Bowdoin Students Forge Lifelong Bonds, Echoing Family Legacies
BRUNSWICK, ME – A sense of community and enduring connection defines the Bowdoin College experience for many students, with some friendships blossoming from shared family histories and extending across generations. Recent stories highlight how these bonds not only ease the transition to college life but also create a unique, interwoven network within the Bowdoin community.
For students like Anabel Schiller ’28 and Julia Costle ’28, the foundation for their friendship was laid long before arriving on campus. Both discovered their families had a shared past at bowdoin – their parents were members of the same fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, now known as MacMillan House, in the 1990s.
“Bowdoin was always something that I knew I wanted to be a part of,” Schiller said. “Just the connections that [my parents] made with the people here…it’s something that means a lot to them. And so when I applied, I was realy focused on the friendships that I would make here.”
Costle’s mother alerted her to schiller’s acceptance, and the two quickly connected at Bowdoin Bearings, a pre-orientation program. “I think a big part of that was that our parents knew each other, so it was that built-in comfortability with each other,” Costle explained.
Their initial connection sparked a larger group of friendships among children of bowdoin alumni. Now, Schiller and Costle are actively extending that welcoming spirit to incoming first-year students with alumni family ties, hosting dinners and offering support as they navigate campus life.
“We’ve been getting dinner with the [first years] of other alumni families that we know, just to make them feel comfortable and have somebody older looking out for them on campus,” Costle said. “Now it’s just really fun, because when our parents come to visit [us at] school, we can all hang out, and they can tell their stories from college, and [we] can tell ours. It’s just like this big Bowdoin family.”
Beyond familial connections, the article also features students Omar Alibhai ’28 and Ben Kaiser ’28, whose unlikely friendship underscores the college’s ability to foster connections between individuals from diverse backgrounds.
“I think you should never put it past whoever it is, be it God or destiny or whatever, that decides how people come together,” Kaiser said.
Alibhai echoed this sentiment, stating, “It just shows that, if you want to, you can connect with truly anyone. Especially on this campus.”
