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 love all branches of science, from particle physics to neuroscience, and I'm also steadily falling in love with journalism and telling real stories about real people, for once. 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.
"Kalina, you couldn't start with a cheesier line, could you?"
You're probably rolling your eyes at me right now, but bear with me. What would you call it if you spent six days canoeing down the Green River in Utah, marveling at the most gorgeous of canyons, yapping* with the most hilarious of Dartmouth students? It's a dream come true. This dream is called a DOC break trip!
From left to right: Fiona, Diana, me, Maggie, Dylan, Ben, Noah, Ari, Peter, Sylvie. (Photo by Fiona)
The Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) runs many trips: hiking trips, surfing trips, skiing trips, birdwatching trips, and climbing trips. It runs trips during the academic terms and on the breaks between quarters. If you go back through my blog posts, you'll notice that I talk about the DOC a lot (my friends think that's the only thing I'm talking about). You'll also notice that I've never talked about canoeing or kayaking trips before. That is because I was just introduced to these outdoor activities through the DOC break trip with the Ledyard Canoe Club. You might be thinking:Aye-yai-yai! Ledyard? What about Flora and Fauna, Kalina?!
As of today, I've been to only one Ledyard meeting! Tomorrow, I'll go to my second meeting, fully immersing myself as a proud Ledyard member. I have to thank Ledyard for making this dream trip of mine come true.
I have found that break trips are the BEST way to spend a week of your break. I wish the trip was the length of the entire spring break.
That's how you make Utah-touille.
On a break trip, you fly to a cool place like Utah (the DOC subsidizes your plane tickets). You fill two carts with food for ten people that's supposed to last for seven days—consequently, you have everybody in the store in Salt Lake City look at you as if you're crazy. Then you drive to Moab, Utah, and you take the last shower you'll take in the next six days. And then:
- Red rocks, sandy river banks, mallards, geese, and otters.
- Cards, canoes, paddles, and mud.
- Physics, tuna, tortillas, stars, sunsets, and campfires.
- Special moments, funny moments, deep moments, muddy moments, and precious moments.
The Dartmouth Outing Club made this dream trip of mine come true, but it was Ben and Dylan (our trip's leaders) who made this one come true. Thank you Fiona, Ari, Sylvie, Peter, Maggie, Noah, and Diana**! Can't wait for our next adventure.
It's just too pretty.
NOTES:
* Special thanks to Peter, who taught me what it means to yap, and special thanks to Dylan who taught me how to pump gas. (Both are very important life skills.)
** Dianais also a People Places Pines blogger! Check out her blog and what she's got to say about this trip!
I have written about being a student worker plenty of times in the past, but I have yet to talk about one of my favorite jobs ever: ticket selling at the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
