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.
A week before class started, right when my family was in the middle of marathoning all eight Harry Potter movies, I received an email from my House Community, North Park. Dartmouth has a total of six House Communities, which are not unlike Gryffindor or Slytherin (minus the talking sorting hat and association with different personality traits). The email advertised the first event of the winter, and to my surprise, it was going to be Harry Potter-themed!
I brought a few of my friends who are also in North Park, and we set out for House Center A (aka the Onion), a building meant for North Park and West House. What we saw when we walked in was beyond expectations. The North Park executive council truly went all out in their decorations, thoroughly decking out the entire place in various Harry Potter paraphernalia. (There was even a Moaning Myrtle in the bathrooms, as we came to discover.) It truly felt like I was teleported to Hogwarts.
They served all sorts of elaborately decorated Harry Potter-inspired finger foods, cupcakes, and cake pops, as well as butterbeer. I’ve personally never gone to Harry Potter World in Florida, but I can’t imagine that the butterbeer I drank could be improved. And what's Hogwarts without a little entertainment? The Dartmouth Association of Magicians
performed a show, and there were various activities set up all around the Onion, most notably a wand-making station. Not quite as fancy as Ollivander’s, but you would be amazed at what you can make from a wooden stick, glue gun, and paint. I completely forgot how relaxing arts and crafts can be, but evidently, the students and staff who organized this event had not. The event was attended not only by undergraduates, but also graduate students, and the Housing Community events are typically great opportunities to get to know them.
The first week back can definitely be an adjustment for some, but this was the perfect event to lift my spirits. As we reluctantly ate the adorable snitch cake pops, I could hear lively Harry Potter music playing, people “ooh” and “aah” ing at the magicians, and laughter erupting as the trivia game continued. As an extremely late but now avid fan of the world of Harry Potter, I sincerely appreciate all of the effort put into making this event so much fun and bringing the North Park community together. Harry Potter is, at its core, about an incredible community of students and staff banding together, and in that sense, Dartmouth isn’t very different. Now if only we had time turners…
It’s no secret that Dartmouth is located in a small town and many city kids are apprehensive about entering such a vastly different environment from what they’re used to.
After coming to College, I realized how much these spaces are important, and how much we take them for granted during high school. To be able to go and socialize in a safe, low pressure environment is priceless!
This lecture was part of the Dorsett Fellowship Lecture Series, sponsored by the Ethics Institute. Past speakers include science fiction writer Ted Chiang and Professor of Law at Yale Law School Robert Post.
All the treats looked too good to eat!
Who knew North Park socks could be so useful?
