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.
I blogged a while back about rushing in the fall the gender-inclusive Greek house Alpha Theta. Rush was a fun experience: I got to appreciate how many of my friends were already in the house, and I got to see how cosy the actual house is. And yet, I hadn't had many member responsibilities until this weekend.
The library at Alpha Theta
Sunday was a "House Day:" all members came to the house to tidy up for two hours. Some of my friends were cleaning the fridges and the kitchen. My friend Nicolas and I were tasked with washing the couch upholstery in the living room. Other friends of ours were sifting through long-forgotten and abandoned belongings, decluttering bookshelves and carrying down the stairs piles of junk left in the corners of rooms and hallways.
There are two things that I love about living in Alpha Theta: first, I get to spend so much time with my friends: one of my favorite ways of winding down in the evenings is chatting with my friend Anya, after finishing all work for our CS 30: Discrete Math in Computer Science class and then playing pool with Anya's partner Shawn. The second thing I love about living in Alpha Theta and being part of this community is that we get to take care of the place we all live in together. This Sunday, it was really heartwarming to see all my friends, everyone who, like me, sees the house as their home for this term or even this year, making sure it was as clean, organized, and cozy as it can be.
A gorgeous painting that had been hidden in a corner for years and no one knew it was there.
Cleaning out and decluttering also leads to some fun discoveries. While cleaning the library, my friends found a gorgeous painting of a mountain (that's now on the wall, where it belongs, as opposed to stashed in a corner, hidden away) and a really old map. Shawn and I could tell the map was old right away, but we wanted to know how
old. So we did some detective work. On top of the map is written the name of Charles Hazen: a few Google searches told us that Charles Hazen graduated from Dartmouth in 1889 and went on to become a history professor at another school.
"Whoa, this map could be a hundred years old," Shawn said when I told him about Professor Charles Hazen's graduation year.
Shawn had a feeling. Another Google search—this time focusing on the whole map—showed us that such a map was published in 1925. We don't know if this is the same map we found in Alpha Theta's library, but it's likely that it is. This Sunday we not only cleaned the house and made it extra cosy; we also found a hundred-years-old map.
Our House-Day discovery: a map by Charles Hazen, Class of 1889.
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.
