NOTE: The Senior Close-Up is a frequent feature on the Bard Athletics web site, with the focus being the life of a student-athlete at Bard. Here, every student must complete a Senior Project to graduate. The Senior Project is an original, individual, focused project growing out of the student’s cumulative academic experiences. Preparation begins in the junior year, and one course each semester in the senior year is devoted entirely to the Senior Project. The student submits the completed project to a committee of three professors and participates with them in a Senior Project Review.
By Jim Sheahan
Bard College Sports Information Director
Kim Larie will tell you that she never heard of Bard College before she clicked on a Facebook page ad one day.
But she was meant to be here.
Kim Larie will tell you that she twice visited Bard as a high school senior and the weather outside was miserable both times.
But the soccer field looked terrific.
And Kim Larie will tell you that her major doesn’t lead directly to law school, which is where she wants to be.
But she wouldn’t have it any other way.
It was clearly no accident that she ended up at Bard, excelling as a student and as an athlete. Now that her departure is imminent, she can look back on how the whole thing began with a smile.
“I was considering a lot of schools, but I wanted to stay in the Northeast, and I wanted to keep playing soccer,” Larie said recently. “Schools like Amherst, Williams, Bates, Connecticut College. Then one day I was on Facebook, and I clicked on an ad for something called beRecruited.com. I filled out the information and submitted the form.
“A couple of weeks letter, I get this handwritten letter in the mail from someone named Bill Kelly at Bard,” she continued. “I said to my dad, ‘Have you ever heard of Bard?’ And he said, ‘Bard is a great school and it’s on all your match lists.’ I’d never heard of it because I wasn’t including New York in my searches.”
Kelly began to work hard on convincing Larie – “Bill is very good at recruiting,” she said – that Bard was the place for her.
“He was so excited about the possibilities for me here,” she said.
Even she didn’t anticipate the success that was in the offing. All-Skyline Conference Second Team as a freshman, Skyline Player of the Year as a sophomore, and All-Skyline First Team as a junior.
Academically, she was exceeding even her own expectations and building a foundation for a double major in math and economics, with her eyes still fixed on law school. With the support of her parents, Paul and Sarah, and her younger brothers, Dale and Phil, she was blooming.
“I was going really well in school, and I started taking math classes – I didn’t want to stop taking math classes,” Larie said. “Also economics. I was just loving it. It was stuff that I liked doing; it didn’t lead directly to law school and still doesn’t.”
This past summer, however, she followed her intuition, which told her she might be interested in corporate law. She interned with the International Crisis Group in New York City. It’s an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict.
The group was involved in litigation at the time, and Larie even got to sit in on depositions.
“I figured I would do the internship and either I would totally hate it, or I would find out this is totally what I want to do,” she said. “And I loved it. This is totally up my alley.”
Her sole major now is Economics, and her Senior Project is about the stock market crash of 2008.
“I’m passionate about it, and I’ve already written a lot of papers about it, so I have a lot of research done already,” Larie said. “More specifically it’s going to be an exploration of how legislation passed meant to protect consumers actually made the crash worse because the protections failed. I’m a little bit ahead of everyone else because I have a solid idea, and that’s feels good. I’m excited to dive in.”
Her college soccer career will end this fall, and it bothers her.
“Only six more weeks of soccer,” she says wistfully. “Being done with competitive soccer is the scariest thing I can ever think of. It’s been in the back of my mind for years, and now it’s coming.”
This spring, while she completes work on her Senior Project, she’ll also finish a lacrosse career that started her only a couple of years ago, when Bard added the sport. She wants to tackle something else, like nurturing her “weird compulsion to volunteer,” or teaching, before pursuing law school.
“I want to be a lawyer,” she says.
If recent history is any indication, she will be.
