Welcome to the woods! My name is Natalie and I'm from California (3035 miles away from Dartmouth)! I'm a political science and crossword puzzle nerd who's excited to dive into the millions of activities we have on campus. I'm a Politics, Philosophy, and Economics major at Dartmouth, and am considering both a History and Human-Centered Design minor. I'm also the President of the Parliamentary Debate team! Go Big Green!
Hi everyone! Hope you're having a fantastic week! Fall is officially in full swing here on campus, and we just launched into our fifth week of the term! A question I've gotten a few times while I'm here is "So what do you do all day?" I figured I would walk you through the things taking up the most time in my life right now, starting with my classes!
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I only have one class, but it's all the way on the other side of campus, so I try and make an event out of it! The class is Government 004: Politics of the World. It's taught by Professor Horowitz, who really knows his stuff: he worked on the logistics of elections in Kenya! We've been talking about what defines democracy and what impedes democracy from happening in the first place. With our midterm behind us, we're working on research papers about Russia and China through the lens of modern non-democracies. It's a lecture-style class, but the class only has around 30 students, so Professor Horowitz calls on us by name and always has time to chat during office hours, which is awesome.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have two classes! Engineering Sciences 12: Design Thinking, taught by Professor Robbie, and Writing 5: Sports, Science, and Ethics with Professor Obbard. Like Professor Horowitz, they've walked the walk.
There's an adage thrown around sometimes — "if you can't do, teach." That couldn't be further from the truth here. Professor Obbard is both an incredible athlete and a published engineer — she did it all, and now she is generous enough with her time to share it with us — we are so lucky! My writing class is only 15 people, and we all sit around a conference-style table — the class is so small that we don't even have to raise our hands — Professor Obbard just trusts us enough to know when is a good time to speak, and when isn't!
One thing I will say is that my classes are all over campus — I hit at least 12,000 steps on my Apple Watch every day! Dartmouth is SO walkable. It's less than 20 minutes from end to end of campus — it's just that my schedule has me going end to end a lot!
After class, I head to my extracurriculars. Besides writing for the admissions blog, I'm on the parliamentary debate team here at Dartmouth. I tried out after debating casually in high school but never expected to make the team. Somehow, I was one of the 5 freshmen who got chosen, and now we're competing against Columbia this weekend! We practice 3 times a week, 90 minutes each time.
In my free time, I do homework in one of our gorgeous libraries, exercise, and just chill out with friends (we've been having some crazy Spikeball tournaments). Hopefully this gives you a little sense of life at the College on the Hill.
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