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sydney wuu econ midterm review

While touring schools the summer before my senior year, the freshmen I talked to gushed all about Dartmouth's collaborative atmosphere. Now as a current sophomore, I thought I'd share how students here genuinely want to help lift each other up!

In classes, we are encouraged to work together for problem sets or join group tutoring through the Academic Skills Center where we can ask a more experienced upperclassman questions and help one another out. As I learned in EDUC 1: Introduction to Education (my favorite class of freshman fall), one of the best ways to study for exams is not by simply re-copying notes, but by actively testing yourself or—even better—working in groups to test others and have others test you. 

I definitely applied that philosophy to my own studies. For instance, ECON 39: International Trade is my first higher level economics course at Dartmouth (last year I took ECON 1: The Price System - Analysis, Problems, and Policies along with MATH 10: Introductory Statistics to fulfill my statistics prerequisite for the economics major). When studying for my first International Trade midterm, I was nervous and didn't know what to expect. Luckily, I worked with my friends Adri, Z, Stephanie, and Leina to prepare. The night before the exam, we headed to the second-floor of Baker-Berry Library and tested each other on drawing graphs from memory of the effects of consumption taxes, production subsidies, and tariffs on the basic trade model. We reviewed the practice midterm and went through the list of concepts highlighted in our review session. When the test rolled around, I felt a lot better about it than I would have if I didn't study with my friends!

sydney wuu adri econ
Adri works on our ECON 39 problem set and compares three countries, analyzing their imports/exports!

For my ENVS 3: Environment and Society midterm, I studied with two '25s Eiha and Sam along with my friend Scarlette. We compiled a Quizlet together and drilled one another on everything from the Clean Power Plan to the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program. During the test, I felt extremely prepared because of my study group's collective efforts and pooling together of resources. After the midterm, we decided to be a group for our data science project because we worked so well together helping each other study for our first exam! The data science assignment was super fun and required a lot of collaboration as we examined the effects of race, class, and environment on Louisiana COVID-19 mortality rates.

sydney wuu eiha envs
Eiha studies for the ENVS 3 midterm by physically writing everything she knows on the board by memory!

All in all, I am emphasizing Dartmouth's collaborative spirit because you may often hear about the importance of understanding "the culture" of the school, but don't hear about it too in-depth from a student's perspective. I'd describe Dartmouth's culture as incredibly tight-knit, supportive, happy, adventurous, flexible, kind, and last but not least—collaborative. Thanks for tuning in and that's all for now!

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