I'm Kalina, a '27 from Sofia, Bulgaria. I love books (I love reading and writing them), and I particularly love fantasy (i.e., I'm an expert on Middle Earth and Hogwarts studies). I'm fascinated by the human brain and the real-world magic of science. I also love hiking, bird-watching, climbing, and em dashes.
Instead of taking a normal Writing 5 course, I decided to fulfill my first-year writing requirement by taking HUM 1. This course helped me strengthen my relationship to literature and writing. It changed the way in which I thought about classics, both books and movies (we saw Wall-E, by the way). And it also changed the way I thought about academic writing and literary criticism. A third of the course was made up of lectures by professors from different departments, while the other two thirds were discussions with a single professor and a small group of 15 students.
Intro to Neuroscience was the first course I was truly excited about. It wasn't an easy course; we had a weekly quiz of ten to thirteen questions covering the lectures from the past few days, but it was very interesting and also very funny (Professor Winter's humor is legendary). We learned about the human brain at the level of individual cells. We also studied it at the level of different systems, from the olfactory system to the parasympathetic nervous system. And last, we learned about cognition: learning, attention, language. We saw a real human brain with formaldehyde dripping from it. We saw a real sheep's brain. And a rat's brain. And we pocked each other with paper clips to determine the sensitivity of our touch receptors.
Journalism with Professor Alexis Jetter was an enjoyable class, sometimes challenging but very satisfying. We covered a lot of US history through the lens of the media, and we started every class with a discussion of the current news and events (thanks to these discussions, I feel like a real adult now—not so lost when the conversation turns toward politics). Several guest lecturers—from former students of Professor Jetter who're now journalists to a New York Times war correspondent—brought us real stories from the field. In the middle of the term, each of us had to find someone over 30 years old in the Upper Valley, spend a day with them, and write a profile.
SummerSofia, Bulgaria
I'm spending my first summer back home, helping my family care for my newborn sister. In my free time (changing diapers takes a lot of time!), I'm doing research for the cognitive neuroscience lab FINN Lab, preparing for my classes in the fall, and working on a new book.
Computational Neuroscience with Professor Richard Granger is a multidisciplinary course taught by a multidisciplinary professor and designed for multidisciplinary thinkers. The class covered brain anatomy and physiology and the biology of learning; it covered linear algebra and the architectures and characteristics of several neural networks. Last, we had a module on "brain engineering"—how some brain circuits function and how we can get inspired by them as engineers.
The first focus of Discrete Math for Computer Science was learning to think like a mathematician: how do we use logic to find proofs to problems and our solutions? Next, we learned how to apply this thinking in computer science contexts — how do you prove that a recursive program works? How do you prove what its run-time is going to be? These were the kind of skills we were building in preparation for the next course in the theoretical computer science sequence: Algorithms. Before we can build algorithms, we need to know how to think about the steps we need to take to solve problems with the rigor of mathematical logic.
PSYC 36: Neuroscience Systems (PSYC 36 is one of my favorite classes in the department. I took it in my first spring (maybe a little too early in my academic career), and I got to do everything I had dreamed of doing when deciding to pursue neuroscience: brain dissections, experiments with rats… you can read more about my experience in PSYC 36here).
During my sophomore fall, I took PSYC 38: Cognitive Neuroscience with Professor Caroline Robertson, whose specialty is neurodiversity and whose labuses virtual reality to aid their research. The exciting part of taking this course is that at the beginning of the term, every student in the class receives a virtual reality (VR) headset, and we get to learn about the concepts we learn in class through VR experience.
For example, one of the first VR activities we did in class was to experience binocular rivalry, a phenomenon when the two eyes receive two different inputs, and there's a rivalry between which input is going to be consciously perceived at a given moment. In the VR headset, your left eye sees a house, while your right eye sees a face; the brain won't allow you to see both at the same time; instead, your visual perception keeps alternating between the house and the face.
In actual experimental settings, participants would also be in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner, and scientists can observe the alternation of perception by seeing which area in the brain (the one specializing in faces versus the one specializing in objects) lights up.
We've also done VR activities illustrating the visual experience of newborns—activities that help us understand how we locate where sounds come from and how the VR headset tries to mimic sounds and their origin locations in space. PSYC 38 brings not only technology and virtual reality to the classroom but also some of the current research methods in the field—and it's exciting to take part in science as it is currently advancing.
While many people might associate cold, long, snowy winters with hardship, I've found that winter at Dartmouth is full of potential to be just as fun as other seasons.
