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.
What's something about Dartmouth that you didn't know existed prior to your enrollment that you couldn't imagine your life without now?
A:
For me, Dartmouth's support for undergraduate research is not something I knew a lot about coming in. However, it has certainly differentiated my experience here. For the past two years, I've worked as an associate with the Dartmouth Digital History Initiative (DDHI), a digital humanities project that makes oral histories more accessible. Our research team has encoded interviews from the Dartmouth Vietnam Project (an effort to capture the oral histories of Dartmouth Vietnam veterans) as well as Dartmouth Black Lives (an effort to document the experience of the first black students at Dartmouth). Through the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Research, I've received a substantial amount of funding for each term that I've worked on the project. This funding has allowed me to use the time that might be spent on an additional job instead of research. My experience with the DDHI has been phenomenal. Working with such a close knit-team of different majors with our faculty advisor, Professor Edward Miller, has been an experience I can't imagine Dartmouth without.
Unlike some other universities, many of the STEM lecture classes at Dartmouth require concurrent enrollment in a laboratory section. What is it like navigating that time as a student?
