Hi everyone! I'm Tess, and I live 30 minutes outside of London. I love everything Dartmouth, including the sunsets, the traditions, the classes, and the merch. I'm super excited to experience everything I read about in this blog over the next four years. Come along with me as I explore the ins and outs of life in the woods.
A course that definitely surprised me, I did not know what to expect and had very little philosophical knowledge before taking this course. It was a mixture of current and past readings, with the final project to make a group video, testing my technological ability. Professor Bumpus was amazing, and I got to know her more when I took her to breakfast at Pine through the Take Your Professor to Lunch Program.
I was recommended to take a history course, specifically a history course with Professor Lu, and it has not disappointed! This course is cross listed with Asian Studies, my major, but it has made me consider a history minor... We start every class off with a song relating to the topic of that class, and then we move on to discussion based activities.
So far, the Dartmouth classes I have taken have been all based around discussion and essay writing. As an Asian Studies and Government major, I expected that the rest of my time at Dartmouth would follow a similar pattern, but in fact a pre-requisite for the Government major is a Political Analysis class. This class involves coding, analyzing survey samples, and other quantitative methods. The professor is amazing—a friend and I got to know him better by taking him out to breakfast at Pine through the 'Take Your Professor to Lunch' program. The final group project involves making projections for the 2024 elections using past data. Although, obviously, this election already happened, some of our predictions were more accurate than the polls! It is super interesting to take a class that I can see the themes in real world news outlets.
From varsity sports all the way down to intramural leagues, about 75% of Dartmouth students participate in athletics. From my previous blogs, you can see that I love to watch our amazing varsity teams; I was briefly a member of the club field hockey team, so I recently decided to go to the final level and participate in intramural sports. From soccer to kickball to volleyball we have it all, but what piqued my interest was pickleball. Before I moved to the US for college, I had never heard of this strange sport that seemed like tennis-lite. But it's a huge thing here! So, I had to see what the hype was about.
Action shot…
At the start of spring term, we got an email that was promoting the league. With multiple open slots on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I only had to find a partner. And who better than Noemie, who could bring her varsity athleticism down to the IM level. Our team's name: Kitchen Chaos. (The kitchen is an area on the court that you aren't supposed to step into or else you get penalized, a fact I learnt after I stepped in it multiple times). On the platform used to keep track of the games, we made our team picture Gordon Ramsay getting angry at fellow chefs. The idea was that in your league, there were six teams, and it was a round robin tournament, with one game a week. This league was open to all undergraduates—a great way to meet new people.
Our first match was week two of the term. We came relatively unprepared, I would say. We got blown off the court. In our defense, we hadn't quite gotten into the rhythm as a pair together, and I was still a bit iffy on the rules. But it was a good warm up match. This meant that we fell to 0-1 in our league of six.
Paddles and balls are provided by the school, with student employees of the athletic center present to encourage us to start on time, inform us which teams we are slated to play, and keep score. After a weekend practise, we came back stronger in our second and third matches, losing both but with a steadily decreasing margin. Our fourth match got cancelled because of the rain, but it didn't matter because we were preparing for our final match.
Our cheer squad coming to support us
In our final match, we had an audience, so we had to perform. We just managed to claim victory! Because of that victory, we claimed a spot in the playoffs as last seed. The playoffs were a combination of the best teams from all four leagues on Tuesdays, and as last seed we played the best team. It didn't go very well for us.
All in all, our pickleball league has been a highlight of my term. It's a great way to get moving and get outside, meet new people and learn a new sport. We are already looking forward to coming back even stronger next year, when we actually know all the rules and have had some practise. #picklepower
After a long winter term where everything was overlaid in snow and serenity, the weekly Norwich farmer's market is finally back—and I could not be more excited.
