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 love all branches of science, from particle physics to neuroscience, and I'm also steadily falling in love with journalism and telling real stories about real people, for once. 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.
Spring has long been my favorite season. It's neither too hot, nor too cold. The flowers are blooming, the warblers are chirping, and the trees are green again (or white, or pink!). More importantly, spring seems to be full of celebrations.
No1: Eastern European Easter, Bulgarian-Ukrainian style
May 5th this year was the Orthodox Christian Easter (the date changes every year), and Bulgarians celebrate it by painting hard-boiled eggs, eating kozunak (Easter bread with raisins), and then engaging in "the egg battle." Egg battles are my favorite: you hold your egg and then let someone else smash their egg onto yours. Whichever egg's shell remains intact by the end of the "battle" is the winner.
Dr. Seuss said "Green eggs and ham." I say "Green eggs and paska."
I was afraid that my Easter this year would be lonely and eggless, but my friends Mimi (she's a senior from Bulgaria), Clay, and Polly (another senior from Ukraine) had organized an Eastern European Easter at their apartment. They had bought food paint (to paint the eggs) and had baked Ukrainian paska (which was similar enough to our kozunak), and we played Bulgarian and Ukrainian music. Turned out to be quite a fun Easter.
My friend Naniko with two eggs (one has already lost the egg battle, but the other one is still a fighter!)
No2: Africa Week and the Dartmouth African Student Association's Mock Wedding
May 6th to May 11th was this year's Africa Week. Organized by the Dartmouth African Student Association (DASA) and the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, Africa Week was a series of events that highlighted the cultural diversity across Africa–as brought to Dartmouth by international and domestic students. The week ended with a "mock wedding celebrating a diversity of vibrant East and West African traditions" (you can find a more formal article about it here).
My friend Deborah and I (I'm wearing white to a mock wedding! Ooops. Sorry.)
The fake wedding was the Africa Week event I attended. There was food, live music, a bride and a groom, and loads of people dressed in pretty dresses/suits. My friend Deborah, who invited me to the event, was part of the dance group that performed on stage. I personally never got to be on stage, but my shoe, bracelet and earring were. To end the night, DASA had organized a game where eight bridesmaids were sitting in chairs on the stage. The event's speaker then said today several times, "Okay, bring me a… [and here, she said something like: a shoe, or an earring, or a bracelet]." The bridesmaids promptly jumped off the stage and ran around, looking for an object to bring back to the stage as fast as they could. Whoever returned last was no longer part of the game. And that's how my shoe, earring and bracelet ended up on stage.
The bride, the groom, and the usual suspects
No3: Green Key
There's of course the famous Green Key weekend–a weekend with live music and a lot of fun. It doesn't make sense to write a blog post about spring celebrations without mentioning Green Key, but I think Green Key's popular enough that other writers will mention it, so that's it from me. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to head outside and celebrate my favorite season ;)
What an incredible spring! This term was undoubtedly my favorite that I've experienced thus far, and as I wait to board a flight back to campus for a highly anticipated Sophomore Summer, I reflect on everything that allowed this spring term to bloom.
I lived on the same dorm floor as the GIS LLC (Living Learning Community) this year. I asked some of my floormates about their experience with it so that you can hopefully get a holistic sense of what GIS is like!
I moved to Berlin for three months to live with a host family. These are my thoughts about the process and why exploring study abroad programs with host families is worthwhile!
Dartmouth's most anticipated spring tradition is over, prompting an influx of Green Key posts from Dartmouth students online (including this one from myself)! Join me as I reflect on the most memorable parts of this weekend!
