The conversation is flowing freely among the two dozen students and their dean bellied up to the large island counter in the kitchen/rec room of UVM’s Honors College. Talk ranges from cold medications to theoretical physics to horror movies to such weighty matters as whether athletes or actors are more overpaid.

About every eight minutes, the dean turns from the crowd, draws a sheet from the oven behind her and places it on the counter, causing a momentary lull as students study its contents.

Welcome to Cookies and Tea with Lisa, a cherished ritual in the Honors College that draws between 20 and 50 students late Tuesday afternoons for a 60-minute repast of multiple cookie varieties, herbal tea and non-stop talk. 

Lisa is Lisa Schnell, the college’s dean. The cookies are her own from-scratch creations, produced en masse in dough form one weekend a month and stored in her freezer.

“People in the Honors College are very academically motivated and that's why they're here,” says Anthony Spinella, a first-year Neuroscience major from Chelsea, Vt. who attended a recent cookie social. “But it’s also fun to come down and have cookies and just relax with friends and other people who have sort of a similar mindset, similar work ethic, similar motivation to do well.”

While it’s plenty academically “strenuous,” adds Stephen Indrisano, a first year psychological sciences major from Bethesda, Md., its sense of “community is one of the biggest parts of the Honors College." The cookie session is the most popular, but “there's a bunch of different events” that build togetherness at the college, he says, including a weekend hobby lobby, a light book club and a weekly TED Talk marathon.

“In its simplest formation,” Schnell says, the cookie social “is home. I don’t want students to think of me as their mom, but they do,” she laughs. 

Having a surrogate mom in the house – or the kitchen – has its benefits. While she also conducts private advising sessions, she’ll frequently ask students to bring their questions about courses, professors, internships and the like to “cookies,” where she’ll dispense advice between batches, which often benefits everyone.

“I think it just demystifies the whole, ‘Who are the grown-ups in college’ thing,” she says. “Students come in with a preconception that grown-ups in college are pretty intimidating, especially if they’re deans.” 

Hanging out with students in informal settings has other advantages, Schnell says.

“I love having that kind of time with students where I can just find out what's going on in their lives,” she says. “The sky's the limit for these kids, so we want to make sure that they know they can talk to us, because we’re likely to have an opportunity we can throw at them if we know what they're thinking."

Students enter UVM’s Honors College in one of two ways. Two hundred incoming first year students are invited to join, based on their academic record in high school and test scores. Another 100 apply in their sophomore year and are accepted based on their first-year grades and professors’ recommendations. 

Students are quick to point out that Schnell’s cookies – favorites include chocolate/chocolate chip with orange flavoring, peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip and chunky chocolate with minimal dough – bear next to no resemblance to prepackaged supermarket rolls. 

“I kind of imagined that it was just chocolate chip cookies,” says Sophie Thorup, a sophomore English major from Weston, Mass. “I had no idea.”

The cookie hour offers a “sense of the excitement of the intellectual community in the Honors College,” says Schnell. “It's not highbrow, but they're not talking about what they are going to do on Friday night. They really are interested in ideas.”

That may be. But Spinella has four words of advice for any student interested in joining UVM's Honors College: “Come for the cookies.”

PUBLISHED

04-28-2015
Jeffrey R. Wakefield
Lisa Schnell