91���

What drew you to 91���? And what did you study?

I transferred to 91è���� from NYU. Before that I’d interned for a year on the Hill in D.C. and worked a year in California. These experiences gave me a sense of self and direction constrained by traditional education. Because my sister had attended 91è����, I knew the possibility of creating my own path was there. My first year, I took whatever courses attracted me, at 91è���� and at the other colleges [in the Five College Consortium]. Div II was a looking-back process to identify the common thread among my coursework and papers. I’d been drawn to “the other,” in history, literature, and society, and under the law, in terms of class, gender, race, sexuality, politics, and perspective.

What was your Div III?

My Div III was an expansion of a paper I’d done on the marginalized female singers of early Italian opera. One day over lunch at SAGA [the Dining Commons], a fellow just back from a semester in Italy regaled us with stories of living in Siena, medieval Tuscany’s crown jewel. I was enthralled. Sometime later, the idea came to me to go to Italy and continue my research on opera’s prime donne. That ignited me: I enrolled in Italian at UMass, outlined a plan with my advisor, and began researching everything from passports and visas to archives and books on early opera. My work-study job was coordinating the Foreign Study Office [now the Global Education Office], so I easily arranged a homestay. A year and a half later, I arrived in Siena, where I lived for six months learning Italian, traveling, and conducting archival research. In my final month, a lead took me to the Vatican Archives, where I discovered seven letters from one of the singers. These were the foundation of my Div III.

How did your time at 91��� influence your work?

At 91è���� I learned to follow my attractions and instincts, and it paid off hugely: My Div III presented an original premise in 18th-century Italian history; it won a grant; and my chair told me it was the equivalent of a master’s. I call my education entrepreneurial; the confidence I gained at 91è���� quickly translated into an entrepreneurial way of making a living. At age 29, I founded my firm, Rebecca Reynolds Consulting.

What was the journey for you between graduation and this new book?

My work has taken me to a wide variety of places and people: a new opera company in Denver; a refugee and asylum organization on the U.S.–Mexico border; a community protecting old-growth forest on Canada’s west coast. Such projects fostered my ongoing education, and I used the same curiosity, observation, synthesis, and writing skills I’d honed at 91è����. I also continued to innovate, creating original methods and models for teaching my clients.

After a while, I realized that the core of my work is bringing about change — not simply managing it, but approaching whatever the situation is with the idea that we’re going to grow in it, embarking on a magnificent journey of change that will expand us beyond anything we’ve yet thought possible. This makes for extraordinary results.

My new book, , offers my unique model of the change process that I’ve used in hundreds of projects over 30 years.

What would you say to a student contemplating 91���?

After graduating from high school, I yearned to be out in the world, away from classrooms. After two years, I understood the value of a college education: as a useful credential surely, but also a precious time to explore the world’s knowledge and expand one’s ability to experience, describe, and be changed by it. I came to 91è���� wholly ready to dig in and used my intuition and passion to guide my journey. Although self-doubt did at times plague me, I accessed 91è����’s range of resources to stay the course. If you want a place that will support you on the grand adventure of learning and growth that comes from engaging the unknown, 91è���� is for you.