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!
Coming to Dartmouth with a solid background in French (Delf B2), I find French 3 a perfect fit for me -- it helps me to consolidate a lot of key grammar and vocabs, and fun weekly cultural activities like coffee hours and french lunch table offers me chances to relax in busy times. While the class is very rigorous and requires a lot of hard work, my professor is so nice and makes the class very fun! I also look forward to going to Dartmouth's Toulouse LSA program after completion of this class!
This course explores how Buddhist concepts of embodiment affect daily life and society in Southeast Asian contexts, and how the intersection of religion, sexuality, and gender impact broader understandings of authority, wisdom, beauty, death, and loyalty. The class takes on many forms beyond mere lectures -- a visit to the Hood Museum of Art, mindfulness practices, and small Buddha-crafting projects. Our professor (the sweetest Prof. MK Long) also invites many of her colleagues at other institutes as guest lecturers to our class so that we can learn from real experts specializing in different countries in Southeast Asia. I have learned a lot from the class and decided to become a religion major after this course!
Having never enjoyed math classes before college, I'm surprised (again) by how I'm becoming a math major and falling in love with math here! My professor (Prof. Shu Longmei, who graduated from the best university in my hometown) is incredibly good at teaching the concepts -- not just explaining things clearly but also showing us the beauty and elegance of calculus. I really look forward to taking more math classes in the future!
One thing that I like about Dartmouth is that it gives you a plethora of opportunities to explore—both in terms of academics and career. In this post, I will focus on opportunities for academic exploration, and in my next post, I will discuss more about the career opportunities here.
Dartmouth's distributive requirement requires students to take courses in a variety of fields before graduation. On our way to fulfilling these distributive requirements, we oftentimes stumble upon really fun classes and fields that we wouldn't have the chance to explore otherwise, and sometimes, these fun classes even shape our major and minor choices.
For example, this term, I'm taking a computer science (CS) course, "Introduction to Programming and Computation," a writing seminar about Jerusalem, and a course named "Buddhism, Gender, Sexuality in Southeast Asia." As an intended mathematics major, I might have never thought about taking all these classes. However, Dartmouth's distributive requirements encourage me to explore fields that I'm entirely unfamiliar with, and I can't express how much I love these classes—now I'm considering religion and computer science minors!
Taking these diverse courses has prompted me to reflect on the rationale behind such distributive requirements. My writing seminar has introduced me to new dimensions of religion, history, and politics. Through close readings of historical texts from various cultural and religious perspectives and engaging office hours with my professor, my critical thinking and writing skills have significantly advanced. Even my computer science class, like linear algebra last term, has been a revelation. Having been scared of STEM subjects since elementary school, I never thought that in college, I would recognize the beauty in math and computer science's foundational logic.
In essence, my coursework across these different fields is converging on a singular lesson: the art of thinking both critically and creatively, a skill essential and irreplaceable in the age of artificial intelligence. To me, this epitomizes the essence of a liberal arts education!
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!
After returning from an enriching study abroad program, I'm diving into a bustling spring semester here at Dartmouth. Here are my four courses I'm taking this term!
Dartmouth's liberal arts curriculum pushes students to explore new departments and draw connections between seemingly disparate disciplines. Come explore my Economics, Physics, and Asian, Societies, Cultures, and Languages classes!
