My First Day Back to Campus
On January 2, I began the second day of the year by boarding my flight back to the Northeast from Chicago. Although Dartmouth starts the winter term earlier than most other schools, the 6-week length of the winter break from Thanksgiving to New Years definitely makes it worth it. In this post, I want to share a 'day-in-my-life' easing back into school after a long 6-week break.
After arriving to campus at 10pm after a 2-hour flight and 3-hour bus ride, I focused on unpacking and organizing my room before calling it a night. Since I didn't have class on my first day until 3:30pm, I had plenty of time to see friends and get used to campus again before class.
I started my day at Novack, one of the popular cafes on campus, enjoying breakfast with one of my friends while setting up my calendar and to-do lists for the term. While catching up on what my friend was up to during winter break, I did some of my readings for the first day of classes. After getting some work done, we headed to the mailing center on campus to pick up some packages.
Afterwards, we grabbed lunch at the Collis (center for student involvement) on campus, which happened to be chicken and rice. After lunch, I went to my first class of the term, which was Ethnographic Film. We began to talk about some key ethical questions raised by documentary filmmaking before watching and analyzing "Nanook of the North", the first documentary of all time made in 1921.
Once class was finished, I immediately logged onto Zoom for drill instructor training as part of the Rassias Method for language learning at Dartmouth. Since I help tutor Arabic on campus, I need to be retrained at the start of every term so that me and the instructors are on the same page about what I'll be teaching this term. After that session, I went to the weekly Hop Fellows dinner meeting—it was great to see many of my friends and enjoy a delicious meal from Base Camp, a Nepali restaurant in town. To learn more about the Hop Fellows program, check out this post I wrote about the program!
After dinner, I went back to my dorm to relax, get a bit of work done, and prepare for the next day. I definitely have to hit the ground running at the start of a Dartmouth term, but it's a lot of fun, too! I am excited to continue updating the blog as I navigate this winter term.