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.
How does one create social change through architecture?
In Architecture II we developed varying responses to this question through a design project that spanned the entire ten-week term.
We began the course in the theoretical realm. Our Professor, Zenovia Toloudi, asked us to read works on different aspects of our question: some argued that public space promoted democratic ideals, others questioned the role of art as a vehicle for progressive thought, and one talked about the process of design within a famous studio. I had never approached architecture through this literary and perhaps utopian lens, but seeing diverse arguments in literature helped me grasp that people have all sorts of concepts about public space, research-based and otherwise, and that people would have all sorts of thoughts about my design too.
Walking through Carpenter Center, a building designed by the famous Le Corbusier, on Harvard campus.
Then it came time to focus on a societal issue. I wanted to pursue promoting human relationships in an increasingly digital age. Others selected topics included gentrification, solving seasonal boredom, and loneliness. Our class was small with only eight people total, but this allowed us to share ideas easily and watch each other grow over the course of the term.
A bridge edge doubling as a bench at Harvard.
Harvard Art Museum.
Harvard was our selected site for the term, so around week three our class took a trip to Cambridge for a site visit and to look at public art. This was an extraordinary visit. We took the bus up and walked around MIT and Harvard, noticing how previous designers had approached similar questions to our own. A Harvard professor explained to us the history of and current fight against gentrification in Harvard Square. We met up with a ’17 who is currently at Harvard Graduate School of Design. At the end of the day we visited the studio of Höweler + Yoon Architects. This was incredibly enlightening in terms of seeing what it was like to work at an architecture firm.
Early sketches for my public space design project.
Throughout the rest of our ten weeks we had two midterm reviews, lessons on the CAD software Rhino 3D every Wednesday, a visually stunning presentation on diagrams and unconventional “function follows form” design by Hayri, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, and one trip to the local coffeeshop Dirt Cowboy to talk about project development over coffee.
Section view of the "Conversation Bubble".
My project developed into a “Conversation Bubble” that purposefully blocks cell and wifi reception to promote quality-of-life-boosting face-to-face conversation. I learned a lot about geodesic domes, increased my Rhino 3D skills tenfold, practiced research-based architecture, and examined how physical structure can influence human behavior.
A visual created in Rhino and Illustrator to show the lights on the exterior.
Would I recommend this course to a friend? Yes, of course! It’s definitely difficult and a step up from Architecture I, but it challenges you to reevaluate society and space, which is pretty cool if you ask me.
I have written about being a student worker plenty of times in the past, but I have yet to talk about one of my favorite jobs ever: ticket selling at the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
As I approach the halfway mark of my Dartmouth journey this spring, I find myself reflecting on the significance of distributive and world culture requirements in shaping my academic experience.
