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.
If I could rewrite my Why Dartmouth essay: Sophomore Edition
Exactly one year ago, at the end of my first-year fall term, I wrote a blog post called "If I could rewrite my Why Dartmouth essay." At the end of my first fall, I was convinced that the Dartmouth Outing Cluband the amazing friends—hikers, birdwatchers, climbers, archers—I met through the DOC were the biggest reason I was so happy at Dartmouth. If I could rewrite my Why Dartmouth essay, I thought, I would write about them.
In the Why Dartmouth blog post from last year, I also noted how I'm still a little disappointed with my original Why Dartmouth essay, but I couldn't have written it any better. "How do you talk about the people you still haven't met, but are absolutely certain that they exist and that they're amazing without sounding corny or delusional?" I was wondering.
By the end of my first-year spring term (Dartmouth uses the quarters system: there's a fall term, a winter term, a spring term, and a summer term, and students choose which terms to be on and which terms to take off), I had begun to slowly drift away from the DOC. It wasn't that I no longer found the trips exciting, it was simply that other passions of mine were taking hold of me.
I had finally discovered my primary academic interests—no, sorry, that sounds too dry, let's try this again—I had finally discovered my one academic true love: neuroscience. I had taken an intro course to neuroscience (see my D-plan for a description of PSYC 6: Introduction to Neuroscience, to the left, if you're reading this on a computer, or scroll up, if you're reading this on your phone) and my spring term I had dove into one of the core major classes: PSYC 36 Neuroscience Systems(you can read about my experience in this class here and you can learn more about my path to choosing a majorhere). The spring term of my first year I also made myfirst wobbly steps into research, applying to work as an undergraduate research assistant at the Functional Imaging and Naturalistic Neuroscience Lab (FINN Lab).
Now that I'm at the end of my sophomore fall term and have spent a whole term—no, not pursuing my academic interests—allowing my academic interests to pursue me and take full hold of me, I still think I could never rewrite my Why Dartmouth essay in a way that would allow me to put forward the one reason I think coming to Dartmouth was one of my smartest decisions. It's the people I meet.
There was a really cool rainbow in the sky, one of the last days of the term. :)
Last year, it was my friends in the Dartmouth Outing Club. This year, I can't describe how grateful I am to have met people who enjoy talking and thinking about the human mind and brain as much as I do, who support me and inspire me and introduce me to ideas I would never have encountered before, who show me the inner workings of academia, who make me find new ways to think about biology, find ways to connect it to other fields (see left for a description of my favorite course this term:PSYC 40 Introduction to Computational Neuroscience)…
Friends (neuroscience-connaisseurs), mentors at my lab, professors—if I could rewrite my Why Dartmouth essay, I'd write it so it's a tribute to them.
This winter break, I spent eight days participating in the TuckLAB: Energy Program before heading back to home. In this blog, I'd like to share more about what TuckLAB Energy is about, and why I decided to participate in it.
Dartmouth hosts a variety of speaker events, bringing experts from politics, journalism, and academia to campus. The 2024 Election Speaker Series featured figures such as Mike Pence, Elbridge Colby, and Ben Rhodes.
Having grown a little more accustomed to the single-digit temperatures in Fahrenheit, I decided to spend my three-day weekend participating in a campus-wide snowball fight.
Dartmouth offers a variety of study abroad programs. In this post, I interviewed a member of the class of 2027 who went on the ASCL Chinese LSA+ during the summer of 2024.
