Making Her Way

Back in 2018, when Liz Tilley ’22, a talented artist who specializes in printmaking, started attending Washington College, she wanted to participate in an art club on campus. No such organization had been available to students for some time. Tilley saw that as an opportunity: She approached Heather Harvey and Julie Wills, both associate professors of studio art, about restarting a club.

In short order, and backed by Harvey and Wills, Tilley lobbied for the club's reinstatement at student government meetings, circulated related petitions and secured funding. Her efforts paid off: 50 people showed up at a meeting to gauge interest, and before long, a college art club was back in business. Called the Art + Art History Club, it is still going strong today.

The club serves as a platform for the art that students create, and it promotes an awareness of art history. For Tilley, who became the club's president, it complemented one of her majors: Art + Art History (the other was experimental psychology). She remembers organizing a tote bag-painting event and participating in community-building gatherings in which students took their crafts and artworks to a college studio, hung out and listened to music.

Tilley now says that her involvement in restarting an art club drives home an important benefit of Washington College.

“You kind of have to make your way at a small private college like Washington College,” Tilley said. “But if you want to, you can. They will give you the opportunities.”

She also said that students can count on the assistance and encouragement of professors to make these opportunities a reality. Today, Tilley works as a psychiatric rehabilitation therapist at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, drawing on the work she did in her psychology major. Among other things, she helps people with disabilities land jobs.

Although she's clearly on her way career-wise, she remembers feeling less than confident during her final semester as she looked over ads for jobs she might do after graduating. Were it not for the support of professors, she might well have not applied for many positions, having concluded that “I don't know what any of this means. I'm not eligible to do this.”

Her professors stepped in and said: “You can do that. Just apply. It'll work out.”

It did.

— Ken Keuffel