Hi there!! My name is Martin, and I'm thrilled to be a '27 blogger for People Places Pines! A small rural town in Maine called Veazie is where I call home, and I can't wait to tell you about what life at Dartmouth is like! Carving the slopes in the winter, hiking through woods in autumn, or basking in the Green in spring and summer, that's where you'll find me! Stay tuned for everything Big Green!
Random Adventures in DALI, Soccer, and Podcasts at Dartmouth
It's no secret that Dartmouth has a lot of activities for you to get involved in. Some require applications–but many don't! There's a plethora of things to join or try out with no background experience required. I've been exploring some of these myself in my first few weeks at Dartmouth:
Dali-Lab UI/UX Design Class
About a week ago, I received a random email inviting me to apply to "DALI's Intro to UI/UX Design Mini-Series." I was interested in learning more about it as I had no experience or background in design. So, I quickly wrote up the interest application and sent it off, and was shortly admitted! Since then, I've been spending my Wednesday and Sunday evenings learning about user "interface" (UI) and "experience" (UX) in the DALI Lab, something that I've never done before! My roommate and I actually signed up together. So far, we've been learning how to record and summarize user experience, and we've just now started learning to model and prototype different digital interfaces. See a picture from class below:
Here's a pic of my roommate Zach from our DALI design class!
South House Intramural Soccer
I played soccer all throughout high school and wanted to continue in college. However, since I'm already on the club swim team here at Dartmouth, I wanted to find another way to play that wasn't a huge time commitment. So last week, I signed up for and played in my first intramural soccer game for "South House" (my randomly assigned housing community). We played against "East Wheelock" (another housing community)–it was a great game, and we came out on top (4-2). I love it since it's not a huge time commitment (just one game every Friday night–no practices throughout the week) and I get to play some soccer while earning points for "House Cup." I'll be playing again this Friday night! For anyone who might want more soccer–there's also club soccer here at Dartmouth and other intramural leagues that you can play in!
Podcast on Dartmouth Radio Station
Last week, I was studying for midterms when one of my friends (who was also on my first-year orientation trip!) messaged me "do you want to come on my podcast in an hour?" I was a little surprised, but I agreed–and about an hour later, I was live on the Dartmouth radio station with two of my friends here at Dartmouth, discussing our favorite parts of orientation week (and mostly joking around). The podcast showed me how many random cool things students on campus are doing that I didn't even know about! I hope to be invited onto the podcast again sometime soon!
Here's a pic of my friend and I at the Dartmouth Radio Station!
Those are some random things I've been up to in the past few weeks! There is so much to do here that you don't have time to do all of it–and that's okay. Trying out any random opportunity or activity that pops up and interests you here is totally normal and encouraged!
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.
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.
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.
