Hey everyone! I'm Cooper from Wayne, Pennsylvania, which is right outside of Philadelphia. I am a '28 here at Dartmouth, and plan on studying Quantitative Social Science and Cognitive Science. In my free time, I love getting food with friends, playing pickleball, watching sitcoms (personal favorite is Modern Family), and going on walks. I am super excited to be here and cannot wait to take you along my journey at Dartmouth!
I took this class with Professor Binkoski, and I absolutely loved it! We explored numerous theories regarding time travel and the existence of time, and it just completely blew my mind. Professor Binkoski is such an engaging lecturer and explains everything so thoroughly, which makes the class so incredible! After taking this class, I have become more interested in philosophy and cannot wait to take more classes in this department.
I took this class with Professor Horiuchi and learned more than I could have possibly imagined! This course is incredibly challenging and has a good amount of work, but I learned so much about the programing language R as well as how to wrangle and visualize data. By taking this class, I have confirmed that I want to major in QSS because of how interesting the material was. If you want to enhance your skills in R, this is the class to take!
In order to fulfill my language requirement, I took Spanish 9 with Professor Rieumont. This class was simply incredible. Not only was the content interesting and engaging, but my actual class itself (both the professor and fellow students) made this class so memorable. We learned so much about Spanish-speaking cultures all while having so much fun doing it, and I am so grateful that I took this class with such an amazing group!
Welcome to a new series of mine, where I will be reviewing each of my classes in-depth to give you more of a sense of what classes at Dartmouth are like! To start, I will be discussing QSS 17, which is also known as Data Visualization. This class is a requirement for the quantitative social science major, and is one of the core aspects of the field! It fulfills the TLA distribution, which allows you to knock out the lab credit without having to attend the typical lab that takes about 4 hours each week.
Let me discuss more about the actual class structure. I took this course with Professor Horiuchi, a professor of Government and Japanese Studies, where we had a flipped classroom. Essentially what this means is that we read a textbook and watch videos outside of class to learn the content, and then during our class period, we would solve practice problems. This allowed us to get more of a sense of how to actually apply the content we were learning to societal issues, which was the main focus for the class. We analyzed data regarding many issues, including gun violence and weather disasters.
Throughout the term, we had three projects, two midterms, a final, and an overall participation grade for the course. The projects were by far my favorite part of the term. We could essentially choose anything we wanted to analyze (there were a few restrictions for each, but for the most part it was all up to you!) and we would have to use the programming language R to plot the data. This allowed for a lot of freedom with what we could do, which definitely helped relieve some stress.
One of my projects for the class!
Now, to be completely honest, this class was extremely difficult. There is a lot of content to learn in such a short amount of time, and the assessments and assignments overall were quite time-consuming. I would definitely recommend taking this class with two others that are not quite as intense, because it could definitely cause a lot of stress. Despite this, I do truly believe that I have learned so much from this class and it was certainly worth it to take, especially early in my college career.
Dartmouth is known for its outstanding graduate schools of business, engineering, and medicine, but how can undergraduates take part in that enriching environment? Read more to find out!
During my sophomore spring quarter, I took on the challenge of four STEM courses, and while it has been intense, the unexpected connections across subjects and the joy of learning have made it one of my most rewarding academic experiences yet.
