during HoC events. The bar also has shelves full of games and decks of cards that students can play with. It helped to improve the community-oriented feel of the space, she said, and because of that, it has become one of her favorite places in the house. She added some new furniture to the porch, too, so students could sit out on the patio during nice weather.
I wondered if Baskin-Sommers’ work as a HoC connected at all with her academic work. As a psychologist, a lot of her research has to do with understanding variability in people’s experiences, as well as recognizing the cognitive, emotional and environmental factors that contribute to behavior.
As HoC, she tries to understand the experiences of her students, providing different opportunities for people to thrive — hosting different events and reaching out in different ways to help students feel seen and supported.
“There’s certainly a bit of an advocacy piece to what I’m doing in my academic work, and that probably translates to being Head of College, as well,” she said. “I see a big part of my role as showing up for students when they need it, whether that’s as a whole group or talking with individual students who reach out if they’re struggling with something.”
Although she knows she needs small ways to maintain her privacy — setting boundaries, going away for a weekend, taking a long walk — Baskin-Sommers largely enjoys the energy of campus life. It reminds her of living in New York City.
I asked if it bothered her to hear late-night stragglers coming back to their dorms on the weekends — she said that, happily, her bedroom faces away from the courtyard and the house is well-sound-proofed.
As fall rolls around, Baskin-Sommers is doing a lot of planning for HoC life in the year ahead — sending emails, making Google Spreadsheets, ordering materials on Amazon and managing, as she said, “a little bit of that anticipatory excitement.”
In addition to the Polaroid portrait idea, Baskin-Sommers hopes to work on a project that recognizes former Silliman heads of college, which will represent and celebrate previous generations of Sillimanders.
“And then, I’m sure,” she joked, “something will come to mind when I open the next closet door.”