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.
From Motors to Chloroplasts... My Week through Lab
For a lot of STEM classes, there is an extra component in addition to regularly scheduled classes. Once a week, you have lab, which varies in length, activity, and rigor based on the specific class. Here’s a little about what I did this week in lab:
Monday night: Constructing a motor
In my physics lab, which is 7-10 pm on Mondays, my partner and I assembled a working electric motor out of simple materials including a power supply, baseboard, neodymium disk, and wire. Our task was to design the motor in such a way that the torque on it was always in the same direction, which would allow it to spin. We also explored a demo that involved dropping a magnet down a copper tube and watching it slowly fall through, partially levitating on its way down due to induced current.
This is a screenshot of a video I took of our motor - it was too cool not to share!
Physics lab is always really entertaining because it’s very hands-on and visibly demonstrates the conceptual theories we learn in class. As a result, lab makes the connection between abstract ideas and real-life applications of physics, especially the field of electromagnetics, more obvious. My lab section only contains ten students, so we have more than enough attention and help from our teaching assistant (TA), who is a graduate student. Our post-lab homework involves working through three textbook problems and relating them to what we did in lab.
Tuesday night: Investigating Photosynthesis
The following day, I have biology lab from 6:30-10:30 pm on Tuesdays. That might sound scary, both the fact that it’s at night and four hours long, but it seldom takes the whole four hours, and I actually like having lab at night. Since I tend to feel more worn-out anyways at night, I feel like I have more time freed up in the afternoon to finish my work. This week, our research question focused on the rate of the Hill Reaction, which is part of the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis.
Our TA, also a graduate student, gave a brief lecture at the start, walking us through our objectives and the procedure. Along with an undergraduate TA, he answers our questions and checks up on our groups. My group includes two other sophomores, and we joke that biology lab is the highlight of our week because we always end up laughing about slipups we make. After lab is done, we usually have a week to finish the lab summary assignment, which involves creating graphs and tables with the data gathered and answering questions about the methodology and results.
One of our first experiments involved separating a mixture of proteins and then checking with a gel to see if we were successful.
So far, I genuinely enjoy the labs for these classes and do not find them as stressful as I had thought. The TAs take off a lot of the pressure because they try to assist as much as they can. For example, in my biology lab a few weeks ago, we inadvertently used the wrong buffer, which would have messed up our entire experiment. Fortunately, the graduate teaching assistant caught the mistake and helped us restart the experiment while it was still early in the procedure. And who doesn’t want to see their cheek cells or spinach chloroplasts under a microscope?
Something that is relatively important to a Dartmouth term that has an unnecessary mysticism about it is the elusive period of testing at the end of every term known simply as "finals." While they are certainly difficult and do take a lot of work,
I participated as a Women in Science Program (WISP) intern, presenting a poster entitled “Visualizing machine learning models for predicting readmission after an acute myocardial infarction”.
Three teams showed up: Jack-O (Dartmouth’s satirical newspaper), Cabin and Trail (a sub-club of the Dartmouth Outing Club), and Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE).
Here at Dartmouth, students have access to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), a state-of-the-art hospital and medical facility located a fifteen-minute bus ride away from campus.
As part of the promise of that liberal arts, Dartmouth has a distributive requirement that requires us to take courses out of our comfort zone (dubbed "distribs").
Whether it's supporting each other in intramural sports games or attending a fellow student's thesis presentation, Dartmouth provides many different opportunities that foster community growth.
This is a screenshot of a video I took of our motor - it was too cool not to share!
One of our first experiments involved separating a mixture of proteins and then checking with a gel to see if we were successful.
