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.
This term I decided to venture out of my comfort zone and fill out of my distributive requirements with a government class. Taught by Professor Steven Simon, America and the Middle East was one of the most interesting classes I've taken at Dartmouth. The class covered the evolution of US foreign policy toward the Middle East from the early days of the Republic to modern times. The books and papers we were assigned to read for each class were complemented by Professor Simon's lectures (his storytelling style made his class one of the few classes with 2-hour-long lectures that keep my attention till the very end), and he shared fascinating anecdotes from his work and trips.
One of the most popular classes in the Computer Science department at Dartmouth is CS 52: Full-Stack Web Development,taught by Professor Tim Tregubov (you can check out the class's website page here). Web development is a trendy field, and the class helps you master both the front-end (client) and back-end (server) side of the process (that's why it's called full-stack); this is just one of the reasons why it's so popular. Professor Tregubov has created a class that leans on creativity, on both student and instructor side: students are given a lot of creative freedom to pursue projects they care about and build skills while building something meaningful, while the class has a custom website, a number of supportive TAs, and the lectures follow a story-telling format that puts everything we learn into context and "historical" perspective (though, can you really call it "historical" if everything in tech changes so fast?). We learned how developers at many big companies solved problems and came up with the tools we use today, and discussed the importance of learning to think like a (software) architect in the age of artificial intelligence.
It's no surprise that the class is so popular—there's a long wait-list and class spots fill as soon as they open up. I was really fortunate to get to be in the spring cohort of CS 52. During the first round of class selection (which happens the term before you take the class), half of the people who get into the class are chosen from the wait-list; the other half are randomly chosen by the registrar's algorithm. I was one of those randomly chosen students—and I wasn't even a declared CS major yet. (Dartmouth students can officially declare their majors during their sophomore winter.) I was extremely lucky to get in.
The first milestone students reach in the class is learning how to write HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which determines the structure of the webpage, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which determines the style of the webpage. Everyone created a static page (you can just look at it; there's no functionality like buttons or links) and learned how much time goes into fidgeting with the design of web-page components.
The next milestone was learning to incorporate JavaScript (the language that makes websites responsive and interactive). We had to build our own BuzzFeed quiz that a user can take and learn what kind of coffee they like—or what kind of protagonist in a book they'd be.
We learned to use React — a JavaScript library that allows you to keep track of what component in your website changed (someone clicked a button!) and helps you organize components and the interactions between them (when this button is clicked, this happens). And we learned how to use many other libraries that allow you to easily send information from the front-end (client) side of the website to the back-end (server) and retrieve information from the backend.
After completing two labs (big assignments in some CS classes are called labs) that walked us through building the front-end and back-end of a website that allows users to create, read, update, and delete information from the website (a.k.a CRUD functionalities), we split into groups to work on a final project.
The dashboard view of our platform LessonLink, where teachers can write lessons, make them public (viewable by anyone on the platform), and "remix" other teachers' lessons if they get inspired.
The final project was introduced in the very first weeks of the term to allow students enough time to think about an idea (what problem would they want to solve), form a team, refine the idea with their team, pivot if needed, and build a product. After the ideas were pitched, students voted for which idea they wanted to work, and teams were formed.
My team worked toward building a platform for teachers to create and share their lesson plans (like a social media for teachers) while having access to the state standards for the specific grade they teach.
First, we drew our designs on paper. Then we moved on to Figma (a web tool for website design). Some team members set up the front-end; others worked on the back-end. Everything was synchronized on GitHub (a website for open-source code and collaboration), and in just a couple of weeks, we had a functioning website that we presented at Technigala, an event where all CS and engineering students share their work and products.
