Snow-capped mountains

Kalina Duncheva

Class of 2027
Kalina standing amidst the autumn leaves

Bio 

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.

Academic Program 

Neuroscience and Economics Major

Favorite Thing Right Now 

The old piano in the basement of my dorm

Hometown 

Sofia, Bulgaria

Pronouns 

she/her

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Kalina's D-Plan

What's a D-Plan?

    • FallHanover, NH

      Favorite Class: HUM 1 Dialogues with the Classics

      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.

    • WinterHanover, NH

      Favorite Class: PSYC 6 Introduction to Neuroscience

      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.

Campfire in the dark with people around it.
The silhouette of a girl running through the fields with golden flowers and a pinkish sunset in the background.
Three trail-workers are holding a fir they've just dug out in the woods.
Sunset in the woods, the sky is cloudy and the sunlight streaks through the branches of a spruce.

Don't Try This at Home (Try it at Dartmouth)

What do you do when you want to do too many things? Dartmouth offers so many clubs that I faced this question before my first week of classes had even ended. I tried to do everything. Don't try this at home. It was too much. (Try it at Dartmouth.)

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Posted 10/3/2023 at 9:00 AMAll Text Posts

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