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.
This term I decided to venture out of my comfort zone and fill out of my distributive requirements with a government class. Taught by Professor Steven Simon, America and the Middle East was one of the most interesting classes I've taken at Dartmouth. The class covered the evolution of US foreign policy toward the Middle East from the early days of the Republic to modern times. The books and papers we were assigned to read for each class were complemented by Professor Simon's lectures (his storytelling style made his class one of the few classes with 2-hour-long lectures that keep my attention till the very end), and he shared fascinating anecdotes from his work and trips.
SummerHanover, NH
I am spending my sophomore summer on campus, doing full-time research at the FINN Lab (Functional Imaging and Naturalistic Neuroscience Lab). This summer I get to do a little bit of programming, stimuli writing, and data analysis and run a pilot study that will pave the way for a bigger neuro-imaging experiment. I am also serving as the house manager of Alpha Theta Gender Inclusive Greek House. I'm still deciding which is more challenging: navigating academia or the intricacies of taking care of an actual house. ;)
I'm spending my sophomore summer doing full-time research at Professor Emily Finn's FINN Lab, funded by Dartmouth's UGAR program, which supports undergraduates in research. Before this summer, I had already spent more than a year working as a research assistant at the FINN Lab under the guidance of Katie O'Nell, a graduate student at the lab, whom I met through my first-year writing seminar (Cognitive Don Quixote).
At first, I wasn't sure if research and academia were the career path I wanted to follow. Taking classes while doing research can leave anybody a bit too stressed to fully enjoy running participants and reading papers. Now that I am not taking classes and all of my energy goes into work at the lab, I'm finding out I love it.
I love canoeing in the Connecticut River on weekends, after a full week of research.
This summer is also the first time I have had a lot of autonomy over a research project. Moving through the steps of finding a fascinating idea, reading about it in papers and books, and getting even more excited about it brings me the same thrill that starting a new book used to give me (I'm a fantasy author). I didn't think anything else but writing fiction could give me the same butterflies-in-stomach feeling, but here we are. Every time I sit with one of the graduate students in the control room of the fMRI scanner, I feel like a toddler who's had a bit too much sugar. Neuroscientists can collect brain-imaging data through functional magnetic resonance imaging; fMRI scans are the reason popular science books say, "and then this brain region LIGHTS UP".
Last Thursday, when the graduate student Kay and I ran two participants in the fMRI scanner, I kept staring goggly-eyed at the brain scans, hinting at Kay that I wanted to see my own brain, too! (Kay refuses to let me go into the scanner until I have fully recovered from my concussion.)
This week, I will be launching my first behavioral experiment online. Participants will read short stories Katie and I wrote, and their data will help us design our own fMRI experiment. Stay tuned to hear how it goes!
