Hey there! I'm Isabel, a '20 from the sunny town of Tucson, Arizona. I spend most of my time at the Dartmouth Engineering, but you can also spot me hanging out with plants and my twin brother in the greenhouse, snapping photos of picturesque Hanover, or drinking iced coffee even during the winter (Arizona habits die hard). I'm an undergraduate advisor for the North Park housing community as well as a member of the marching band, Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineers, and Club Swim.
This special topics class taught Adobe Illustrator and the CAD software Rhino 3D. We laser cut, 3D-printed, and used the CNC router to cut huge sheets of plywood to make pavilion structures. My group made an 11 foot tall pineapple structure that now sits in House Center A .
This is the one class that Professor Merton teaches each year and it is well worth it just for her. The texts are transformative and lend themselves to self reflection and better learning in all aspects of life. The expertly planned assignments helped me become a much better writer.
ENGS 20 with Professor Taylor is taught in a "flipped classroom" style where one watches mini-lectures before class and works on coding projects during class. Students are assumed to have no coding experience coming into this class and are taught the basics of C and Matlab languages.
SummerTucson, AZ
I went home for the summer, enjoyed the sun, swam nearly everyday, and worked for Cocina Verify, a startup company that verifies food safety in restaurants in Latin America.
The Peru LSA+ for Spanish is one of the defining moments of my Dartmouth career. We pet llamas, hiked in extraordinarily beautiful places, visited Machu Picchu, and read amazing Peruvian literature, my favorite of which is Rosa Cuchillo by Oscar Colchado Lucio.
My favorite class ever! Taught by the renowned Argentine comic artist Liniers, we looked at Latin American comics through time and were exposed to history and many variations of the Spanish language.
ENGS 44 teaches the basics of sustainable building design. Throughout the course we designed tiny homes for varying applications and went on several field trips around the Upper Valley, including a visit to a straw-bale insulated home in Vermont.
My class designed a range of installations for the Dartmouth Organic Farm, including small buildings, amphitheaters, and comprehensive pathway systems. We went on a site visit to the Organic Farm and had weekly lessons for the software Rhino 3D.
ENGS 37 is a chill engineering class that covers diverse technologies for water and air treatment, risk assessment, design for the environment, life-cycle assessment of a product, and other related topics. We also had one week of field trips during class!
WinterTucson, AZ
I spent my winter off-term enjoying the Arizona weather at home and working remotely for a FinTech startup based in New York. It was nice to have some time to reflect on my Dartmouth experience thus far and refocus for the future.
I took ENGS 71 with Vicki May, one of my favorite Thayer professors. The course covers modeling and approximation of structural systems, for example calculating the type, dimension, and layout of beams to properly support a roof with certain applied loads.
SummerBeverly, MA
This summer I worked for Build Health International, a non-profit that designs, builds, and equips healthcare infrastructure in low-resource settings. I worked on initial design for a hospital in Rwanda and researched germicidal UV lamps at hospitals in Haiti.
In ARTH 38.01 we learned about Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic architecture as well as Asian funerary architecture. Professor Hockley taught us the basics of religious thought and introduced us to many fabulous structures.
Modern Architecture, taught by Professor Heck, starts in the mid-18th century with Neoclassicism and ends with the expansion of the 'International Style' post WWII.
SpringTucson, AZ
I am taking Glaciology, Reproductive Ethics, and Machos & Malinches (Gender and Sexual Identities in Latin/x American Literature and Culture) remotely this spring term.
I've encountered graduating seniors who didn't know that Dartmouth has a greenhouse. They’ve missed out, because the Life Sciences Center's Greenhouse is one of my favorite places on campus. On the fourth floor of the Life Sciences Center, it may be a bit out of the way for non-biology majors, but it is well worth the trip.
Xeric room of the Dartmouth Greenhouse.
The greenhouse offers the Brout Orchid Collection, which includes about a thousand species, a tropical room, a sub-tropical room, and a xeric room. Carnivorous plants can be found in the tropical room. Plants like succulents and cacti that grow in dry climates inhabit the xeric room.
The Life Sciences Greenhouse is famous for its corpse plant “Morphy”, whose species has the largest flowers in the world. I was lucky enough to see it in 2016 when it bloomed my freshman fall, but it unexpectedly bloomed this November as well (for more information on Morphy, click here).
Corpse Flower bloom from 2016.
I highly suggest the greenhouse as a study space. There are a couple tables in the outer room where one can type away amongst the plants. I wrote a decent chunk of my 11-page final paper for Spanish 40 sitting in one of those very tables. In the winter the heat lamps and high humidity in the greenhouse make it a very attractive place to work. And, for those of you who come from the desert like me and are worrying about homesickness, all you have to do is take a trip to the xeric room and stare at your favorite prickly plant. You'll feel right at home.
On Monday, April 8, 2024, a phenomenal total solar eclipse occurred — and we happened to be within the path of totality. As a result, Dartmouth hosted a variety of eclipse-related events on- and off-campus. Find out how I spent the eclipse!
