Ben Casanova

My exciting course load this term!

Spring has sprung! The first few weeks of the term have blessed us with warm, sunny days. It's always a great feeling to see familiar faces playing spikeball and soaking up the warm sunshine on the Green. Campus rejuvenates itself at the start of every quarter, with people picking up new hobbies, being outdoorsy, and enrolling in a brand new set of classes! I'm almost (entirely) set on double majoring in Biology and Economics, so I'm trying to get ahead on taking important courses for my two majors. What's really cool about Dartmouth's flexible liberal arts education is that even the most hardcore engineers and pre-med students, or basically anyone set on a very fixed path, are not only encouraged but also required to take classes outside their major(s).

Welcome to the end of winter and start of spring! Now that the weather permits it, my friends and I are going to start hanging out more outside.

With all that said, let me dive straight into what I'm taking this term. I'm doing CHEM 11 right now, which is essentially the honors equivalent of a general chemistry course. Not only does it let me explore my academic interests in chemistry but it also fulfills a core prerequisite for my Biology major, so it's a win-win situation! I was scared before enrolling in the class that the concepts would be way too challenging. However, I haven't fallen behind—just yet. 10-week term STEM classes can be very intense and fast-paced, but plenty of office hours and all the additional support of teaching assistants have made my transition to college-level coursework ten times smoother. So far, we have only covered quantum mechanics, although we'll soon tap into molecular orbitals, thermodynamics, and many other cool niche chemistry areas. While I could have opted for the standard gen chem route with CHEM 5 and 6, I chose to take CHEM 11 because I wanted to knock out my last Bio major pre-requisite in just one term and shift most of my focus in my last two years of college toward Bio and Econ classes.

Like any other Econ major at Dartmouth, I am currently taking an introductory statistics class called MATH 10, which fulfills the statistics pre-requisite for the major. What I love about intro stats classes at Dartmouth is the range of courses offered. Most social science departments, spanning from Sociology to Government (our equivalent to Political Science!), offer a stats class, so you can easily tailor your prerequisites to either your major department or any other department you want to explore further. For instance, say you're a political junkie who would love to run rigorous data analyses on election results; you can take full advantage of Dartmouth's long list of choices and enroll in GOV 10, which is the Government Department's intro stats class.

Ah! This right here is why I absolutely love spring. The whole campus community just comes together to spend more time outdoors, playing sports and doing fun activities in the surprisingly warm New Hampshire sun!

As an institution that takes pride in cultivating a community of well-rounded individuals, Dartmouth has a graduation requirement that gets students to take classes in different academic areas. Distributive requirements, colloquially known on campus as distribs, extend from Art and Social Analysis to Technology and Quantitative Science. Don't worry about STEM reqs if you've always gravitated more toward humanities, or vice versa. You're not limited to an abstract math class on differential equations to meet the quant requirement, especially if numbers and math-y subjects scare you. Departments like Linguistics and Philosophy routinely teach courses that can satisfy those requirements. For my Literature distrib, I'm currently in ASCL 10: Introduction to Chinese Culture. This reading-heavy class falls under the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, often abbreviated to ASCL. Sadly, I don't think I'll get to sample more ASCL classes, but ASCL 10 is giving me a great snapshot of Confucianism, Buddhism, Gender in Premodern China, Contemporary Chinese Poetry and so many other stimulating topics. As you can probably tell, there's lots of room to nurture intellectual pursuits at Dartmouth while still graduating on time with 1 or 2 majors!