The Starr Center explores the American experience in all its diversity and complexity, seeks creative approaches to illuminating the past, and inspires civic engagement informed by history. We offer Washington College students dynamic opportunities for hands-on learning and off-campus experiences unequaled at other small liberal arts schools.

Amid a culture of the immediate and the instantaneous, the Center stands for the transformative power of the long view. That means understanding where each one of us—the lives we live and the decisions we make—fits on the centuries-long arc that connects the past to the present, and the present to the future.

The Center draws inspiration from the historic surroundings of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and from Washington College’s legacy as a place where a revolutionary American vision of higher education has flourished since 1782.

Hands-on learning through paid internships and civic engagement:

· The Chesapeake Heartland Project is an innovative, collaborative, community-based project to explore, preserve, and share four centuries of the incredible Black heritage of the Eastern Shore. Students are engaged in everything from recording oral histories, to digitizing centuries-old documents, to creating and staffing walking tours and pop-up exhibitions shared via our Chesapeake Heartland Humanities Truck.

· The Miller Program in Civic Engagement places students in paid externships with a range of area nonprofits, as well as offering many other opportunities for engaged learning, both on campus and beyond the College gates.

· The Holstein Program in Ethics, a College-wide initiative, engages students with “ethics in action” by helping them become citizen leaders changing the world around them for the better. The Holstein Program sponsors internships and externships, public events, co-curricular opportunities, and an annual prize.

· The Starr Center offers an array of other paid jobs and internships that changes from semester to semester. Please contact us at starr_center@washcoll.edu for information on our current paid opportunities.

Scholarships:

· Our Quill & Compass Scholarships offer merit-based financial aid to incoming students throughout their four years at the College. Quill & Compass recipients are also invited to participate in a range of other special opportunities throughout the academic year, from riverfront cookouts, to sailing excursions, to weekend road trips.

Travel programs:

· Throughout the year, we offer free road trips and field trips to cultural locations around the region, as well as a spring break travel program in collaboration with Washington College faculty.

· The summer Kiplin Hall Travel Program, co-sponsored with the Department of English, the O’Neill Literary House, and the Center for Environment and Society, takes a group of students to explore Northern England through an interdisciplinary lens of literature, history, and the environment. The program is based at Kiplin Hall, a 400-year-old manor house that once belonged to the Lords Baltimore, the founders of colonial Maryland.

These are just a few of the many opportunities and resources that the Starr Center offers throughout the year to students in every major. Visit https://www.washcoll.edu/learn-by-doing/starr, or email starr_center@washcoll.edu, to learn more about us. And come visit us in our headquarters at the beautiful Custom House, a delightfully rambling 280-year-old building in the heart of Chestertown’s riverfront.