Welcome! I'm Olivia Koo '26, hailing from Los Alamos, New Mexico. I hope to study biochemistry on the pre-health track, and I'm excited to supplement it with music, as a classical musician and songwriter! Some of my favorite things to do are watching YouTube videos about my favorite TV shows, fiddling on my guitar, and reading New York Times op-eds.
Unsure whether I would enjoy the biology-heavy pre-health track, I took an intro biology class. I surprisingly found myself so invested each class—I didn’t think I’d ever be excited trying to determine if the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) had DNA or RNA, but here we are! I found it a great introduction to thinking processes at Dartmouth.
I loved coming to this class with its supportive environment! The professor's feedback really helped me improve in my writing. This course guided us through personal narratives and organizational writing while discussing what it really means to be authentic. It also introduced me to the library’s resources for writing and research!
This class was definitely not easy! The accelerated version of general chemistry, it was my first class at Dartmouth that used a textbook, and I had to adapt and learn how to use a textbook for a class properly. But that didn't mean I didn't have a good time! The classes were full of physical demonstrations, and I felt very supported in the lab and beyond.
This was the first group music class I took, and I loved it! Each class we'd move a little forward in time; one day we'd talk about medieval chants, and by the next couple weeks, we talked about Baroque music. We even got to observe original medieval music scores from the Rauner Library, and attend a performance of Baroque music by the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra!
Songwriting 1 was the first time I was able to work on something creative/in the arts at Dartmouth, and I really loved it! I got to learn how to improve my songwriting and get to know a community of fellow songwriters on campus. The class was both supportive and constructive, and I pushed myself to my creative limit with the assignment of writing one new song a week. This class inspired me to continue writing and being expressive, whether in an academic setting or not.
The longer I am at Dartmouth, the more I appreciate the proximity Dartmouth has to its medical school—the Geisel School of Medicine—and its hospital, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), which is only a short bus drive away. There's a robust and consistent shadowing program with DHMC, a program initiating conversations between undergraduates and medical students to learn about medical school and more! All of this runs through the Nathan Smith Society (NSS), Dartmouth's leading student organization for pre-health students! You can check out the website here.
This week, I had the opportunity to attend a "Dinner with a Doc" event, a smaller event run by NSS! This was my first term signing up for the event. Essentially, students get to have dinner with a doctor and get to ask them questions about their specialty! This time, we got to have dinner with two psychiatrists.
As someone who's always been intrigued by the idea of psychiatry but hasn't had much exposure to the specialty, I found the panel really fascinating! I learned that psychiatry has been a little pushed to the wayside in terms of medicine from a social and fiscal separation of mental health from the rest of medicine over the last fifty years through legislation and insurance companies, which makes accessible care more difficult. I learned that there's so much in the field of psychiatry and mental health that has yet to be discovered; is it possible to biologically define the causes of mental disorders? I also got to learn about the nature of psychiatric care, a combination of education, psychotherapy, and collaboration with patients to achieve the best care possible. As of this moment, the concept of being a psychiatrist is interesting, but I found the research surrounding psychiatry especially intriguing. I'll have to learn more!
Overall, I'm very glad I attended the event! It allowed me to learn about a specialty in a slightly different way than shadowing. The food was also great!
It's easy to forget how easy it is to access walking trails during the hustle of a Dartmouth term. As graduation nears, I am reminded of how special it is to step off campus and enjoy quiet moments in nature.
With a solar eclipse sweeping across North America for the first time in nearly seven years on April 8th came a road-trip with hundreds of other Dartmouth students to a zone of totality near campus: St. Johnsbury, Vermont!
After returning from an enriching study abroad program, I'm diving into a bustling spring semester here at Dartmouth. Here are my four courses I'm taking this term!
Dartmouth's liberal arts curriculum pushes students to explore new departments and draw connections between seemingly disparate disciplines. Come explore my Economics, Physics, and Asian, Societies, Cultures, and Languages classes!
