Hello, Eda here: full-time learner, part-time writer, and pretty much a happy amateur at everything else. My hobbies include reading, discovering new movies, and looking at the pictures of my cat. On campus, you can find me peer supporting for the Mental Health Union and SAPA, writing for Spare Rib, doing research in psychology, or listening to Turkish & English alt-rock. Feel free to ask me about taking a gap year, transitioning to a new cultural space, or college in general!
This class discusses the concepts of sex and gender in the broader context of issues related to race, class, national identity, and more. I loved this class because it helped me better understand how systemic inequality affects individual lives and made me think about ways to change it. Professor A'Ness is such an inspiring prof!
In this first-year writing seminar, we discussed how avant-garde movements from futurism to punk rock have constituted a rebellion against the status quo. I loved all the readings for this class and Professor McCann inspired me to take more courses in the English department!
In this course, we learned all the basics of fiction: character, plot, setting, etc. My favorite parts of the course were receiving feedback from other students, reading my peers' work, and having fiction readings as assigned course work! I also appreciated all the guest speakers we had, who were experienced writers in their respective genres.
As an aspiring clinical psychologist, this course has been one of the best classes I have taken at Dartmouth so far. The class focused on the etiology, diagnosis, characteristics and treatment of various mental disorders. Professor Hudenko has been one of the greatest lectures I had the pleasure of meeting. As a clinical psychologist himself, he had extensive knowledge in not only the theory, but also the practice of clinical psychology. He also succeeded in making a lecture-based class feel interactive and dynamic.
We covered the complex neural and biological mechanisms of multiple mental health disorders ranging from common conditions like anxiety to more complicated illnesses such as schizophrenia. In addition to reading about the cutting-edge research in this area, we also read memoirs and watched documentaries about the mental illnesses to focus on how these conditions are affecting people in real life. Professor Funnell is one of the best profs I had!
As an aspiring clinical psychologist, this has been one of my favorite classes at Dartmouth. We learned about different therapy methods, how and when to use them, their advantages, and shortcomings. The class was incredibly engaging with Professor Hudenko's frequent demonstrations of methods, therapy videos, and guest speakers. I would recommend this class to every psychology major.
I worked at Dimock Health Center as part of my community health internship. I was part of a team of summer interns who were college students like myself. We worked as patient advocates that helped people reach out to resources regarding housing, food, utilities, etc. Most of our work involved calling patients, helping them fill out forms, and researching resources. I learned so much about community health resources and how to communicate with a diverse set of patients. It was an invaluable experience!
I took classes in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. My favorite class of the term was called London Performance Now, which involved going to different performance events in London and discussing them in class. It was the perfect opportunity to explore the cultural landscape of London.
As the title of the course suggests, this class was about food: its history, economics, and cultural practices. I learned a lot through this course thanks to guest speakers, thought-provoking readings, and engaging assignments. My favorite assignment in this course was writing about a family recipe; I learned so much about my family's history as well as the cultural conflicts in my home country. Overall, it was among the best classes I have taken at Dartmouth. Plus, we even got to eat delicious food cooked by our classmates!
I have been involved with research at Dartmouth since my freshman year. I started working at Reading Brains Lab under wonderful Professor Donna Coch in freshman winter through the Women In Science Project (WISP), an undergraduate research program that matches first-year women with faculty in STEM. Reading Brains Lab is an interdisciplinary lab working on, projects combining psychology, neuroscience, and education. Professor Coch herself teaches classes in education, focusing on reading processes and children's literature. Most of my coworkers in the lab have joined the lab after taking Professor Coch's classes.
At Reading Brains Lab, I primarily worked on a project investigating the skills influencing non-word reading in college students. In my first two terms at the lab, I scored the diagnostic language tests conducted by my coworker and acted as a secondary during the experiments, double-checking data. In my second year, I got funding through Undergraduate Research Assistantships (URAD) to continue working at the Reading Brains Lab. In my second year at the lab, I ended up running the language tests myself on participants. It was an incredible professional opportunity, as I learned how to interact with participants from diverse backgrounds in the experiment room. Throughout my second year at the lab, I also trained in recording event-related potentials, a neurological measure of the electrical signals in the brain.
I learned an incredible amount from my time at Reading Brains Lab thanks to my coworkers and Professor Coch. It was a difficult decision to switch to a different lab, but I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone a bit. Through funding from Presidential Scholars, awarded to rising juniors above a certain grade threshold, I applied to AIM High Lab run by Professor Jacobson at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. The goal of the lab is to make mental health treatments more effective and accessible through novel technological and computational methods.
At AIM High Lab, I am part of the chatbot training project, which aims to create and test a new generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot treatment for multiple mental disorders. Currently, my job entails writing sample dialogues based on therapy chapters and testing the chatbot by interacting with the newly developed app. The clinical trials will start soon, which I am super excited about.
My journey in research is one of many paths to research at Dartmouth, as I have many friends involved in research in some capacity. After all, the increased opportunities for undergraduates to conduct research at Dartmouth is one of the main reasons why I chose Dartmouth, and I was not disappointed!
Unlike some other universities, many of the STEM lecture classes at Dartmouth require concurrent enrollment in a laboratory section. What is it like navigating that time as a student?
