snow Dartmouth

Jenny Chen

Class of 2021
Jenny with crossed arms

About 

Hello! My name is Jenny and I'm a senior at Dartmouth studying biology and quantitative social science. On campus, I also work as a communications intern for the Admissions Office, teach piano to elementary school students through Musical Empowerment, and mentor freshmen in the Great Issues Scholars LLC. My hobbies include reading, attempting to finish crossword puzzles, and embroidering, which I only recently picked up. Welcome to my blog!

Academic Program 

Biology and Quantitative Social Science

Favorite Thing Right Now 

Big scarves

Hometown 

Bethesda, Maryland

Pronouns 

She/Her

You are here

Jenny's D-Plan

What's a D-Plan?

    • FallOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Sociology 001

      I looked forward to this class every week, partly because of the professor and partly due to the content. We read books on a wide variety of topics, ranging from privilege and how it affects our interactions with others to restaurant kitchens and the hierarchies inherent in surgical residencies.

    • WinterOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Biology 013

      Biol13 is structured so that you have to work as a group on difficult class problems and even on some exams, which was novel to me and pushed me to really understand the material. This class inspired me to pursue research (both off-campus and on-campus) related to genetics.

    • SpringOn Campus

      Favorite Class: The Body: The Nude in Western Visual Art

      Although this class was daunting to me in the beginning, given that I had little to no experience in either Women's, Gender, and Sexuality or Art History, it was also one of the classes in which I became the most engaged in. For our final project, I investigated the history of allegories in Western art and why they were so often portrayed as women.

    • SummerOff Campus

      I interned at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA under Dr. Livingston. I explored the mechanism by which BRCA1 acts as a tumor suppressor. It was really rewarding to be able to apply what I had learned in Biol13, including specific procedures and techniques we had been tested on, to a real-life laboratory setting.

    • FallOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Organic Chemistry

      This class is notorious for its difficulty, and I would not call it an easy class. Nonetheless, it was my favorite class because I loved Professor Jacobi, who has taught at Dartmouth for 22 years, and I appreciated learning mechanisms behind why certain reactions happen. Instead of rote memorization, this class relied on being able to predict the products of a reaction, a skill picked up from lots of practice.

    • WinterOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

      Although this was an introductory class, Professor Craig made it more dynamic and interactive, with several visits to the Hood Museum of Art, ethnography labs, and weekly discussion posts. I learned about everything from the Gebusi culture and their rites of passage to the opioid epidemic. For my final paper, I conducted an ethnography studying the social dynamics that take place in Baker Lobby and how that relates to the exchange of capital.

    • SpringOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Introduction to Programming and Computation

      Though I had taken four years of computer science before (mostly in middle school), I did not have a very good experience with coding prior to taking CS1. However, the professor was one of the best professors I have had, explaining jargon in understandable ways and even giving out chocolate bars to students who answered the most difficult questions she would ask in class. I was certain that there was no way I would be able to create the lab assignments (such as a revolving solar system animation and map of Dartmouth that calculated the shortest possible route between two points), but she enabled all of us to through exercises, short assignments, and exams.

    • SummerOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Sex, Gender, and Society

      I took this class for a distributive requirement and ended up loving it. Each student was assigned a day to present on a certain topic - mine being patriarchy. I decided to analyze relationships in Crazy Rich Asians through a lens of the patriarchal bargain. We explored transgender issues, the history of feminism, gender identity, and so much more. Would highly recommend!

    • FallOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Sports Analytics

      As someone who didn't know the rules to pretty much any sport, I tentatively signed up for this class. However, the professors made it clear that everyone had a different sports background, so I never felt at a disadvantage. We used Markov chains to predict winners of tennis matches, analyzed field goals kicks using logit models, and listened to guest speakers from a variety of industries.

    • WinterOff Campus

      I spent the winter at the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, studying epidemiology and global health. I was first involved on a project using data surveillance and social media to model Ebola outbreaks in the DRC, but as soon as the COVID-19 outbreak started, I transitioned to that. I was even able to publish my first paper!

    • SpringOff Campus

      I was planning to study in Rome for the term and practice my basic Italian skills, but unfortunately the program was canceled. Instead of taking classes, I decided to continue working at my winter internship at NIH. Some of the research I conducted involved analyzing data on excess mortality as a method of estimating the true burden of COVID-19.

    • SummerOff Campus

      I continued my research at Fogarty while also working part-time as a Learning Fellow for BIOL13 (Gene Expression and Inheritance), a job I also did my sophomore summer. It was great to see some familiar faces and help with transitioning this very interactive class into something Zoom-friendly!

    • FallOn Campus

      Favorite Class: Design Thinking

      I had heard about this class long before taking it my senior fall, as it's one of those quintessential Dartmouth classes. We had a total of six projects over ten weeks, many of which were group projects. They included everything from building rollercoasters, creating Photoshop posters to combat harmful misconceptions, and designing prototypes to improve student dorm life. I learned so much about what it means to design ethically and purposefully, and will definitely carry these lessons forward with me in my future endeavors.

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Checking Off My Winter Bucket List

This year, given all the memories we missed out on due to COVID-19, I decided to brainstorm a list of everything I wanted to do before leaving Dartmouth. Some were things I hadn't done before, like try snowboarding or the Polar Plunge, while others were experiences I enjoyed but usually did not indulge in too often, like board game nights and stargazing on the golf course.

But looking back at winter term, I also had a lot of fun memories with friends that did not involve any of these pre-planned activities on my list, like spontaneous trips off-campus to restaurants or the thrift store. Despite COVID-19 restrictions, winter was one of my favorite terms on-campus so far, and I still surprisingly made a lot of new friends. Without further ado, here are the five completed items on my winter bucket list:

  1. No. 1

    Ice skating!

    ice skating

    This was a pretty easy one to cross off, given that Dartmouth installed two new ice skating rinks right on the Green to encourage socialization in a safe way. I hope they keep these around in the next winters to come because they seemed to add a lot of life to the center of campus. Not only did I appreciate ice skating myself, but I also loved walking by on my way to get food or go to the library and being able to see people ice skating and enjoying themselves!

  2. No. 2

    Reuniting with friends

    molly's reunion with friends

    This one was kind of vague, but one group of my friends had not been all together since junior fall (and we were still missing a few people!). On the first weekend out of quarantine, we went to a restaurant downtown to catch-up. It was so great to be around them again and talk about everything that’s happened since our last get-together more than a year ago - study abroad experiences, internships, and quarantine activities, to name a few.

  3. No. 3

    Movie nights

    One of my friends and I had regular weekly movie nights, which was so much fun and the perfect way to unwind. We watched Blades of Glory, the Notebook, and When Harry Met Sally, all of which I had not seen before!

  4. No. 4

    Celebrate a birthday

    foco birthday celebration

    It was one of my friend’s 22nd birthday around Valentine’s Day, so we had to celebrate! We originally planned on going to Lou’s (a Dartmouth classic with arguably the best breakfast options downtown), but unfortunately, the wait was so long that we decided to go to FoCo instead (one of the main dining halls). We are huge FoCo fans, so it wasn’t too big of a disappointment! Even with the new social distancing rules, we were able to grab a few tables at the back and spend a leisurely brunch together.

  5. No. 5

    Collis trivia

    Every Thursday, Collis Governing Board hosts Thursday night trivia, and early in the term, a few of my friends and I signed up to play! Last term, I was able to go in-person, but this time we did it over Zoom since one of our friends is off-campus. Although we did not win (or even get close, to be honest), it was still a great time. I miss the pre-pandemic events and programming as much as the next person, but I do have to give a shout-out to our amazing student organizers who plan so many virtual events that definitely help keep and build a sense of community.

Posted 03/7/2021 at 1:03 PMAll List Posts

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