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Ben Chaucer

 

Ben Chaucer didn’t start his first year at Johnson State by jumping right into campus life. “I was frustrated, and a professor, Les Kanat, told me, ‘You can live your whole life with blinders on, or you can work to change the things you don’t like,’ ” Ben recalls. “He encouraged me to stay and work on change instead of taking the easy way out.”

As twice-elected president of the Student Government Association, Ben has been credited with reinvigorating the SGA, increasing student participation and establishing a class gift tradition.

He also was selected as one of 15 American student body presidents to visit Russia, meet government officials and learn about post-Cold War realities. Ben was invited back to an international youth conference in Russia, featuring 50 students from that country and 50 from across the world.

“I’ve found that Johnson is a place where - if you have the drive to explore and investigate and challenge the world around you - you can succeed,” he says.

Ben’s love of travel, however, began long before Johnston State. After high school, he spent three years flying around the world - with stops only to earn more travel money - in Europe, Northern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

But it was an old asbestos mine in Eden that delivered his possible ticket to medical school. During the school year and in the summers, Ben has worked as a paid laboratory technician for Professor Elizabeth Dolci. “For medical school,” he notes, “being involved in research can make or break an application.”

Working so closely with a professor on a research project is not something Ben necessarily could have accomplished at a larger university. “Johnson’s small-school size has enabled me to utilize resources, getting more one-on-one time with professors in the classroom and spending time on individual research projects,” he explains.

The research already has garnered attention; the team has presented at Ithaca College and before Congress. “We found there was a diverse, thriving community of bacteria in mine water that the state of Vermont thought was devoid of any life,” he says. “Down the road, that could yield clues for eventual remediation of heavy metals and possibly asbestos.”

Ben’s application to medical school also will stand out due to his enrollment in Vermont’s only college-level Wellness & Alternative Medicine Program as well as his independent study of emergency medicine.

“I am able to do both the traditional pre-med route while taking alternative medicine courses,” he notes. “As modern medicine becomes more and more aware of the alternatives, having both perspectives is more and more valuable. Growing up, I always thought there was more to healing than allopathic medicine, and there are things that even science can’t explain.”

Through independent study at JSC, he has enrolled in a University of Vermont emergency medical technician (EMT) course.

“I hope to spend the year between graduation and medical school working on an ambulance crew in Burlington,” he says. “Johnson has really given me the flexibility to do what I want to do and allowed me to spend time on things that will help me get into graduate school.”