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.
We saw a lot of crabs on the beach and we even found a dead lobster's shell.
All of these activities, however, I did as a "trippee," meaning a participant on a DOC trip. A while back, I also wrote a blog post about the DOC trip leaders—the students who go through training and begin "leading" trips of their own. However, I wasn't working toward becoming a trip leader back then, I preferred being a trippee.
This weekend, however, I co-led my first Flora and Fauna trip (FnF is a sub-club of the larger DOC) and got to see what the process looks like from the other side.
Current Flora and Fauna chair Casey Yang '27 organized a trip to the New Hampshire coast which I was supposed to co-lead with her as a sapling (in Fauna and Flora lingo a sapling is a leader-in-training). It happened so that Casey couldn't come, so it was me and Ethan Greenberg '26 (Ethan is the other FnF chair this term) who led the trip.
Ari and I after our grocery shopping for the trip.
After coming up with the trip details and posting them on Trailhead (the website where DOC trips are posted and are accessible for Dartmouth students to sign up), the next big organization step is to buy food for the trip (everything is subsidized by the DOC and of no cost to trippees). So, my friend Ari and I went to Hanover's grocery store and bought a LOT of food.
Later that day, Ethan and I drafted an email to send to our trippees and at five o'clock in the following morning, we set off for the coast. We drove to Odiorne State Park near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I had already been on a tripwith Flora and Fauna legend Wyatt Cummings '24 (clickhere to read about the marvelous "Atlantic puffins trip" that Wyatt '24 organized in the spring).
A curious flora specimen we noticed.
The most exciting part of the trip wasn't that our trippees were telling me how beautiful the ocean was; and it wasn't the cool birds we saw either. What made me really happy was that this was the first time I got to be like a trip leader, like Wyatt '24. I've a long way to go before I can begin identifying birds as masterfully as Wyatt, and I have an even longer way to go before I can be the welcoming, cordial trip leader Wyatt is (that's why to me he's a legend), but it was a good start!
I applied through Questbridge's National College Match, but did not match. To others who also did not match, this is not the end of your application process! Here's what I did following match decision day.
Unlimited buffets, flavorful drinks, an assortment of breakfast pastries—Dartmouth has so many great food and drink options to choose from! Join me as I rank my favorite ones.
Walking around the Wellelsey campus, it's clear that it was built with intentional incorporation of the surrounding nature. The architecture of many buildings were also mindfully crafted to support Wellesley's unique principles.
From orientation week to your classes, you can easily find community at Dartmouth! Read on to know how I met my Dartmouth family and where you might also find yours.
