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.
Last summer, I wrote a blog post about allthe authors I've met at Dartmouth (the list includes Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ron Adner, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Eduardo Halfon, and Abdul R. Latif). This week, I had the chance to meet another author who was visiting Dartmouth: Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist who has written some of my favorite non-fiction books.
Grant was invited to Dartmouth by the Dialogue Project, a campus initiative aiming to foster conversations about complex topics among students, faculty, and staff. Grant gave a talk on his book Think Again, a book about scientific thinking or simply the art of thinking again—a skill needed to notice one's biasesand lead more thoughtful, productive conversations.
I could barely believe it when I saw the announcement in the daily Dartmouth news that Adam Grant would be coming to campus. As you may imagine, I reserved a place immediately and even feared that the event might be overbooked. Then, during the talk, I kept having this strange feeling of "Whoa, this is actually Adam Grant! He's real, and he's right there, on the stage." As I'm describing it, you might think I just met one of Hollywood's most famous celebrities, but writers excite me way more than other forms of celebrities.
Just as I wasn't expecting to attend an event by one of my favorite authors, I also wasn't expecting the talk to be so funny and the follow-up questions so fascinating. Adam Grant is only one of the many speakers the Dialogue Project has invited on campus!
The Dialogue Project also works with StoryCorps' One Small Step, a program that pairs people with different backgrounds and has them engage in a one-hour conversation. I've listened to some of those conversations—discussions led by people in the Dartmouth community about life within the Dartmouth community. Sometimes, listening to people's stories is more interesting than any podcast I can find online. I just marvel at the people you can find at Dartmouth, and I'm not just talking about the students!
I've never felt the saying, "Time flies" more strongly than now. How am I already halfway through my Dartmouth career? This winter marks the end of my 6th out of my total 12 terms, the halfway point of my Dartmouth journey.
