Hi there :) My name is Bryanna and I'm a '23 who was raised in Singapore. On campus I co-direct Sugarplum Dance Team, am involved in the Dickey Center's War and Peace Fellows program, do oral history research on the Vietnam War, and am writing a history honors thesis on the Cambodian Genocide. In my free time, I work as a barista at a local cafe called the Nest, listen to The Daily, and watch Masterchef (I'm trying to get into cooking).
With only 12 people, this course was the perfect seminar style course to introduce me to the history department at Dartmouth. We learned about pre-Columbus America up until the American Revolution, exploring a vast period of American history that is largely swept over in high school curriculums.
As someone who hopes to attend law school one day, this course was the perfect introduction to legal jargon, briefs, and the like. Professor Kalish helped me improve my writing my leaps and bounds as we explored judicial philosophies, current Supreme Court cases, and court history.
Despite my inability to sing or act, I've always been a big fan of theatre. Quite frankly, this course is one of the reasons I applied to Dartmouth in the first place. We read plays written from the early 1900s up to Hamilton, engaging with each deeply through class discussions and essay writing.
This summer I interned with a food bank in Philadelphia called Philabundance through the Dartmouth Partners in Community Service (DPCS) summer internship program. Each year, students apply to be matched as interns with non-profits in San Francisco, Philadelphia, or Boston. I completed the 10 week internship remotely from Asia, working a 9pm to 5am shift 5 days a week. It was an incredibly timely experience, as I worked primarily on Philabundance's COVID-19 relief efforts.
My little sister Kayla recently matriculated into the Dartmouth Class of 2025.
After the first two quarters of my freshman year, I returned home for quarantine and couldn't shut up about how much I loved Dartmouth. I brought up stories about my classes and escapades whenever I could. Most notably, I couldn't quite shut up about how much I loved my new friends.
Meanwhile, Kayla was deep in the process of figuring out which colleges she was applying to. She had said a couple times before that she absolutely did not want to "follow" me to college and that Hanover was simply too cold for her liking. I truly thought that she was going to end up applying somewhere else, so I started to gas up other schools to her to offset my non-stop Dartmouth propaganda. When she told me she was applying to Dartmouth as an early decision applicant, I was overjoyed. When she got her acceptance letter, I was over the moon.
My mom dropped off Kayla a couple weeks ago and we got her settled into her two room triple in the Fayweathers. As I led section B's "Climb and Hike" for First Year Trips, she climbed and hiked with section A. As she thought about first year course selection, I was able to give her my thoughts on what a balanced load looked like and what professors to try to take classes with. I got the opportunity to show her where my favorite places to study on campus are and gave her my two cents on which clubs she should look into. It's funny – I really didn't see myself as an upperclassman until the '25s got to campus. Now I feel like I have some insight to pass down (not that she'll listen to most of it, anyways).
Dartmouth is big enough that I don't see Kayla all the time, but I've loved catching her walking around campus and spending late nights in the Tower Room of Baker-Berry. '25s have waved at me thinking that I'm her, and I constantly have my friends report back to me when they see "little Bry." Having a sister on campus when the rest of my family is on the other side of the world has been a welcome change. One of my friends once told me that going to college with their sibling was the best decision they ever made. Based on the past two weeks, I think that I might end up feeling the same way.
Now, as I'm wrapping up the last days of my freshman year in college (UNBELIEVABLE), I want to share some things that I learned throughout my first year here as well.
