Amy Hoffmaster was packed up and ready to attend a marine studies program out of state when she visited College of the  Atlantic. As she walked around campus, talking to students and faculty, she found herself thinking, "So this is what it's supposed to feel like when you find the place you want to be, when you find the people with whom you want to share your learning." Returning home, though, she had to do some very serious financial thinking. "I had to decide whether the individual attention, small classes and exploratory nature of COA's human ecology curriculum was going to make it cost-effective."
It was the right decision. By exploring the entire range of COA's curriculum, she was able to study science, art and education, which is where she has found her calling. "I realized that when I really understood something, I saw all the many ways that others might see it. My reaction was to share it with someone. That's what teaching is about, having an idea that I am passionate about, then thinking about it from multiple perspectives so I can create experiences for others to get their own understanding. That, to me, is also what human ecology is."
Since Amy ultimately wants to research the process by which brains acquire information, she has also been taking a lot of science, researching such topics as the physiology of memory, brain-based learning and the most efficient ways by which people incorporate information, connecting what she's learned about neurophysiology to her interest in how we learn and think. To Amy, that's a natural. "At COA there's almost an expectation that we will find connections between ideas."
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