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.
Almost everyone I talk to at Dartmouth has had a “mid-college crisis,” when they contemplate changing their major, minor, modified major, or whatever combination of disciplines that they had originally set out to explore. I know for me, that’s definitely true. I applied to Dartmouth as a student interested in studying global health, which I am still passionate about and interested in. As you can see from my biography up above, I was planning on majoring in biology and minoring in global health. However, as I have progressed through my time at Dartmouth, I have seriously considered minoring in economics, public policy, and/or education. The excel sheet I have that lists all the classes I want to take still has scattered remnants of those various minors. At the time, I was thinking about ways to expand my learning of global health, and knowledge about development economics and policy-making seemed particularly applicable.
Posters for presentations can be printed in the Evans Map Room, which is located right in Baker-Berry library. It was pretty cool to see how professional our poster looked once it was actually printed out and not on a powerpoint slide!
Now (aka as of last night), I have decided to tentatively plan on double majoring in biology and quantitative social science (QSS). Quantitative social science is a very unique major, combining the practical skill set of coding and visualizing data to a specific social science of your choice. Currently, I am taking a class in the QSS department, cross-listed with Government: “GOVT 19.01: Applied Multivariate Data Analysis.” This class pretty much threw me into the world of coding in R, which we use for all of our weekly lab assignments.
We have looked at some pretty fascinating data – such as what factors (race, gender, income) influence the probability that someone voted for Trump in the 2016 election, as well as whether political ideology influences the type of vehicle you drive. Our final research project was with a group and on any topic of our interest. My group chose to test the hypothesis that the effect of a violent offense on sentencing length was greater for Blacks than for whites. All of our findings, including boxplots, tables, predicted probability graphs, and more, were showcased in a poster.
From a raw data set, we were able to calculate the change in predicted probability of receiving an extreme life sentence for each increment in age category.
After realizing the power behind the type of work and the conclusions that can be made from these types of analyses, I want to pursue QSS further. Moreover, I can directly incorporate global health into this new plan of mine. Every QSS major must take four classes in a social science of their interest, and for me, that will likely be global health. In my GOVT 19 group, the other students are concentrating in areas such as health and music, immigration, and American voting policy. What I really appreciate is how the department encourages, and some would say even requires, students to apply the skills they learn in their QSS classes to other disciplines.
I hope this plan works out, but who knows, I might write a post in the future about a completely different department that just happens to catch my eye… but I should probably update my bio now!
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.
Posters for presentations can be printed in the Evans Map Room, which is located right in Baker-Berry library. It was pretty cool to see how professional our poster looked once it was actually printed out and not on a powerpoint slide! 
From a raw data set, we were able to calculate the change in predicted probability of receiving an extreme life sentence for each increment in age category. 
