Hello! My name is Jenny and I'm a sophomore at Dartmouth. Besides blogging, I work as a communications intern for the admissions office! I also do research at Geisel School of Medicine, and I am a mentor for the Great Issues Scholars LLC, centered around security, global health, and environment. Some of my favorite ways to relax include running around Occom Pond, stargazing, and spending quality time with some of the amazing people I have met here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not every day that you get a front-row seat to hear a presidential candidate talk about the issues she is passionate about. Kirsten Gillibrand '88 is the first Dartmouth alumna to win election to Congress, and she has represented New York in the United States Senate since 2009. She is an advocate for affordable child care, affordable healthcare, paid family leave, and more. And as she has recently announced, she is running for president in the 2020 election!
The event featured three Dartmouth female alumni who forged a path for themselves in politics. They include Martha Hennessey ’76, Annie Kuster ’78, and Kirsten Gillibrand ’88. Hennessey mentioned that she actually met Gillibrand at a Dartmouth alumni organized event. Kirsten talked about how during her time at Dartmouth, she majored in Asian Studies, did a study abroad program in Beijing, and played squash (her coach was even at the talk!).
People started lining up early to ensure that they would be allowed to enter such an anticipated event.
The event itself had a huge turnout and was attended by both Dartmouth students and local community members. Though it technically started at 3 pm, there was already a line by 2 pm when I walked by to grab food from the nearby dining hall, and some people couldn't get in because there simply wasn’t enough space. It was a great opportunity to get to know about Senator Gillibrand’s experience as a senator and her platform on various issues, including climate change, student loans, and how she plans to win the Midwest votes.
It’s also quite impressive how much the Dartmouth Democrats accomplish. They are one of the most active student groups on campus and regularly invite speakers, advocate for various issues, and invite other students to become more politically active. During the midterm election, they made sure that vans would leave every 15 minutes to drive students to polling stations and students knew about the whole registration process. As the executive director mentioned before the speakers took the stage, it is incredibly easy to get involved with politics and the barrier is low.
As other bloggers have previously written about, Dartmouth is a unique and incredibly important place to be in terms of the political landscape, and 2020 will certainly be no exception.
There is Mardi Gras down south, Carnivals north into Canada, but here in Hanover the weekend before Lent doesn’t really have anything special most years. Most. This year, we held the party of a lifetime.
People started lining up early to ensure that they would be allowed to enter such an anticipated event.
