Building Interfaith Community for Students

Ryan Jenkins, MDiv ’22, Interfaith Advisor, Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH)

View more stories on HDS alumni and their career paths.

Describe the work you do today:

I am the interfaith advisor at Dartmouth's William Jewett Tucker Center for Spiritual and Ethical Living. Broadly, I create and facilitate spaces where students can find community, ask deep questions, and explore who they are and want to be. More specifically, I coordinate interfaith programming including an interfaith living and learning community, an interfaith spring break trip, and wellness courses on a variety of interfaith topics.

How has your HDS degree experience influenced your career journey?

Most obviously, HDS was the place where I learned about the field of higher education chaplaincy (my eternal thanks to Kerry Maloney). Additionally, in my third year, I did field education at Northeastern University's Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service (many thanks to Alexander Levering Kern), where I was hired full-time after graduation. Beyond these concrete examples, the multi-faith environment of HDS, along with the dear friends who I was able to process alongside, prepared me to enter a multifaith world and support people from a variety of backgrounds, beliefs, and practices. It also reinforced for me the importance of interfaith work and the need for spaces that welcome openness, curiosity, and questioning.

What career advice would you offer to current HDS students?

Be open to new ideas, new experiences, and for things to go in unexpected directions. Learn from your classmates. Take classes in the BTI. Take classes at other Harvard schools. Find a mentor. Suspend disbelief. Lean into field education as a site of learning and growth. Field education is a place to learn from people who are seasoned in the fields you are interested in, to gain valuable experience without needing prerequisites, to reflect and ask questions, and to see where you have gaps in knowledge and experience. Lastly, if you want to go into chaplaincy of any sort, I highly recommend CPE, even if it isn't required for you. Carefully discern the decision, as CPE is not easy, but know how often you will have the chance, both personally and professionally, to put into practice the tools and approaches that CPE teaches.