Hey everyone! My name is Alexis Colbert and I'm a '19, a senior, with a major in Anthropology and a minor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. I am a Senior Admissions Fellow and the Undergraduate Advisor (UGA) for the Gender Equity Program floor the 2018/19 school year. I have spent three terms abroad throughout my Dartmouth career and worked on a reflective project. In my free time I love to read, drink coffee, work with kids, and explore the arts.
Introduction to Anthropology is a course meant to show students the basics of anthropology along with the core theories. The focus is around the ability to evaluate differences in terms of similarities and vice versa. I took this course the fall of my freshman year with professor Watanabe and absolutely loved it, it's actually what got me to switch over to an anthropology major.
Education and Inequality is a course that explores the effects of schools on society and vice versa, along with inequality within schools and how that can affect people's lives in the long term. This focuses on how race, gender, and socioeconomic class shape, and are shaped, by education. Taking this course, I had never taken a sociology class before, but I loved it. I had already been working with kids back home at this point and coming from a low income, single parent household I had lived some of the situations that we explored in the course.
Forbidden Romance was a chance for me to take a course just because it sounded interesting and I knew the professor. Though she is no longer at Dartmouth, I took this class with Prof. Choi who was an astoundingly sweet woman. Over the course of the term we talked about different types of romance that are considered taboo and "forbidden", why they are considered so, and how romantic taboos can vary from region to region. I had never imagined that I would give a presentation on Fifty Shades of Grey in college...but I did.
Women and the Bible was an exciting course for me because I was also using it as a way to have more input on a topic that I had been thinking about quite a lot: what is the place of women in the bible. The course talks about the representation and treatment of women in the bible, as well as how women interact with the bible and different feminist takes on passages. I think it's a really interesting course whether you're religious or not.
Life in the Anthropocene is a course starts off by asking the questions: what is the Anthropocene and are we indeed in it. From there, the course works to identity the geological and societal consequences of this. Not only did we talk about climate change, but we also talked about how climate change effects groups and how groups can also cause climate change. If this course sounds interesting to you, I also suggest you read the Great Derangement.
In high school I became really interested in art, but when I first came to Dartmouth my freshman year I really lost that. So taking Drawing I was more than getting rid of a distributive requirement for me. It gave me a chance to be in a real studio and pour myself into my artwork. It required a lot of time in the studio, but I think it was definitely worth it!
DartFit was amazing! I took this gym class my sophomore summer, and yes, it was intense, it's a Dartmouth version of CrossFit, but my instructor was amazing. We called her Mad Maddie and she has her own website for personal training. I had taken Insanity with her two terms before. And the coolest part? Professor Hickox, the West House (best house) professor was taking the course as well. I literally worked out with my house professor three times a week.
This was my off term. I took this time to find an internship and that ended up taking me all the way to Kuwait. I worked full time at the American University of Kuwait in the Marketing office, the Office of Student Life, and the Writing Center. For ten weeks I walked to and from work, tutored students, planned events for the university, wrote articles for the website, and transferred digital archives. Being able to see the Middle East from a perspective other than what is covered in Western television was priceless.
Colonialism is not an event, it is a process. For the winter, I decided to escape the Hanover cold and go to New Zealand where it was summer for the anthropology foreign study program (FSP). The course taught by a Dartmouth professor was my favorite by far. Professor Sienna Craig taught the course Colonialism and its Legacies, we also had a teacher's assistant named Grant that attended every lecture, and brought forth readings that I didn't know I needed in my life. Over the course of ten weeks you discuss the lasting effects of colonialism on communities, the prospect of decolonization and what that could mean or look like, and study the colonization of New Zealand.
For the spring I went to Barcelona on the Spanish language study abroad (LSA). During my time there I took a course called History and Culture taught by a faculty member at the University of Barcelona. This course was my favorite because we spent a lot of time talking about art and how it relates to the social and political context of the artist. My favorite artist is Goya, he was a Spanish painter and during this class we spent over a week talking about him in lectures and also saw some of his most famous pieces in person while visiting Madrid.
To complete the major or minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies it is required to take a senior seminar in the department. The themes change based on the professor, this fall our theme was Futurisms, but our professor allowed our research projects to be on any topic and range from essays to fiction to art projects. At the end of the term, I had produced a two part project on Black women in young adult vampire novels in the form of a research paper and accompanying multimedia painting. Who said research isn’t fun?
Painting 1 was my second course in the Studio Art Department, the first being Drawing 1. Working with oil paint, we completed a range of paintings over the term geared to teach us about color, edges, and composition, among other things. Professor Enrico Riley was an amazing artist to learn from and often shared with us his philosophy around art, painting, and the relationships between colors. Whether or not I produced exclusively paintings that I felt were aesthetically pleasing, I learned about the theory and process of art making and the influence colors have on one another.
As you may have seen here in my blog, I went on the Anthropology and Linguistics Foreign Study Program in Auckland, New Zealand this past winter. The trip consisted of two professors, one in the Anthropology department and one in the Linguistics department, along with around twenty or so other students studying one of the two subjects (or both).
This helped feel a bit more at home at the start of time there in New Zealand, having people who were also from Dartmouth around us, many of which we may have met or taken a class with before because many of us were pursuing the same major. I still remember the first five weeks of the program during which we lived in a dorm at the University of Auckland, all on the same floor, and ate together in the mornings and at night in the dining hall. I remember us all studying together in the common room and watching television until late at night. This isn’t to say that we didn’t explore Auckland or make local friends, but it did mean that not everything and everyone around us was new and/or different, which was comforting during times when we missed home or campus. We were able to work through these experiences together and support each other.
This did not stop when we left Auckland. We still have our GroupMe and Snapchat group chats. We send each other quick bits of when something is reminding of us of our time in New Zealand together. We support each others on campus activities going to the games of our rugby and volleyball players or sending moral support.
Most of us are now seniors and this can be a stressful time. We are finishing up our majors and minors, some of us are doing thesis research, and we’re all trying to figure out what it is we’re supposed to do after Dartmouth. Being able to come together this past weekend for brunch at Professors Craig’s home and having Professor Laura and her husband there, was heart-warming and comforting.
Three of the other people from my FSP in the living room as we waited for food to be ready.
We walked down to this pond in the woods behind the house after eating. Back in New Zealand we spent a lot of time connecting with each other through nature.
In order to write this blog post, and remember the moment, I asked if we could all do a group photo. This is everyone from the trip minus two people who were sick.
Treasure your chances to go abroad. The dynamics of being on a foreign study allow for relationships to develop differently than they would on campus, I think quicker and stronger than they would. It won’t feel the same when you come back to Hanover and see each other, but you have now all shared something together and that’s special, because group dynamics can have a huge impact on how a foreign study experience goes.
I was attracted by the opportunity to engage with first-year residents and shape their Dartmouth experiences, in addition to working with other UGAs and staff who shared my interest in helping others.
We so very wish you could step onto Dartmouth's campus yourself to witness the beauty of our winters live, but COVID-19 has made visiting campuses extremely difficult. I would love to share some of my favorite photos from this past snowy week!
With lots of things (understandably) still closed on campus, it's nice to know that study spaces are beginning to open up again in a safe and responsible way.
In previous winters, I was able to skate on Occom Pond, usually at events with my Living Learning Community, and I'm glad to see that we're still able to take part in such winter festivities even with COVID-19 restrictions.
