你好! or hi! My name is Yutong, but feel free to call me Taylor. I'm a '27 from Beijing, China. This will be my first time living ten thousand miles away from home and my first time embracing the New England winter, which makes everything more exciting! I'm also a big fan of Dartmouth Outing Club, and you can find me canoeing in the Connecticut River or taking a walk at Pine Park. I can't wait to show you my college life with my blogs!
Dartmouth has many hidden gems, and sometimes you can take it literally! With a free afternoon on my hand this Wednesday, I explored the Donald Claflin Jewelry Studio and made a necklace
The jewelry studio is located on the third floor of the Black Visual Arts Center (BVAC). With an appointment online, you can come on weekday afternoons and make anything you want for about 1.5 hours—and the best thing is, you only have to pay for the materials you used! The BVAC, the Hopkins Center for the Arts, and the Hood Museum make up an arts cluster at the southeastern corner of campus, offering students and local people many opportunities to engage in the dialogue and making of the arts.
As soon as I entered the jewelry studio, I was shocked—or amazed by how well-equipped this maker-space is—from beads of all kinds to precious stones and metals and to all types of fancy tools for metal smithing (and a lava lamp for decoration! How cool is this!), you can make any jewelry you want to make—necklaces, bracelets, rings, pendants, etc. Even if you do not have a specific idea of what to make, the exhibition board of jewelry can be a great inspiration and starting point for beginners (as shown in the featured image).
The jewelry studio!
I decided to make a necklace. Starting from the selection of beads for my necklace, I was dazzled by the studio's bead collection: from a pot of free colorful beads to a cupboard of shimmering beads categorized by color, the collection was like a black hole, deeply attracting me and making it extra hard for me to decide what beads should I use. In the end, with the help of a lovely artist (also a Dartmouth '23 who's staying on campus doing research), I made this:
As someone who has practiced studio arts for about ten years, I am excited and grateful to discover Dartmouth's student workshops. With these extraordinarily affordable and marvelous art spaces open to students and the public, I love seeing how Dartmouth takes real action to popularize art. Everyone here is encouraged and empowered to try something new, to express sparkles of imagination through art, and to become an artist
What kind of classes do you take in a subject-based Foreign Study Program? Here's a rundown of my classes in the Music FSP in London to give you an idea of what academic life is like in the program!
It's easy to forget how easy it is to access walking trails during the hustle of a Dartmouth term. As graduation nears, I am reminded of how special it is to step off campus and enjoy quiet moments in nature.
With a solar eclipse sweeping across North America for the first time in nearly seven years on April 8th came a road-trip with hundreds of other Dartmouth students to a zone of totality near campus: St. Johnsbury, Vermont!
