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Jenny Chen

Class of 2021
Jenny with crossed arms

Bio 

Hi there! 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, tutor local high school students through Health Access for All, and mentor freshmen in the Great Issues Scholars LLC. My hobbies include reading, going on walks, and embroidering, which I only recently picked up. Welcome to my blog!

Academic Program 

Biology and Quantitative Social Science

Favorite Thing Right Now 

Science fiction

Hometown 

Bethesda, Maryland

Pronouns 

She/Her

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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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Five of My Favorite Assignments

Since I'm not taking classes this term, I thought it would be fun to look back at five of my favorite assignments throughout the years. They might not have been easy, but they were interesting and rewarding to complete! I also wanted to show the variety in the types of assessments professors decide to use.

  1. No. 1

    Genetics Group Exam

    I had never done or even heard about a group exam before this genetics class. In the first week of class, we were assigned to groups, with whom we worked on problems every class. I was pretty intimidated because I was just a freshman, but I loved having extra support from my group. During group exam weekends, we would meet in the library for chunks of time to solve open-ended and complex genetics questions. Fun fact: our group name was Blue Genes!

  2. No. 2

    First-Year Seminar Project

    artwork

    For our final project, we were allowed to choose any topic related to the course - The Body and the Nude in Western Visual Art. I decided to delve into the personification of Western ideals, such as democracy, liberty, and justice, as female figures in artwork. I really loved learning more about famous paintings and sculptures I had known about all my life - like Liberty Leading the People, American Progress, and The Statue of Liberty.

  3. No. 3

    Quantitative Analysis

    analyses regression

    In my class on Applied Multivariate Data Analysis, we also had the ability to choose our final project topic. With three other students, I worked on a project on the factors determining sentence length and severity for U.S. inmates surveyed in 2004, across both state and federal prisons. It was a great learning experience to apply analyses we had covered to our data.

  4. No. 4

    Gravity Simulator

    gravity simulator

    This project really scared me at first, and I was not looking forward to starting it. It was for introduction to computer science, where we have a few labs over the course of the term. The goal of this lab in particular was to design and implement a simulator that animates the motion of the stars, planets, or moons. We had to input real masses, distances between objects, and velocities, and the final product was so relaxing to watch!

  5. No. 5

    Maria Montessori in the Modern Age…

    Maria Montessori

    This last one might have been the most unique and fun. To help develop our Italian skills, we were all assigned a famous or historical Italian figure, mine being Maria Montessori. This project involved imagining what our person would be like in the modern age. I designed some Instagram posts for Ms. Montessori, while others made Tinder profiles or Facebook status updates.

Posted 08/10/2020 at 9:00 AMAll List Posts

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Winterim To-Dos

As a senior, this is my last winterim, and I plan on making the most of it! Winterim is a break between fall and winter term that spans six weeks (or Thanksgiving to New Year's).

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Jenny with crossed arms
Jenny Chen 2021