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.
Dartmouth Librarians: Where Passion Meets Knowledge
Except for my professors, most people I see on campus are in their twenties (or act as though they're in their twenties), so every interaction I have with a grown-up–which feels so rare on campus–is memorable.
This week, I spent a morning with Dartmouth librarian Rachel Starr in the Hanover bookstore and cafe Still North. Rachel and I met my first-year winter because she wanted to highlight my self-published fantasy book at the library. In the spring, she then organized a book-reading event for me and the Muslim Chaplain and Associate Director of the Tucker Center, Abdul Latif(who also self-published a fantasy novel). You can read about this event and other authors I've met on campus here.
Last fall, Rachel organized another event at the library that I was much looking forward to attending: Book Recommendation Swap. A couple of students and a couple of librarians gathered inBaker-Berry (the main library at Dartmouth) and chatted about their favorite books. Rachel also showed us ways to organize our reading, books and articles, and our notes.
I now hold the opinion that librarians are the best people to discuss books with. Librarians probably aren't better readers than the rest of us (or maybe they are, let me know if you know). But I find their combination of bookish passion (they're simply in love with books and so am I) and knowledgeable turns of phrase invigorating. Surely a lot of people are passionate about books, but librarians, I've noticed, also know how to talk about books.
The Stacks: a quiet part of Baker-Berry library.
Rachel and I didn't have an academic conversation this Tuesday; we had a normal conversation, a simple chat between friends, yet it was a very eye-opening discussion because she knows how to explain and recognize important phenomena in the world of reading and being a reader that other people who haven't spent as much time thinking about books wouldn't know how to use.
This is one of my favorite things about Dartmouth: whoever I talk to, I always learn a fresh way to see something simply because people here are excited. They're excited about what they do, and they manage to channel the intellectual density of their interests into day-to-day conversations. And thus, life at Dartmouth is never boring.
