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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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?
I am writing this blog post as I enter week 9 of my spring term. The weather is so sunny, refreshing, and awesome (it reminds me a lot of the weather in California). I am dedicating this post as a reflection on my week 8.
Now, I am wrapping up my first year at Dartmouth. After reflecting on my experience thus far, I want to offer some advice to prospective and admitted students.
When I applied to college, I was dead set on studying only music and neuroscience. However, I now say go take that course that has nothing to do with your major and maybe find a new passion.
10 weeks, 3 classes, 40 departments and programs, 420 tenured and tenure-track professors—endless possibilities. Here's why I love academics at Dartmouth.
My weeks at Dartmouth are often full of back-to-back events and a constant rush of activity. For me, the best way to quell these negatives is to leave school behind and become one with the trees.
Ever wonder what a typical Dartmouth student's classes look like? Every student's schedule is different, but here's a peek into the four courses I'm taking this term!
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. 
