Each week, the Record (using a script in R) randomly selects a student at the College for our One in Two Thousand feature, excluding current Record board members. This week, Bennett Ptak ’28 discussed art, crime, and spinning Driscoll. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lily Fox (LF): Do you have a motto by which you live your life?
Bennett Ptak (BP): I like to live by “fuck around and find out.” If you’re not fucking around, will you ever learn? I wish to be intelligent when I grow up. I’m still a child, guys. I’m 14. I don’t know why they let me into this college. I don’t think you can publish this without permission from my mom.
LF: You are 20 and about to finish your sophomore year at the College. What advice would you give your first-year self to help you have a fuller experience?
BP: I think I need to tell my freshman self to have a less full experience. Go to fewer parties. Spend a couple more nights in your room.
LF: That’s interesting in contrast with your motto, “fuck around and find out.” Do you feel like you’ve found out?
BP: Immensely. I feel like I’ve found too much. My therapist told me once that nothing you learn goes immediately into effect. You can see this in academics. You can see this in your personal life. If you’re always fucking around and never reflecting, the finding out is never really gonna happen, and at that point you’re just fucking around. You’re not following the motto anymore.
LF: You are a prospective computer science and theatre major. How do you think that those two disciplines complement each other?
BP: In theatre, I do lighting design, which is a very technical part of theatre. And I think I really love lighting design because I get to work with these crazy technical systems and turn them into art. And that’s my same mindset when I’m doing computer science. Just like in technical theatre, I think there is art in working with computers. In that way, I’m using two very different mediums for the same thing. One of them is lighting people on a stage, and another is writing code alone in my room.
LF: You are an avid member of the technical theatre world at the College. How does it feel to be a member of the LGBTQ+ community?
BP: Shout-out gay people, really love what they’re doing on this campus. I love gay people, really. I’m glad they’re out on this campus. Some of y’all doing too much. We might need to tone it down. Don’t print that. Don’t print that.
LF: Describe your ideal Williams day.
BP: I wake up. I miss my morning class — I sleep straight through it. I get out of bed at 10 a.m. I show up to whatever’s after that. I go to Theatre 260-something with [Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre] Erica Terpening-Romeo, the best professor on the Williams College campus. I take a trip to the bouldering barn. I do a little workout there. I order my Lees’ [Snack Bar] fried chicken sandwich with cheddar cheese, a kaiser roll, everything on it, and then a hash brown, unless someone has specifically told me that the fries are good today. If the fries are good today, I get the fries. That brings me to, like, 4 p.m. I might do 30 minutes of homework — like, sit in Lees’ and act like I’m doing something but just scroll on my phone for most of it. Dinner hits, you know, I’ll find some friends. Take a little bite to eat with them and really savor that moment. Then it’s, like, 6 p.m. and it’s call time for whatever my current show is. Immerse myself in the art. Feel the story. I rock over to Sawyer at 10 p.m, get the only actual work done for the day, then go to bed, maybe after Snar, and then rinse and repeat.
LF: If all crime were legal for one day, what would you do?
BP: So much petty theft. So much. I’d walk into Stewart’s Shops and I’d just take something off the shelf and go home with it.
LF: Recently, the dorm Williams Hall was burglarized. What hall would you burglarize?
BP: Williams Hall. I did that shit.
LF: You were not on campus during the time of the burglary. What is your advice for the reader?
BP: The same as my advice for the world: Open a Roth IRA right now, if you haven’t already. I’m not a finance head. I’m Bogle-headed, if you know who that is. Invest early, diversify, divest, stop bombing children. Williams needs to divest.
LF: Have you considered writing an Opinions piece?
BP: I wrote one, actually. I submitted it to the Record, and it got rejected. I think Driscoll should be taken down. We need to rebuild it from the ground up so that it spins. It’s so circular that I just want to see it spinning. And the Record rejected it, and they said it was not a serious piece, and it was, and I was honestly, personally hurt by that.
LF: If you could have voted in the 2016 Democratic primary, who would you have voted for?
BP: I’m writing in Obama. Give him a third term.
LF: What is your favorite tree and why?
BP: I am going a little bit different than what I think you’re asking, but on Mission Hill, facing away from Mission on the very right side, there’s a really, really big tree with one branch like 30-something feet off the ground, and if you’ve got a good arm, you can throw a rope over it, and you can set up a rope swing on that tree. And it’s beautiful. It brought me a lot of joy my freshman year. That’s my favorite tree on the Williams College campus.
LF: Last question: If you had to describe yourself in three words, what would they be?
BP: Chopped ass motherfucker.
LF: Awesome.
