snow Dartmouth

Jenny Chen

Class of 2021
Jenny with crossed arms

About 

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!

Academic Program 

Biology and Quantitative Social Science

Favorite Thing Right Now 

Big scarves

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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Three Lessons I Learned This Year

It's really hard to believe that I'm done with my third year of college. It truthfully feels like I just arrived for First-Year Trips, walking around campus with a sense of disorientation at all the people and things around me. It's even more strange to think about how I only have a year left with my friends in Hanover.

But before thinking about the future too much, I want to reflect on three lessons I've learned since starting junior year (which has felt both extraordinarily long and yet fleeting at the same time). Most of my time hasn't been spent on-campus, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything from the Dartmouth community remotely. 

  1. No. 1

    It’s worth it to branch out

    LSC

    In the fall, I tried a lot of new things, including which classes I took. I enrolled in an introductory Italian language and art history course, both of which I loved! I took Spanish through middle and high school, but wasn’t particularly good at it, so I was nervous about testing my rusty language skills again. But I saw my Italian skills improve dramatically as the course of the term went by, in part due to the speaking drills held multiple times a week (which were conducted by a student instructor and with no grades). It was so much fun to learn new phrases, and class felt more like a discussion with friends than a formal lecture. I also learned a ton about Maria Montessori and her education system... 

  2. No. 2

    Let your friends introduce you to what they’re passionate about!

    basketball game

    This winter, it was really nice because two of my close friends were interning at D.C., only a few metro stops away from my house. Even though I’d lived here for a long time, there are a lot of parts of the D.C. scene that I didn’t appreciate before. One of my friends was a sports fan, so he took us to an NBA game. We also went to the Kennedy Center for an orchestra performance, and I’d never been before! My other friend was more into art, so we made sure to hit up the most famous art museums and galleries. This sort of thing happens all the time at Dartmouth, but I really appreciated it away from Dartmouth as well. And this is also reciprocal, meaning you should show your friends your interests and passions! 

  3. No. 3

    Embrace change (and the unknown)

    computer outside work

    I feel like this one is a given, considering everything that’s happened this year. While I was hoping for a winter in D.C., a spring term in Rome, and a summer in Boston, let’s just say that that hasn’t happened. But I’m super grateful for my internship and the fact that I’m able to spend so much more time with my family than I thought was possible during college. I'm someone who identifies as an absolute change-hater, but looking for the bright side kept me optimistic. For example, I've really loved my internship at the Fogarty International Center, and I've gained a lot by being able to intern for more than the typical two months of an off-term. It's definitely changed the trajectory of my career plans and made me want to pursue a Master's in epidemiology! 

Posted 07/5/2020 at 11:30 AMAll List Posts

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