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(03/17/16 2:22am)
While most students spent J-Term hitting the slopes or catching up on sleep, Maryam Mahboob ’18 was hard at work, albeit outside of the classroom. For Mahboob, J-Term marked a time for fundraising and for the first test of her food startup, Macaroni and Choose (M&C, formerly known as M.A.C.), among Middlebury students.
Mahboob, who thought of the idea during a workshop at MiddCORE last summer, first sought to create a supermarket brand of condiments for macaroni and cheese. Howerer, according to Mahboob, this quickly changed into a project she found more feasible.
“The idea became a late-night mac and cheese food truck on campus, called the M&C Truck, built around the idea that students can choose condiments to enjoy with their mac and cheese, such as fresh thyme, blueberries and tuna,” Mahboob said. “M&C’s primary objective is to provide inexpensive, wholesome, local and organic mac and cheese during a time when such a meal is most needed among students — late at night.”
In order to test the concept, Mahboob gathered some friends and ran one night of delivery over J-term as a test. Despite only advertising through a handful of posters and Facebook posts, the event was a huge success. Another test, this time with a few delivery kinks worked out, is planned for March 18.
After the full launch, which Mahboob hopes to complete by mid-April, M&C will have two main components. One will be the M&C truck, parked in the Proctor parking lot, where students can walk up and order food themselves. The second will be a campus-wide delivery service to those willing to pay a small fee in exchange for macaroni and cheese delivered right to their door. Mahboob stressed that while the truck may not end up being an actual food truck due to logistical difficulties in obtaining a vehicle, M&C will still have a flagship location there in some form.
Through MiddSTART, the College’s crowdfunding site, Mahboob surpassed her goal of $2,000 from members of the Middlebury community. She ultimately raised $2,368 from 51 donors. While Mahboob’s current projection is that the truck will operate at a bit of a loss even if she takes no wages for her work, this is not the plan for long.
“My long-term hope for M&C is that it one day takes the form of a social enterprise, where a portion of the profits goes back into the community,” Mahboob said. “At the moment, however, my hope is that M&C reaches a point of self-sustainability.”
“M&C isn’t just another dining option,” she added. “The difference between M&C and other food ventures on campus is that M&C is built on a dream and is working towards a goal — serving inexpensive, wholesome, late-night mac and cheese to Middkids, while building students’ leadership skills, fostering community relationships and seeking to serve other parts of the community.”
(03/03/16 2:38am)
When it comes to large events on campus, students are accustomed to seeing mainstays like Wilson Hall or an athletic arena as the setting for such an event. Thus, it came as a welcome surprise to many that one of the largest events of Winter Carnival weekend, a “1980s skiing” themed party, would be held off-campus at the Marquis Theater in downtown Middlebury.
The idea for the party at the Marquis was born when the Traditions Committee, the subset of the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) that is tasked with planning the Winter Carnival, sought to add a new event to the schedule for this year’s Carnival.
“We liked the idea of an off-campus event that was accessible, but also wanted a slightly different option than what people are used to,” said Hannah Morrissey ’18, co-chair of MCAB’s Traditions Committee.
The committee recognized that the Marquis had hosted several successful events in the fall that were geared toward Middlebury students. Hosting an MCAB event there had the potential to further solidify its place on the radar of nightlife at Middlebury.
“We thought the Marquis event would be a good way to address students’ complaints about lack of late-night options on weekends,” Morrissey said. “The Marquis was also a great space to host a retro themed party, and it was an exciting opportunity to partner with a local business.”
The Marquis opened the event to everyone 18 and older, with the exception of the bar. This was a less stringent requirement than the 21-plus mandate requested by several other off-campus options the committee considered.
According to Morrissey’s fellow co-chair, Thilan Tudor ’16, the committee was pleased with how the first-ever MCAB event at the location went.
“The owner and staff at the Marquis were incredibly helpful and flexible,” Tudor said.
“We had a great turnout and have heard positive comments about the event from the students who attended.”
Up next for the Traditions Committee will be Midd Mayhem weekend in May. While preparations are still in a preliminary phase, both Tudor and Morrissey noted that the success of the party at the Marquis made it an option that would be readily considered again.
(02/18/16 1:54am)
For most students, group projects are a source of dread, when unfairly divided workloads and conflicting schedules among group members contribute to a less-than-enjoyable college experience.
This was not the case for nine students in Professor Christopher Andrews’s fall section of Software Development, an advanced course in the computer science department that is targeted towards upperclassmen. Those students, Rob Bracken ’15.5, Joey Button ’17, Andrew Hwang ’15.5, David Cromwell ’16, Max White ’16, Hanna Nowicki ’16, Marisa Dreher ’16, Mohamed Houtti ’16 and Jack Desmarais ’16, not only enjoyed a successful working relationship throughout the semester, but kept working together throughout J-Term in order to finish what they started. Their final product, website Carpanion.org, seeks to fill what Bracken described as an opening the group saw on campus.
“What we set out to do was to solve the need for a ride that so many Middlebury students experience every weekend,” Bracken said.
The group estimated that there are around 15-20 trips undertaken by Middlebury students to popular destinations like Burlington, Boston or New York City on any given weekend, with a huge surge coming at the beginning and end of semester breaks. With the common knowledge that many of those rides often have empty seats, however, Bracken and his classmates decided to create a network that could better coordinate the supply of rides with the demand.
“Right now, if you want to go somewhere off campus, you have two choices: beg a friend, or pay a ton,” Bracken said. “There’s no marketplace for getting off campus.”
Carpanion allows drivers planning an off-campus trip to post their ride online, where potential fellow trip-goers can then view what is available on a given weekend. Riders can then bid on the ride, with the driver ultimately having the final say in accepting bids and who he or she takes for the weekend. All participants will need to have a middlebury.edu email address in order to register.
While the app is currently driver-centric, the next step Bracken and the group intend to take is to allow a rider to post a desired ride in order to attract any drivers thinking of making a trip but who may be hesitant over variables such as the cost of gas. Bracken and the group see the app as both a functional way to solve an existing problem, and as providing other benefits.
“There are a few places people do this already, but everyone in the group felt that the other services were inadequate and incomplete,” Button said. “The cumulative goal was to create a site for members of the Middlebury community to find cheap solutions for rides off-campus, and maybe meet someone awesome in the process.”
“We’re trying to make it easier to see what’s out there, rather than just having to post in a Facebook group and hope someone responds,” Bracken added. Bracken stressed that the rides will also provide a social aspect, as there’s “no better way to get to know someone than on a long car ride.”
Although Carpanion originally started as a class project last fall, the group found themselves unprepared to launch the app at the class’s conclusion in December. They also found themselves unwilling to simply write the app off as a project of a now-past class and forget about it. Thus, they took advantage of a lax J-Term schedule to buckle down and finish the website. The group met three times each week, and started each meeting with the members detailing what they each had accomplished since they had last met.
This system of group accountability was ultimately quite successful with the group putting the last touches on the site and launching it in the final week of the term. Now, as the group advertises the app they have created, they are waiting to see how the student body will react.
“If people see this as we do, as a real need within the student body, then it could easily take off,” Bracken said.
Should the app find success, Bracken and the group face a difficult path forward, with Bracken and another group member graduating with the class of 2015.5 and leaving campus. Right now, the plan for the group is to see how the app fares now that it is open for Middlebury students to use and judge.
Regardless of whether Middlebury students take up the app, Bracken emphasized that the whole experience has been an entirely worthwhile one.
“What is great about it is that we built it all the way through. All the front-end and back-end stuff, the coding, all of us contributed,” Bracken said. “It’s very satisfying to see the finished product.”
(11/18/15 7:37pm)
When most students hear the name “MAC Truck,” they may first think of the Mack trucks that are a common sight on every major roadway in America. However, Maryam Mahboob ’18 proposes a different kind of MAC Truck: the Mac and Choose Truck, the first food truck dedicated to macaroni & cheese in the state of Vermont.
According to Mahboob, her inspiration for the truck came from a few too many bouts with late night hunger after The Grille closed.
“Walking outside on a Vermont winter day, freezing and hungry, only to find that we’ve missed The Grille by a few minutes [was] hugely disappointing,” Mahboob said. “In conversations I’ve had with my peers, I found that they express the same issue: the lack of dining options, especially late at night, is a real problem at Middlebury.”
Mahboob conducted a poll asking if students would be interested in a late-night food truck and received overwhelmingly positive responses. As a result of this perceived need, and with the help of a summer spent participating in MiddCORE, the College’s summer leadership program in Lake Tahoe, as well as space and some funding through the Old Stone Mill initiative, Mahboob is looking to correct the problem. The proposed MAC Truck would be open from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Sunday to Thursday and 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, outlasting The Grille by 2 hours on weekdays and an hour on the weekends.
As the name suggests, the menu will consist primarily of macaroni and cheese, although Mahboob notes that organic juices and hot beverages are also likely to be served. Mahboob believes that the wide choice of condiments that the MAC Truck will offer for its namesake dish will set it apart from any competition; she aspires to “be the premier server of macaroni and cheese in Middlebury” because of this.
To gain a better sense of potential customers’ wishes, Mahboob operated a macaroni & cheese bar during a dining hall lunch at Sierra Nevada College during MiddCore this summer. Mahboob offered bacon bits, buffalo sauce, fried chicken, chives, scallions, bread crumbs, shrimp, blueberries, blue cheese and tomatoes among others as toppings for the macaroni.
“I asked over fifty college students about their thoughts on macaroni and cheese condiments and nearly all students responded positively,” Mahboob said. A second test achieved equally positive results. Mahboob noted that several participants gave constructive feedback about selection and food quality, all concerns that she has addressed as she looks to move forward. The truck will look to emphasize local and organic options with all of its condiments.
As Mahboob looks to bring the MAC Truck to the streets of Middlebury, her next steps are fundraising through MiddSTART, registering the MAC Truck as a legal business, applying to be a student vendor on campus, and finding other students to help staff the truck, which will be run entirely by students. A website is also under development.
If all goes according to plan, Mahboob hopes to be up and running by the spring semester, or even as early as this upcoming J-Term.
If all goes well, Mahboob may even expand outside of Middlebury.