News
New Employee Comes Home
Feb 23, 2011
When Dieter Bouma first came to Au Sable it was fairly easy to know where he was on campus at any given time: in the pole barn, playing broomball. While for most people who come to Au Sable this would be recipe for academic failure, for Dieter, it was all fun and games. He had the luxury. He was seven.
Things have changed quite a bit since then. Dieter is the newest member of our staff, but the days of locating him with relative ease are over. It’s not that he doesn't hone his broomball skills anymore (he claims an Au Sable professional team is “just around the corner”), it’s that Dieter is our new Assistant for Recruitment, Communications, and Development. A majority of his time is spent on the road visiting our participating colleges to talk with students about the opportunity to take courses at Au Sable.
In addition to visiting our participating colleges, Dieter’s other hats include establishing an Au Sable alumni and supporters network, coordinating Au Sable eNotes, developing our new website, keeping faculty representatives abreast of on-going Au Sable news, and applying for grants.
Before coming to Au Sable, Dieter completed an MS/MPP program from the University of Michigan. During that time, he helped to teach courses through the University and worked for both the Huron River Watershed Council and City of Ann Arbor.
It’s a common occurrence, and a wonderful privilege, at Au Sable to have many of our students return over the years. It’s what makes Au Sable feel like a home: it’s a place people come back to. For Dieter, Au Sable has served as a home away from home for almost nineteen years. In fact, one of the things he considered when accepting his new job was whether working for Au Sable would diminish the strong pull on him towards campus. We’re happy to report that it hasn’t.
We caught up with Dieter for an interview about his new position and what keeps bringing him back to Au Sable:
How did you first hear about ASI?
I first heard about Au Sable when I was in elementary school. My dad served on the board in the early 1990s, and then later he taught the January-term class in 'Environmental Ethics' for over 15 years. I was a young recruit.
What courses did you take at ASI? Any favorites?
I took Winter Stream Ecology, Tropical Agriculture and Missions, and Woody Plants. By de facto, I probably took my dad’s 'Environmental Ethics' course by the age of 10 as well. Each Au Sable class was wonderful and unique in its own way. I’m deeply indebted to each of them for the future opportunities they opened up for me. Winter Ex-stream ecology, as Dave [Mahan] likes to call it, landed me my first job with the Huron River Watershed Council, which was a terrific experience. And the Tropical Agriculture and Missions and Woody Plants classes were instrumental in helping me with my graduate work on community forestry and climate change adaptation in rural Nepal.
Do you have any favorite memories from Au Sable or particularly influential faculty or staff?
Au Sable faculty and staff are some of the most fun and enjoyable people to spend time with -- it's blessing heaped on blessing spending time with them. They're the best teachers, mentors, story-tellers, adventure guides, joke-tellers, worship-leaders....
And as teachers, they're so great to learn from because they're so curious. I'll never forget driving with Dave Warners [Woody Plants professor] during our 'Woody Plants' course. I remember thinking, "Gosh, he has a weird way of driving." His elbows would hang straight down from the steering wheel, and he would lean so far forward that his chin would sit over top of the steering wheel. It wasn't until I sat in the front seat with him that I realized why he'd adopted this unorthodox driving style: he was craning his neck to get the maximum peripheral vision out of the front windshield to look at the trees along the roadside! It worked well too. As I was sitting in the front seat next to him, all of a sudden, he slammed on the brakes, pulled the car off the road, jumped out, ran across the road, up a little hill, and clipped a small branch from a tree species we hadn't seen yet. It was a testimony to one person's passion for teaching and the plants our God created.
Has your ASI experience influenced you in any way?
This is an incredibly challenging question! It'd be easier to ask how Au Sable hasn't influenced me. Growing up and working at Au Sable gave me the opportunity to interact with wonderful students and faculty and learn about Christian environmental stewardship from a young age. Despite this, at the beginning of the summer before my freshman year of college, I had to tell Calvin College -- where I went to undergrad -- what I was interested in, so that they could give me an advisor. I chose Sociology because I was good in humanities and had not had the best teachers in the sciences throughout high school. That summer, I worked in the kitchen during Summer Session II. By the end of that summer at Au Sable, I was a Biology major. And it was all because of the students -- I saw their passion and interest and it seeped into me. Au Sable created fertile soil in me for when I began to studying Biology because I constantly tied my coursework in biology and ecology to how it could be applied to care for God's world. I worked for the Service-Learning Center at Calvin College as the Calvin Environmental Assessment Coordinator and was a member of the Environmental Stewardship Coalition. The worldview I learned at Au Sable was what motivated me.
If you could offer one piece of advice to current students of ASI, what would it be?
Just as the threat to God's creation is multifaceted, so the ways to serve God's creation are diverse: take some time to learn about all the different types of careers and service opportunities out there that can help to protect God’s world. There are quite a bit more than you think.
What are you most excited about with your new position at ASI?
I'm excited about the opportunity to talk to students about what a terrific living-learning community Au Sable is. I've taken courses at Au Sable in the summer time, and it combines what's best about coursework -- interesting classes where you're outside interacting with the subject you're studying -- and summer vacation -- being with friends, having adventures, lots of recreational opportunities. It's a challenge to convey this because you really need to experience it to understand it. But I try to channel my own experience and excitement into talking about it with students. It's always terrific to meet a former Au Sable student who lights up when they talk about their experience. It definitely reinforces that Au Sable makes a life-changing impact on students in a variety of different ways.