DARTMOUTH IN ALL ITS DIMENSIONS NO. 9 | AUG 2020
ADMISSIONS.DARTMOUTH.EDU
On the cover: Robin Martinez ’23 photographed in Albuquerque, New Mexico Photograph by Stefan Wachs
AUGUST 2020 // ISSUE 09
02
12
28
42
First Hand
All Together Now
Humanities for Humanity
Funding Outside the Lines
03
16
34
45
It’s a Fact
Walking the Walk
Onward & Upward
Courses of Study
06
20
36
48
Welcome Home
Living the Green Life
D-Plan
Threads
07
24
38
Humans of Hanover
Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
On Course
Dartmouth College is defined by its people, and 3D is a magazine that tells their stories. It’s not meant to be comprehensive, but an evolving snapshot as vibrant and prismatic as the school itself. 3D is Dartmouth in all its dimensions.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT GILL
Dartmouth College is located on traditional, unceded Abenaki homelands.
Admissions Editorial Board
Student writers
Topher Bordeau Erin Burnett Sara D. Morin Isabel Bober ’04 Irma Encarnación Kate Domin ’19
Sarah LeHan ’20 Sofía Carbonell Realme ’20 Lobna Jbeniani ’23 Caroline Cook ’21 Estelle Stedman ’23 Gabriel Gilbert ’23 Jimmy Nguyen ’21
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Lee A. Coffin Vice Provost for Enrollment and Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET LAMPERT
A
ctor John Krasinski’s Some Good News episodes on YouTube have been a cheery tonic in these stay-athome times. Like John, I’m an optimist who’s been working remotely for a while now. Yes, the world’s turned upside down. And yes, that disruption shifted the flow and format of our usual on-campus recruitment conversation. You can’t come to us, and we can’t come to you, but we accept the challenge and march onward. The motto at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering rings true: there is no box right now. New ideas are taking hold as the quarantine invites bursts of creativity. Your college search diverts to a new admissions superhighway powered by Zoom and Instagram and other virtual visit platforms as you say hello, explore, check out our campus vibe, assess fit. Social media is reinterpreting the idea of a campus visit or a college fair. Print — so retro — is making a comeback as we visit your mailbox. As we adapt to our rapidly evolving normal, we find we must intertwine change with tradition. Much actually remains the same as this admissions cycle turns towards the application and selection phase of its journey. In fact, the 2020-21 admissions cycle represents a remarkable anniversary at Dartmouth. Our Class of ’25 will be the 100th entering class selected via a holistic
review policy. And if ever there was a moment when the idea of assessing a whole person was essential, it’s now. If Ps and Fs continue to define academic achievement at many high schools, what’s the definition of GPA? Or class rank? Access to standardized testing is constrained as test administrators redesign sites for social distancing and public safety. As a result, an SAT or ACT score may be absent from your file. That’s okay. In response to this developing reality, we have paused our testing policies for the upcoming cycle and may add new elements for you to showcase your talents. And I suspect personal interviews will migrate to Zoom or FaceTime. Keep an eye on our website for adjustments in real time. But let’s set application logistics aside for a moment. The important questions that we — and you — must answer are these: Are you ready for the curriculum we offer? Are you prepared for its rigor and our fast-paced 10-week terms? Will you thrive in classes that are small and highly interactive with engaged and curious peers? In short, are you and Dartmouth a good fit? We will read your application with a contextual lens, so we rely on you to supply that context. An A average paired with a 1480 might not be part of your academic story this year, so find ways to replace them. Unmute yourself! Tell us your story. Your essays and recommendations and interviews offer opportunities to do just that. Your grades — in whatever pandemic version they exist — are important elements of holistic review, but they are not the sole element. To be honest, they never were. In addition, we understand your extracurricular profile will look different. Spring musicals were cancelled. Internships were postponed. Sports went into suspended animation. We get that. But your interests and talents still matter. The pandemic didn’t steal those qualities. You still offer those talents to a residential community like this one. A stay-at-home gap in your resume just requires you to express those talents a little differently and for admission officers to respect the circumstances we all are negotiating. Of equally fundamental importance and impact, Dartmouth will continue to read applications through a need-blind lens and, as always, we will twin that bedrock policy with an enduring commitment to meet 100 percent of your demonstrated need. Like holistic review, those policies are as essential as they’ve ever been at Dartmouth College. Know that this option on your college list is unwavering in this financial promise. One last thing. The Common Application is now live!
It’s a fact. BASIC FACTS
ONE DARTMOUTH
4,459 % 95 % 100
Number of Undergraduate Students 6-Year Graduation Rate
50
miles of the Appalachian Trail that Dartmouth maintains, part of which runs through campus
4
Demonstrated Financial Need Met, Regardless of Citizenship
Dartmouth has graduate schools in business, medicine, engineering, and advanced studies
22
%
5 388
Fall Term Classes with More Than 100 Students
vs.
7:1
Fall Term Classes with Fewer Than 20 Students
Dartmouth has reduced its energy consumption by 22% since 2005
Dartmouth’s campus includes two mountains: 4802’ Mount Moosilauke, and the Dartmouth Skiway
220
Dartmouth’s Organic Farm spans 220 acres
134 patents on the Patent Wall at the Thayer School of Engineering
The Hopkins Center for the Arts was the precursor for Lincoln Center in New York City
Baker Library was modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
Dartmouth’s Arts District includes over 300,000 square feet of indoor space
Student-toFaculty Ratio
AFFORDABILITY AT DARTMOUTH
+ 55K
$
AVERAGE GRANT FOR CLASS OF 2023
59
% of Class of 2023
offered financial aid
Financial aid travels with you when you study abroad
112M
$ FULL TUITION GUARANTEE
Families with typical assets and incomes under $100k are guaranteed a full tuition scholarship at Dartmouth
given in scholarship aid 2019–2020 Students from
56
countries offered aid in the past two years
admissions.dartmouth.edu | 3
Data Pictured outside of the Undergraduate Dean’s Office in Berry Library
HIMADRI NARASIMHAMURTHY ’20 MAJOR: COMPUTER SCIENCE, MINOR: PHILOSOPHY HOMETOWN: KANSAS CITY, KS
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Vision
Whether the result was climbing a mountain at sunrise or interning with The New York Times, Himadri Narasimhamurthy ’20 has never deviated from the mantra that has guided her since childhood: “Be as inquisitive as possible. Try new things.” Himadri applied to Dartmouth as a first-generation college student with math and government on her mind, but immediately branched out. After her first few classes, she was hooked on computer science. “The most interesting part about computer science for me is the degree to which it can be applied to different real-world challenges,” she says. This past year, Himadri was a senior member of Dartmouth’s Indian-fusion dance team, Raaz, and led The Dartmouth’s business development staff. “Working for The Dartmouth led me to consider the news media. I’m really interested in data journalism and using data to tell a story.” In her junior year, Himadri landed an internship with The New York Times. For her senior capstone project, she created Duet, a program that links Spotify accounts to allow users to compare music tastes and build playlists together. Himadri’s favorite Dartmouth memory revolves around one of her first fears about coming to Hanover. “The idea of going somewhere where everyone seemed outdoorsy wasn’t really a draw,” she shares, “but it was something that intrigued me.” From Kansas City, Kansas, Himadri had been a stranger to activities like hiking and canoeing. Her thinking about Dartmouth’s adventurous culture evolved, however, when she realized it encompassed not only the physical environment but a welcoming social one, too. Inspired by an incredible First-Year Trip kayaking on the Connecticut River with the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC), Himadri volunteered to coordinate “Trips” for future incoming students. “I had never hiked before coming to Dartmouth,” she laughs, “but we were scheduled to leave at 6 a.m. the next day to meet a hiking trip at the top of the mountain. The night before, I couldn’t sleep. I kept trying to see if someone could take my place.” The next morning, Himadri’s doubt faded upon learning another Dartmouth tradition: wearing “flair,” or intentionally ridiculous clothing. “We were all dressed absolutely crazy, climbing this mountain on a beautiful morning. I think that was one of the biggest things that made Dartmouth feel like home.” —Gabriel Gilbert ’23
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WELCOME
HOME
No matter the season, students spill from the library to walk loops around Occom Pond, enjoying the scenery, talking on the phone, or even studying flashcards. Ask a friend to join and it becomes a “Walccom,” a hallowed campus tradition (and example of pervasive campus slang…in fact, phones on campus have started autocorrecting to “Walccom”). But the magic isn’t exclusive to warm weather. In wintertime, the pond is wrapped in ethereal white as skaters glide across the ice. Each year during the Polar Bear Plunge, a (totally optional) rite of passage, students don swimsuits, attach safety ropes, and race — first through the frigid water, then to the Roth Jewish Center for cookies and cocoa. More-anticipated hot chocolate has never been seen this side of The Polar Express. —Sarah LeHan ’20
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELI BURAKIAN ‘00
Occom Pond
HUMANS OF HANOVER ^ DARTMOUTH IS DEFINED BY ITS PEOPLE, SO WE’RE EXCITED TO CELEBRATE THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF OUR COMMUNITY. IN EXCERPTS FROM THEIR “WHY DARTMOUTH” ESSAYS, STUDENTS FROM THE CLASS OF ’24 SHARE WHAT DREW THEM TO DARTMOUTH.
Arturo Serrano ’24, Panama City, Panama Sheltered in mountain forests, Dartmouth could not resemble Panama any less. Dartmouth’s libraries and their imposing wooden bookshelves, leather chairs, and tall windows would perish in the heat. But what makes a Panamanian stumble upon Dartmouth is something more transcendent — academic freedom. As a future engineer who likes to talk science, but also politics, history, and everything else, this is vital. I don’t have to choose a major or a department. Dartmouth encourages academic exploration in engineering and across the college.
Ady Chaudhari ’24, Dallas, TX After 15 Foco chocolate-chip cookies, I knew Dartmouth was the college I wanted to call home. From flitzes to group projects in “Blobby,” Dartmouth has the smalltown intimacy I crave. I can reminisce about my childhood when studying in the Dr. Seuss Room at the Baker-Berry Library but also revel in the novelty of the Dartmouth Swing-Dance Club. I can research the interrelatedness of religion and identity politics under the guidance of Dr. Susan Ackerman, while combating student voter apathy through the Dartmouth Political Union.
Lexy Piton ’24, Brooklyn, NY I believe that a well-rounded performer needs as much knowledge in subjects outside their craft as they do in it. Dartmouth provides that interdisciplinary approach to higher education. To me, theater should be provocative, educational, and informed by the pressing issues of society. The best art exposes something about the human condition, so artists should be equipped with worldly knowledge to inform their craft. At Dartmouth, that opportunity to study theater in conjunction with a broad range of topics is exactly in line with my beliefs as an actor and a scholar.
Jessica Chiriboga ’24, Glendora, CA On Monday, I imagine grabbing a gelato as I plan an LGBTQ+ history lesson with Triangle House. Wednesday welcomes a geo-spatial investigation of voter turnout and asking Professor Chipman for advice on using ArcGIS. Everyone’s favorite day, Friday, starts with a hike with pals and meeting up with rugby friends by the Connecticut River. As the Sunday sun sets on an adventurous week, my fellow members of the Dartmouth Undergraduate Law Journal lie on the Green and reminisce about Daniel Webster’s famous line before the highest court.
Luke Miles ’24, Omaha, NE I’ve made a tradition of backpacking with my dad the last couple of years, so of course I was intrigued when I heard the Appalachian Trail ran through Hanover. The night before my campus visit in October, I hiked a few miles through the trees. I can see myself joining the Outing Club, particularly the Cabin and Trail group, though I want to try rock climbing, too. I come from such a flat state, but nothing would make me feel more at home than living and learning in these green mountains.
Jeffrey Lam ’24, Nashua, NH I look forward to taking advantage of Dartmouth’s unique modified majors to create my own curriculum, one that matches my business goals. Within the economics department, I hope to pursue a modified major with psychology. As an aspiring leader in business marketing, I know the importance of understanding consumers’ decision-making. I loved my AP psychology course in high school. Through my experiences in the Conrad Challenge and DECA, I also have solidified my passion for business economics. Dartmouth will enable me to blend these two interests.
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CRISTIAN CANO ’20 MAJOR: ROMANCE LANGUAGES HOMETOWN: WATAUGA, TX
What language does Cris Cano ’20 think in? For the Romance languages major from Watauga, TX, it’s likely some fluid amalgamation of his four lexicons. A normal day during Cris’s junior winter term consisted of a 10 a.m. French class, an 11:30 a.m. Spanish class, and a 1 p.m. Italian class. Oh, and he started off the day by teaching Italian drill at 7:45 a.m. and ended the day with French drill at 5:30 p.m. “It was back to back languages,” he laughs. But linguistic diversity is just one facet of Cris Cano’s identity. “It’s an understatement to say that I have a unique set of identities and experiences: first-gen, low-income, Mexican-American, LGBT, but I don’t necessarily fit super neatly or stereotypically into any of those boxes. I refuse to simplify my identities,” he says. “Dartmouth has been the most diverse place I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never met people from so many countries, so many states, so many religions.” Cris fell in love with Italian after his first class in the language, sparking a renewed interest in Spanish, which he’d studied in high school. Since then, he’s proved that his curiosity crosses borders, traveling twice to Italy on Dartmouth’s Language Study Abroad programs and once to Puerto Rico for a summer job at a hostel. While in Italy, he received the Frank J. Guarini Institute’s Rick Angelo World Experience Award, an accolade awarded to an exemplary student leader in the study abroad program. It was a distinction that surprised no one, given Cris’s big-hearted determination to encourage the Dartmouth community to expand its linguistic prowess. In much the same way, Cris has built bridges across intellectual disciplines. His extracurriculars span multiple interests on campus. Since his first fall at Dartmouth, he has written for The Dartmouth, America’s oldest college newspaper. This term, he is a senior columnist for The Mirror, The Dartmouth’s weekly magazine focused on campus life and culture. The work gives him the chance to do something he loves: use storytelling to amplify the voices of others. Some of his favorite articles include a piece on Dartmouth’s history with slavery as well as an article about “the people who are in charge of keeping Dartmouth beautiful” — namely, the landscaping crew and custodial workers. “I’m passionate about finding the stories that are right there in the open,” Cris says, “but that no one’s reporting—and finding the best ways to tell them.” Cris emphasizes that his impact at Dartmouth has been a community effort. “I don’t think there’s any one thing I’ve necessarily done ‘that was all Cris.’ That wasn’t even the point. The point is: I chose Dartmouth because there were people here who cared, and if I can be just as caring during my time here, that’s a job well done.” — Estelle Stedman ’23
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Speak Pictured: in Robinson Hall
ing His Peace PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
LINDA XIAO ’20 MAJOR: COMPUTER SCIENCE, MINOR: SPANISH HOMETOWN: SAN JOSE, CA
& THOMAS CORMEN PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
A CONVERSATION WITH POPULAR COMPUTER SCIENCE PROFESSOR AND TEXTBOOK AUTHOR THOMAS CORMEN AND HIS COLLABORATOR, COMPUTER SCIENCE MAJOR LINDA XIAO ’20. CORMEN IS ALSO A REVERED BARBECUE PITMASTER AND MARATHON INLINE SKATER, AND LINDA IS A MEMBER OF CODERDOJO, A CLUB THAT TEACHES CODING SKILLS TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN THE UPPER VALLEY.
Tom: It’s a whopping 1,312-page textbook going into its fourth edition. I was Linda’s first-year advisor and knew she was wicked smart, intellectually curious, and super easy to work with. When I needed someone to implement the algorithms in the computing language Python, I asked her if she’d take it on as a summer job. I’d hoped that she might get a little over halfway through by the end of the summer, but she finished the book — FINISHED — with a week to spare. Linda: The project was a little overwhelming at first. I had to get up to speed on the Python library and modules. Actually, I came to really appreciate Python — it’s pretty slick. And Professor Cormen met with me every day to make sure the code was good. Once I was confident I was on the right track, I got into a rhythm. Tom: Linda didn’t need a lot of advice. I am very proud to release the code that she prepared. Linda, you’ve worked with Tom in another capacity? Linda: Yes, as an undergraduate teaching assistant. Tom: Of all the student section leaders I've hired for my Computer Science 1 staff, Linda is the only student who's been my TA for three terms. She got rave reviews. In fact, I think her evaluations were better than mine.
Tom, you have made it your mission to encourage women in STEM fields. Tom: It goes back to my graduate student days at MIT. I’ll always remember another student sharing her struggles as a woman in computing. When I arrived at Dartmouth, I wanted to make sure that women had ample opportunities to thrive in computer science. I was excited to take 31 Dartmouth undergraduates to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Orlando, FL in October of 2017 to hear leaders in the field like Melinda Gates. It’s the world’s largest technical conference for women in computing, and Dartmouth Computer Science is a platinum academic sponsor. Linda: I missed it during my sophomore year because I was studying in Peru, but I attended during my junior year. I want to underline that Tom is one of the biggest proponents of women in computing. Of the 21 student section leaders he hired during my first term as a TA, 13 were women. Tom: I just followed Fibonacci’s “golden ratio.” Linda, what has Professor Cormen’s mentorship meant to you? Linda: It’s funny, my mom knew all about Professor Cormen before I started at Dartmouth. She said he was a big deal in computer science but, to be honest, he never acted like a big deal. Maybe the best kind of mentorship doesn’t feel hierarchical. Professor Cormen has a way of making you feel like a colleague — there’s no power dynamic going on. Even though he’s on sabbatical, he’s still advising his students because he cares about them. In large part because he trusted me with this book project, Microsoft hired me for a very competitive internship during my sophomore summer and I'll begin my career as a software engineer for Google after graduation. Tom: I think they should count themselves lucky to have landed you!
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PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Tom, you are one of the authors of the iconic computer science textbook Introduction to Algorithms— the industry standard for computer science textbooks. Tell us about the book and how you pulled Linda into the project.
Pictured: In Professor Cormen’s office, Spring 2018
EVERY SCHOOL HAS A CULTURE, one that transcends years, even
ILLUSTRATION BY CELYN BRAZIER
eras. Dartmouth’s legacy is rooted in a powerful sense of community. Students mention it in their applications. Alumni remark upon it decades after graduation. Scholars are drawn to teach here because of it.
admissions.dartmouth.edu | 13
hat is this community thing all about anyway? Well, to start, it’s not one centralized effort but a shared, pervasive mindset that shapes classes, clubs, and residences. It also has a marked impact on research. Hanna Bliska ’20 can tell you fascinating things — really — about the habits of the wolf spider, which she investigated during her arctic ecology expeditions in Western Greenland. She is most animated, however, when she talks about the tight-knit community that grew out of that research. “For several weeks over two summers I worked day in and day out with undergrads, graduate students, my thesis advisor Lauren Culler, and Ross Virginia, director of the Institute of Arctic Studies,” she says. “We leaned on each other 24/7, professionally and personally. Fieldwork is not a 9-5 situation.” An environmental studies major, Hanna jumped into serious research her first-year at Dartmouth with an internship in Virginia’s lab as part of the Women In Science Project (WISP). Today, with two month-long trips to Western Greenland under her belt, Hanna has become an important member of the team, providing pivotal new findings to the larger investigation of the effect of climate change on arctic ecology. Pulling together the pieces of a critical puzzle “Research has been a big part of my life at Dartmouth. My work studying the interaction of different insects and arthropods has given me a real sense of the impact of environmental change.” Without the help, mentorship, and camaraderie of the other team members, Hanna is quick to add, she would not have been able to reach her current level of knowledge. Her teammates, she says, have challenged her intellectually and shared their own research, giving her a broader understanding of the ecology of this vulnerable region and the heady feeling that they are each contributing a vital piece to a larger puzzle. “Professor Virginia calls it ‘our lab family.’ And that’s exactly how I see it. This lab group taught me so much about myself and challenged me to learn what being a real team member looks like,” Hanna says. “Whether that’s helping graduate students count mosquito samples after a long day in the field, making quesadillas together, or volunteering to make the long hike back to the truck after forgetting a necessary instrument in the field, this lab group taught me to be more selfless —and also more accepting of help when it’s offered to me.” The graduate students and faculty of this research community are also delighted to provide career mentorship. As a result, Hanna will join a prestigious environmental consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts after graduation. She notes that Dartmouth’s commitment to undergraduate research has made all of this happen, from picking up the tab for travel expenses to erasing the hierarchical boundaries between younger and older students and faculty. “Dartmouth doesn’t just talk about emphasizing research, it funds it to make sure it happens, and it gives undergrads— even first-years — the chance to make a significant contribution.” Like Hanna, Pablo Correa ’20, an anthropology major, found out that research communities at Dartmouth are not just about scientific findings. One night, in his haste to get to a meeting, he took a shortcut through the snow, executed a fantastic—if unintentional —flip, and ended up with a broken arm. Problem was, he was in the middle of some crucial experiments in his organic chemistry class—and this particular lab posed individual, as opposed to team, challenges. He loved the class and was enjoying the experiments, but now his organic chemistry experience flashed before his eyes. Would he be able to continue? Turning a mishap into an opportunity As it turned out, his lab mates stepped up to help. “Everyone was happy to lend a hand when I needed to pour a chemical into a beaker or mix reactants,” Pablo notes. “It felt so nice to realize that the students in this lab were not motivated by competitiveness.” In the end, Pablo says, he learned what he was hoping to learn from his organic chemistry experiments and successfully completed the class, but he took away something even more revelatory — just how collegial the research community at Dartmouth is. “Dartmouth does a great job of fostering a strong sense of collaboration. We’re scholars first here. One of the reasons I chose 14 | admissions.dartmouth.edu
ILLUSTRATION BY CELYN BRAZIER
Dartmouth, actually, was because I did not sense a hypercompetitive vibe here. In a research community, we need each other.” That sentiment is seconded by Sruti Pari ’20, a biology major and neuroscience minor. Like Pablo, she bonded with a research community outside her major and was frankly surprised. “The research project was for an anthropology class, and our team was as diverse as it’s possible to be,” she remembers. “There were six of us — first-year students, juniors, seniors —and a Marine who lived in Boston and was finishing up a couple of final courses. One student was from Texas, another from Pakistan. Our interests were completely different, too, from gender studies to computer science and everything in between.” At the start of the project, Sruti wondered how they would ever gel as a team. It didn’t help that the project was daunting — identify a fossilized skull that had just come into the possession of anthropology professor Jeremy DeSilva. Even he did not know its provenance. In investigating its origins, Sruti’s team would be doing important work. And that, she recognized, was one of the factors contributing to their bond — they shared a genuine commitment to the project. They were looking to find the answer to a question that no one on earth knew the answer to, so they shared a sense of excitement, too. “We were invested because the project was so cool,” she remembers, “and we were all excited about what we were doing.” By the time of the final presentation, the team was completely in sync— it even had its own inside jokes. “We really fit together so well. One person was highly scientific in attacking the challenge. Another leveraged an interest in history to find clues. One of the seniors took the parental role, encouraging the first-year students. Yet another was a digital whiz. He made our final presentation sing.” When the project ended, the members of the group were in no hurry to disband, and they remain in touch. “We really bonded over this challenge. It’s a Dartmouth thing,” Sruti says. “It taught me that an interdisciplinary team can tackle a problem from so many different directions— it’s a huge plus to have that diversity of perspectives.” Three personal lenses: one town Like Sruti, Angel Aguilar ’22, who is double majoring in government and geography, found that a small group with disparate interests can have an outsized impact. For a geography course called American Cultures and Landscapes, his team was charged with analyzing how the nearby town of Norwich, Vermont evolved into the quintessential pastoral New England village. “In our group of three, it became very apparent that each of us was looking at the research assignment through our own unique lens.” And that, he said, gave them a much fuller answer to the question: how did Norwich come to look the way it does? “During our fieldwork, we spent hours in the car driving around Norwich interviewing town officials and residents and learning a lot about Norwich— but also learning a lot about one another,” Angel remembers. “We could see how our different backgrounds fueled each of our interests in different aspects of the town’s layout. Being from Miami, I was intrigued by the socioeconomic ramifications of living on the water— specifically, the distance of houses to the Connecticut River. A team member from the Boston area was intrigued with the significance of building elevations. And a third member of our group from San Diego had a keen eye for the origins of street names, pre-colonial trade patterns along the Connecticut River, and Native Abenaki settlement patterns, all of which shaped the town as it exists today.” The group’s final multidisciplinary presentation was packed with color, vivid detail, and an integrated pool of perspectives that made the town of Norwich come alive as an evolving organism rather than a set piece in the New England landscape. But for Angel, the biggest takeaway was his team’s camaraderie and their shared understanding of where each person was coming from and what they could bring to the table. Long after the class has ended, they’re still sharing information with one another about zoning laws, affordable housing, and other issues that now fascinate them all. Angel, Sruti, Hanna, and Pablo agree that during times when more and more interaction must happen virtually, a school with a powerful sense of community will prevail. “At the root of it,” Angel says, “Dartmouth has taught me that one of the most enriching experiences is when you step outside your comfort zone and work with people beyond your natural sphere. You find a reward you won’t find anywhere else.” admissions.dartmouth.edu | 15
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Walking the Walk JUL IA NNA T HOM SON ’20
FRESHMAN YEAR WAS FULL OF FIRSTS: MY FIRST TIME MOVING AWAY FROM HOME, MY FIRST TIME SHARING A BEDROOM, AND MY FIRST TIME MEETING MY NEW CLASSMATES AND FRIENDS. I FELL INTO A SIMILAR PATTERN WHEN I INTRODUCED MYSELF. “HI! MY NAME IS JULIANNA. I’M A ’20 FROM JUST OUTSIDE TORONTO, CANADA. I’M ON THE BASKETBALL TEAM, AND I’M GOING TO MAJOR IN ENGINEERING.”
Freshman year also brought what I perceived as failure. By the end of the year, I had dropped an engineering class and quit the sport I had always played. I initially felt I’d lost the things I’d always used to define myself, but I would soon learn that change does not mean failure. Over the next two years, I walked on to a new sports team and, thanks to Dartmouth’s liberal arts curriculum, explored subject areas I never thought I would be interested in. I took classes that focused on digital map making, the foundations of architecture, the music of today, and the intersection of art, music, and religion during the Protestant Reformation. It was this religion class that sparked my interest in the subject. I had always loved studying history and government, and it was within the religion department that I found those two subjects merging. I discovered that I could take classes about economics, art history, and anthropology, all within that one department. My time at Dartmouth has changed all the preconceptions I had about myself. Before Dartmouth, I’d always defined myself by the things I’d done. When people asked me who I was, I defaulted to listing my athletic and
academic pastimes. Now, Dartmouth has helped me realize that the things I love are only a part of who I am and that I am so much more than what I do. I discovered that I didn’t need to study STEM or play a sport just because I always had. I’ve been tested athletically and academically by people who are smarter and stronger than myself. I’ve been pushed to reflect on what I believe. I’ve developed relationships with people who are very different from me. Today, if you asked me to introduce myself, the response would be much different. “Hi! My name is Julianna, and I’m a ’20 from rural Ontario. I’m a member of the track and field team, and I’m studying religion.” My growth during my time here at Dartmouth has been surprising—even scary—and it has come about in the most unexpected ways. Above all, my time at Dartmouth has shown me that I am not defined by my academic and athletic pastimes but by my relationships and my personal traits. I am a friend, a sister, a daughter, a teammate, and a classmate. I am, and will always be, a member of this incredible community we call Dartmouth.
Indicates location on the Dartmouth Green where Julianna is standing. admissions.dartmouth.edu | 17
JASMINE WILLIAMS ’20 MAJOR: SOCIOLOGY, MINOR: EDUCATION HOMETOWN: BROCKTON, MA
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Each One
Pictured: In 8-Ball Hall in the Collis Center for Student Involvement
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Twelve-year-old Jasmine Williams ’20 and her mother were on their way home from summer camp when they made a detour through Hanover. The natural splendor of the Dartmouth campus captured her imagination. “Ten years later, here I am,” she laughs. While it took her awhile to return to the Upper Valley, Jasmine’s childhood experience as a Black girl who loved the outdoors would eventually inspire her academic interests, both inside the classroom and out. The Brockton, Massachusetts native is majoring in sociology and minoring in education, paths she hadn’t expected to follow at Dartmouth. She arrived on campus intending to pursue psychology. Then she took an education course called Social, Moral, and Educational Development with Professor Michele Tine. “We were talking about how kids develop over time,” she says. “What’s really different about the education faculty here is that they don’t necessarily teach you how to teach, but they teach you about the psychology behind how we grow and learn and become human beings in a society.” Jasmine was hooked. That interest has extended beyond the classroom. Through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, Jasmine has researched the varied social experiences of Black boys and girls at New England preparatory schools. She’s surveyed alumni, evaluated their perceptions of their experiences, and analyzed whether they were treated differently— and why. Perhaps reflecting her interests in psychological development, Jasmine’s extracurricular growth at Dartmouth has led her outside her comfort zone. She came to Dartmouth as a coxswain for the rowing team, but other communities soon caught her attention. During her sophomore summer, she found the hip-hop dance group Ujima. She’s also a sister of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the world’s first Black sorority. “I was noticing a lot of the work the sorority was doing on campus, and it really resonated with me,” she says. “I wanted to do that same work for future students.” Jasmine hasn’t always been so quick to embrace the new and different. “I had this strong sense of imposter syndrome, especially during my freshman fall. But when I started participating in the communities around me, I was able to come out of my shell.” It’s the things she hadn’t always wanted to do, she explains, that she looks back on most fondly as she approaches the end of her senior year. In the fall, Jasmine will be teaching history at a middle school in the Bronx. And she’ll probably see a lot of her 12-year-old self in those kids, some cultivating dreams of one day spending four years in a place like Dartmouth. — Caroline Cook ’21
Teach One
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Living the Green
Who they are Hana Warmflash ’20 and Kayleigh Abbott ’20 were roommates for their first year, their sophomore spring, and their junior spring terms. Hana: Major: Biology • Hometown: Portland, OR • Interests: Taekwondo Club; chemistry tutor; vice president of Chi Delta sorority; campus tour guide trainer; volunteer for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's Patient Support Corps •
Kayleigh: Major: Engineering sciences, minor in human-centered design • Hometown: Bozeman, MT • Interests: Women's ultimate frisbee; engineering TA; first-year facilitator for the wellness center
PHOTOGRAPH BY NAME
•
How they met “Kayleigh arrived at our room in North Fayerweather Hall a few days earlier than I did our first year,” Hana says. “She welcomed me with open arms — literally. The only problem: I was just returning from my first-year trip hiking in the mountains around Dartmouth, and let’s just say I was pretty gritty.” But a few days of grit didn’t put off Kayleigh. The two have been friends ever since.
What they call fun Right from the start, one shared interest stood out for its sheer oddity. Both Hana and Kayleigh hail from the western United States, yet each was passionate about the same two teams: the New York Mets and the New York Jets. The roommates also are equally outdoorsy, and when they’re not hiking or skiing, you’re apt to find them picnicking on the Green. “The sunset casts an amazing light on Dartmouth Hall,” says Hana. “You have to see it.”
Why it works Superficially, Hana and Kayleigh couldn’t be more different. Hana is kickstarting her career as a healthcare consultant before applying to medical school, and Kayleigh will be the incoming Thayer Design Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. But as friends, they say, they couldn’t be more compatible. During an emergency visit to the hospital in response to an injury Kayleigh suffered, both were more enthralled by the experience than worried about the injury. Hana, who had twice shadowed a cardiac surgeon in the operating room as part of her pre-med studies, wanted to absorb every process she encountered, while Kayleigh was swooning over the gadgetry of health. Happily, the doctors and nurses they met at DartmouthHitchcock Medical Center, Dartmouth’s own teaching hospital, indulged their inquisitiveness.
The two have prodigious reputations as pranksters and one morning woke up to payback. The common room of their suite was filled waist-high with balloons — about 800 of them. They know because they had to pop each one and clean up the remains. “It was fun, actually,” Hana says. “We armed ourselves with sharp points, blasted some music, and popped away.”
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SUSANNAH HESCHEL ELI BLACK PROFESSOR OF JEWISH STUDIES CHAIR, JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM
Talk about meeting Martin Luther King Jr. I met Dr. King a number of times as a result of my father’s involvement in the civil rights movement. I was fascinated by how often King invoked the Old Testament prophets. The prophets posed a challenge to theologians. During World War I, for example, the universal ethics preached by the prophets were rejected by nationalistic German theologians who supported Germany’s side of the war. When religious leaders have had to choose between universalism and nationalism, many have chosen the theological approach that supported nationalism. In Nazi Germany, some Protestant theologians reconfigured Christian theology and the Bible (which they re-wrote) to support Hitler, whom they viewed in messianic terms. You are an astute scholar of the ramifications of culture. What have you observed about the Dartmouth community? The Dartmouth campus exudes a far greater sense of warmth than I’ve experienced anywhere else. Students help one another. They crave and foster community. They’re fun. When they stop by my office or ask me to lunch, I enjoy spending time with them. Invariably, I have ongoing conversations in my head with my students, thinking of things they’ve said and things I want to say when next we meet. You’re stuck in an elevator. What book will make the time fly fastest? The Collected Works of Shakespeare because it unfurls all of nature and the human condition. Could there be a better distraction when you’re stuck in an elevator than having Shakespeare’s delightfully flawed characters to keep you company? One of my great pleasures at Dartmouth is The Merchant of Venice seminar I co-teach with Patricia McKee in the English department.
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Theologian, Detective, Shakespeare Buff Pictured: In the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
You really are a sort of scholar-detective. True enough. My focus is on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the political and cultural currents that shaped the Bible, the history of anti-Semitism, and the modern Jewish fascination with Islam, the topic of my forthcoming book. In recent years, I traveled to archives from one German city or village to the next to find documents that allowed me to piece together the theological currents that surged under the surface in Nazi Germany. That detective work resulted in my book The Aryan Jesus, which explores the disturbing religious forces that supported the Nazi regime and the murder of the Jews.
Theodor Geisel ’25, better known as Dr. Seuss, was a Dartmouth alum who helps inspire our adventuresome spirit.
Dartmouth’s alma mater rhapsodizes about its “sons” and “daughters” roaming “round the girdled Earth.” virtual classrooms into opportunities for better learning by including guest speakers who may have normally been unavailable in their classes. Here, a group of students peers into the night sky through telescopes set up on the Green by astronomy faculty during the fall term of 2019. Among those faculty was Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Elisabeth Newton, who had led the discovery of a new planet only a few months earlier. It’s fitting that the next line of the alma mater — “her spell on them remains”—attests to the lasting impact of this place on its people.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
The global reach of Dartmouth’s curriculum has always been a distinguishing feature of the College, and Dartmouth leads the Ivy League in the percentage of students who study off-campus. Normally, this space would celebrate experiences like developing Arabic skills by conversing with local shopkeepers in Fez, Morocco, or studying geology on a trek from the Canadian Rockies to the American southwest. Until those experiences return, students and faculty will take learning across other kinds of borders, both virtual and physical. Last term, Dartmouth professors turned the challenges of
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BRADY MCCALLISTER ’21 MAJOR: BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING MINOR: ENGLISH HOMETOWN: SAN RAFAEL, CA
You’re just as likely to find Brady McCallister ’21 with his nose in a book of 16th-century poetry as you are to see him roaring past in the back of an ambulance in his role as an EMT. A biomedical engineering major with an English minor on the pre-health track, Brady designed his course of study at Dartmouth to play to all his interests, no matter how disparate. “I wasn’t planning to minor in English when I first came to Dartmouth,” Brady recalls. “Some people say that they’re either STEM-oriented or humanities-oriented. One of the greatest things about the liberal arts is that you can be both.” Reading different forms of literature from John Milton to James Baldwin to Kendrick Lamar allows the aspiring physician to tap into the complex historical contexts of each author. This past summer term, Brady took a contemporary American poetry class with Professor Joshua Bennett, a spoken-word poet. “We studied Black poetry in America from the 18th century all the way up to contemporary trap and rap music,” Brady says. The complexity of perspectives in the works challenged his thinking. “I like deciphering what the author actually believes in juxtaposition with the rest of the population and considering how that informs my understanding of my life.” Unbeknownst to Brady at the time, his study of racial inequities in Professor Bennett’s literature class foreshadowed his offterm research at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Working with the Maternal Child and Adolescent Healthcare Division, Brady helped to devise conceptual frameworks on racial disparities in preterm birth. His research expanded his awareness of the influences on access to quality healthcare beyond biological mechanisms. “There are so many social determinants of health,” Brady explains, citing differences in prenatal care, neighborhood safety, and social support structures as examples. In addition to his research, Brady spent his off-term training as an emergency medical technician or EMT — just in time, as it turns out. The training prepared him for a spring spent working shoulder to shoulder with other medical workers in California to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the human connections, Brady says, that have inspired him to infuse his study of the humanities into a healthcare career. “Reading different works makes me think about the human condition. I always ask myself the question ‘Why am I here?’ That’s what you get in the philosophy and English departments that you might not get in the science or engineering fields. I just love having those kinds of conversations.” — Lobna Jbeniani ’23
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Poetry Pictured: Near his hometown of San Rafael, CA, where Brady spent his spring term.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD
in Motion
Humanities for Humanity
ILLUSTRATION BY SHOUT (ALESSANDRO GOTTARDO)
BY SOFÍA CARBONELL REALME ’20
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I
thought I had the inside scoop on the humanities at Dartmouth. As an English major and a religion minor, I’ve spent most of my academic career studying textual practices and traditions of thought, taking small, discussion-based classes, writing and reading copiously — in brief, doing and enjoying all things one associates with these disciplines. The humanities have always been at the heart of my college experience, but the more I connected with students, professors, and alumni for this piece, the more I realized how integral they are to Dartmouth itself. Beyond technicalities of classification, the disciplines and perspectives that comprise the humanities permeate the curriculum. “One of the things I was most excited about at Dartmouth was that I would be able to try a lot of different things,” says Patrick Howard ’23. Patrick is on the pre-health track but is also interested in design thinking and is deeply involved with music. He found a platform for fusion in a music and engineering course in which he was challenged with designing and prototyping a brand-new musical instrument. In Biology 2, he was excited to find that Professor Alan Witters connected the science to actual human lives. “We learned a lot,” he says, “within the context of patients’ stories.” Interdisciplinary Crossover For Hoang Do Long ’20, who double-majored in math and film, choosing courses was driven by passion as much as by practicality. “Designing my film major was about finding the right way to pursue what I liked most about the humanities,” he says. Hoang sees the relationship between his two disciplines in terms of transferable skills. “Attention to detail is very important in both my majors. The rigor required to execute mathematical proofs translates into the ability to keep a film set running smoothly and exercise creativity with limited resources.” The possibilities for interdisciplinarity are vast. Professors James Dobson and Ivy Schweitzer practice and teach digital humanities. They both point out that the field is broad, encompassing everything from the ways we read, disseminate, and archive texts to bringing computational techniques and other technologies to bear on humanist disciplines. Professor Dobson’s work uses computational methods to track intellectual histories through semantic changes in concepts over time. He recently oversaw two undergraduate independent studies on how language about the self and the subject changed in relation to political-religious controversies from the 14th to the 16th centuries, a time period that encompasses the Reformation. The hybrid nature of Professor Dobson’s work is also evident in Moonbit, a book that he coauthored with his wife, Dartmouth professor Rena Mosteirin. This project explores critical theory and experimental poetry using text from Apollo 11’s source code.“ The source material had all kinds of really interesting language,” Professor Dobson notes, “but what was fascinating from a theoretical standpoint was thinking about it as obsolete code.”
Humanities Tech Professor Schweitzer has been working on courses and projects related to Emily Dickinson — or, I should say, “the new Emily Dickinson.” Before the poet’s works were digitized (they remained largely in manuscript form during her lifetime), they were filtered— and sanitized — through several editors. Professor Schweitzer argues that access to the manuscripts allows us to reconsider the poems from the perspective of a potential editor and to encounter the work on Dickinson’s own terms. “I’m interested in questions about textuality and sexuality,” she says, “and how her refusal to be locked into a print culture is related to freedoms and innovations in her personal life, especially her gender identity.” Professor Schweitzer also works with the dissemination side of the digital humanities. In collaboration with her students, she has written and published research in blog and video form. For Schweitzer, this is not only a way to explore how technology might enrich a work and make it more interactive but also how to write in a way that is accessible to an online readership. 30 | admissions.dartmouth.edu
The humanities are ultimately about people exploring one’s relation to the world and to one another. Putting the Human in Humanities Studying the humanities, as Professor Dobson points out, is not just about appreciation for art or music; it’s about what it means to be human. For Mauricio Esquivel Rogel ’18, who majored in computer science modified with women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS), it provided a space to think about identity and values. Mauricio, who grew up in Mexico, faced a shift in how people perceived him during his undergraduate career. “While I felt safe and comfortable being openly gay, finding myself identified as a racialized subject brought up all kinds of questions and frustrations.” He found clarity and empowerment in studying WGSS. “I got to study things I never imagined people would talk about. It’s really special that Dartmouth provides such a platform. This allows faculty, especially faculty of color, to teach in a way that’s very challenging, academically speaking, but also makes you feel like you’re not alone.” Today, Mauricio is working at Microsoft on a decentralized identity project. The software he and his team are developing will allow people to protect potentially sensitive personal information. “I love its social implications,” Mauricio says. “It can really help keep people safe.” The humanities are ultimately about people exploring one’s relation to the world and to one another. “Connecting with our students and promoting conversations about things they care about is something we do really well at Dartmouth,” Professor Dobson says. Mathematician and filmmaker Hoang notes that film enables him to say things about himself and his environment that he might not say under other circumstances. It opens up space for inquiry — bravery, too. The Humanities Grows Communities Engaging in the humanities is also a form of community building. For prehealth musician Patrick, that means connecting with people across disciplines. “Last fall, I was in a friend group that was taking a combination of language and philosophy courses. We would stay up until two or three in the morning talking about concepts. There’s an intellect unique to people who study the humanities.” Hoang highlights how intensively collaborative his projects are. “The reason we have such a strong community of filmmakers here is because people are willing to put in the time and effort to contribute to others’ projects.” Professor Schweitzer sees the humanities as a way to support and encourage empathy. “It’s this ability to leave your own little world and step into other people’s reality,” she says. “That seems to me an absolutely essential skill that we need to encourage in our day and age.” The humanities consist of an array of tools and platforms to bring those elements that drive, shape, animate, and trouble our lives into critical discussion, evaluation, and creative action. This is precisely the role of humanities at Dartmouth, and it is what Dartmouth students, professors, and alumni— humanists — do in the world beyond.
ILLUSTRATION BY SHOUT (ALESSANDRO GOTTARDO)
ROBIN MARTINEZ ’23 MAJORS: COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS HOMETOWN: ANNAPOLIS, MD
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Breat Pictured: Near Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Robin spent his spring term
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEFAN WACHS
It wasn’t long after boarding the Dartmouth Coach from Boston to Hanover that Robin Martinez ’23 found himself at the heart of campus. “The bus pulled around the Green, passing Baker Tower and Rauner Library. I grabbed my luggage and headed towards the beautiful mess that was Robinson Hall, full of bright banners and students dressed in crazy outfits, some sporting dyed hair. Right then, I knew I had made the right choice,” Robin remembers. “I was finally at Dartmouth. I was home.” A first-generation student from Annapolis, MD, Robin arrived at Dartmouth intending to major in engineering, but quickly shifted gears. “English, economics, neuroscience, biology, computer science, government —I tried it all,” he says. “Dartmouth makes it easy for you to explore and not be bound by anything in your first terms here.” Indeed, despite a first year spent dabbling, Robin realized he could still double major, make plans to study off-campus in Lyon, France, take classes outside his major, and graduate on time. Today, he is set on his plans to double major in economics and computer science, but he notes that his favorite course during his first year actually belonged to a third department—public policy. Taught by Professor Charles Wheelan, the introductory class featured guest speakers Judd Gregg and John Lynch, two former governors of New Hampshire. Though the course required dedication, Professor Wheelan made sure to reward his students for their hard work. “After our midterm, he treated the entire class to Boloco, a local burrito restaurant, and booked an auditorium for us to watch the documentary Fog of War, which is about public policy in the 1980’s. He ordered more than one hundred burritos and lots of cookies,” Robin remembers.“Even in the Ivy League, there’s always room for a bit of fun.” Now a year in, Robin has found community and peer-support networks in the First Year Student Enrichment Program (FYSEP), a program that empowers first-generation students to thrive at Dartmouth. “In FYSEP, I found a tight-knit community full of people willing to help each other succeed — both in and out of the classroom. Whether through social activities like ‘family dinners’ or workshops focused on building life skills, our dedicated mentors in that program are always there to support us—no matter what.” Robin is about to tackle his first internship at the Immigration Institute of the [San Francisco] Bay Area. “My job will be to do legal intakes with clients— many who do not speak English— and write, translate, and shape their stories for submission to the court,” says Robin. “Growing up, I was always lucky to have someone looking out for me, especially in times when I needed support that my family just couldn’t provide. Now I am on the other side of the equation and can make things better for someone in need, just like so many did for me.” — Jimmy Nguyen ’21
hing Room
ALUMNI WHO CARRY DARTMOUTH INTO THE WORLD
upward
onward &
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When Pete Buttigieg launched his presidential campaign in April 2019, Lis Smith ’05 was one of only three staffers. What the campaign lacked in feet on the ground, however, Smith made up for with old fashioned campaign chutzpah. Smith applied her instinct for clear messaging, quick timing, and maximum candidate exposure in a characteristic communications strategy that both relied on and proved a theory that the press treats candidates more favorably when they see more of them. While the Buttigieg campaign may have ended earlier than Smith had hoped, her impact didn’t go unnoticed: the candidate predicted in an interview that Smith would be “a force for the rest of both of our professional lives.” Jeff Smith, Lis’s former political science instructor at Dartmouth, goes a bit further: “She is arguably the most talented political communications operative in the party today.” Smith’s magnetic attraction to the political realm began 27 years earlier on a family visit to Washington for the Clinton inauguration. Soon afterward, she wrote about James Carville, Clinton’s advisor, for a grade-school assignment about who she wanted to be when she grew up. “He was hard-hitting and totally different, not a buttoned-up kind of guy,” she says. Later, at Dartmouth, Smith knocked on doors in New Hampshire and fired off letters to editors as part of Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s first election bid. Those off-campus, real-world lessons made her an impressive student, says Smith. “Within 90 seconds,” he says, “I could tell Lis was one of the most savvy and politically sophisticated undergraduates I had ever encountered.”
By the time she graduated, Smith had canvassed for senators John Edwards, Claire McCaskill, and Tom Daschle — and not always on friendly terrain. While campaigning near Flandreau, South Dakota, on behalf of Daschle’s unsuccessful 2004 re-election campaign, she was attacked by a German shepherd. “I had the nastiest bruise for a couple weeks,” she says. Daschle joked that it was a rite of passage — he, too, as it turned out, had once been bitten by a dog while campaigning. In 2012, as a well-established political operative, Lis directed the rapid response team for President Barack Obama’s re-election effort. Four years later, she was deputy campaign manager for Martin O’Malley, the Democratic governor of Maryland, in his bid for the White House. “She would just get in her car and drive to wherever,” says Nina Edelman ’05, a friend and college roommate. “Her business has been built road trip by road trip.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN SKLAR
D-Plan Natalie Shteiman ’21 Hometown: West Palm Beach, FL Major: Middle Eastern Studies modified with Art History Minor: Human-Centered Design
Freshman Year Freshman Fall One of the main reasons I chose to come to Dartmouth was because of the strong foreign language programs. I wanted to explore, so I took Introductory Arabic. Immediately, I knew that I wanted to continue with the language and declare a major in Middle Eastern Studies. Freshman Winter Coming from South Florida, I was nervous about adjusting to the winter, so I took skiing as a PE class and participated in the ice sculpture carving competition. The theme was “Star Wars: The Snow Wars.” For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to carve President Hanlon as Darth Vader and named my sculpture Darth Hanlon. He couldn’t stop laughing when he saw it, and I ended up getting third place! Freshman Spring Professor Cynthia Monroe, my writing seminar professor-turned-mentor, fellow book lover, and now friend, has been one of the people who has influenced me most during my time at Dartmouth. I always wish I had more time to read for fun, and she introduced me to one of my favorite books, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. The last line of the book really resonated with me and allowed me to put everything I do at Dartmouth into perspective: “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?” Freshman Summer After I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love my freshman year, I realized I wanted to learn Italian and live in Rome. The F.I.R.E. study-abroad program (Full-Immersion Rome Experience) allowed me to learn Italian without any prior knowledge. I was able to travel around Italy every weekend and lived in an apartment with my friends from Dartmouth. It was during this experience that I learned three key things: I must take more art history classes. I love cooking octopus pasta. And I want to own a vineyard when I retire. 36 | admissions.dartmouth.edu
Pick a term, any term. With Dartmouth’s distinctive year-round system, you customize your own academic calendar. Dartmouth offers four 10-week terms per year; within some guidelines, you choose which 12 terms to enroll — and which to have incredible experiences elsewhere. The result: the ability to take full advantage of all Dartmouth, and the world, has to offer.
Sophomore Year Sophomore Fall I signed up for Engineering 13: Virtual Medicine and Cybercare. Our final project was to recreate the U.S. healthcare system from scratch by the year 2030, taking into account the country’s finances, expected technological innovations, and the pros and cons of international healthcare systems. This ended up being my favorite class at Dartmouth! I learned so much about healthcare, and I became a TA for it during subsequent fall terms. Sophomore Winter Because I studied abroad my freshman summer and took the same number of classes I would have taken if I were on campus, I was able to take my sophomore winter off. This terrific D-Plan hack allowed me to pursue an internship as a clerk for a federal judge at home in South Florida.
Sophomore Spring I knew I loved art history and that I wanted to major in Middle Eastern Studies, but I was most interested in how the two were related. My Islamic Architecture class with Professor Nicola Camerlenghi integrated my two passions and inspired a specialized major in Middle Eastern Studies modified with Art History. Professor Camerlenghi’s class helped me realize that I wanted to further explore research that analyzed Islamic calligraphic inscriptions in secular spaces in the Middle East — potentially as a senior thesis. Sophomore Summer Sophomore summer was definitely my favorite term. I loved it because of how much closer I grew to my classmates. And the weather was fantastic. I headed to the Connecticut River after class and went canoeing every Saturday. Strips (sophomore trips), a special take on Dartmouth’s iconic First Year Trips, allowed me to bond with friends and other ’21s I hadn’t yet gotten to know.
ILLUSTRATION BY STUART BRADFORD
Junior Year Junior Fall I had the incredible opportunity to take a class with visiting professor Dr. Cornel West. Race and Modernity was an English literature class that focused on the writings of James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, and Lorraine Hansberry, but Dr. West spoke to more than the readings. I remember he discussed prison reform and, in the same sentence, referenced Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Sammy Davis Jr. Junior Winter I interned at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy. The internship gave me the opportunity to do curation work, run children’s educational programs, explore the art acquisition process, and conduct museum tours in Italian.
ON
COURSE
ENGL 64.05 Cultural Analytics
What first interested you in the course? As someone who has always been interested in both data and the humanities, I look for ways to bridge the divide between them. Now that I’m more acquainted with the fields of computational humanities and cultural analytics, I realize that this interdisciplinary discourse is crucial to better understanding our relationship with words and literature. I first heard about the class in office hours with Professor James Dobson, who was teaching an English class on Game of Thrones at the time. He has since become a mentor in my academic career. What were some of your initial impressions of the class? At first, I was nervous coming into the class since it was geared towards English majors with zero prior experience in STEM. I have a substantial background in computation and computer science, so I was worried I might not gain a lot from the class. As it turns out, Professor Dobson perfectly geared the class to all. It involved both technical elements in Python and deep critical thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of using data. This way,
students with or without any prior computational experience could engage with the course material equally while learning from one another through their varied perspectives. Can you share a little about a specific assignment from the class? Our midterm task was to reproduce an existing study that we had previously read for the class. I chose a paper on vocabulary decay in the romance genre, which argued that there is a significant decrease in variability of vocabulary throughout books in the romance genre. This brought up questions about what this means — what does this say about authors in the romance genre or about pressures from publishers pushing authors to write quickly in the interest of reaching a mass audience? I had the chance to collect my own corpus of texts and attempt to replicate the findings. So, this course inspired you and your research partner to pursue an independent study? Yes, my research partner and I were both so excited about the course that we wanted to continue our work in the discipline. We were interested in understanding change in thought and rhetoric through the process of analyzing early modern texts from the English Protestant Reformation. My partner is a religion major, and I am planning to double major in computer science and history, so this project perfectly encapsulated our interests. —Catherine Parnell ’22
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELI BURAKIAN ‘00
What’s the difference between the social sciences and the humanities? How do their methodologies and interpretive practices differ? How can humanists use quantitative methods and theories to study data in text and text as data? Catherine Parnell ’22 explored these questions and more in Professor James Dobson’s Cultural Analytics course.
PHOTOGRAPH PHOTOGRAPH BY DON GETTY BY HAMERMAN IMAGES NAME
What are Dartmouth students studying? In every issue, we feature a class plucked somewhat randomly from a deep reservoir of fascinating courses.
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CARLY TYMM ’20 MAJOR: CHEMISTRY HOMETOWN: BELMONT, MA
& KATHERINE MIRICA ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY
CARLY TYMM ’20 AND HER MENTOR, AWARD-WINNING CHEMIST DR. KATHERINE MIRICA, TALK ABOUT THE WOMEN IN SCIENCE PROJECT (WISP) AND THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTORSHIP—NOT TO MENTION FUN—IN THEIR LAB.
Katherine: My mother is a chemist, so I was exposed to chemistry and its possibilities from an early age. It wasn’t until I joined a materials chemistry lab in college, though, that I really became excited about research. Later, I was looking for a faculty position at a research institution with excellent resources — a place where students were truly excited about research and science. I also wanted to teach at a school that valued a liberal arts education, and that certainly influenced my decision to teach at Dartmouth. Carly: I actually entered Dartmouth as a biomedical engineering major, but Dr. Mirica’s intro chemistry course changed my mind. Chemistry is intriguing. One of my professors described it as “an ever decreasing series of lies.” The idea really resonated with me: you’re taught basic principles, then told, “that wasn’t fully accurate; here’s a more complicated explanation.” What are you working on in your lab at the moment? Carly: I would characterize my project as within the intersection of chemistry and engineering — we’re using small molecules to create functional materials with interesting mechanical properties that have not yet been explored. Katherine: My research group aims to make an impact on healthcare, but also on electronics that interface with healthcare and with daily life. The materials chemistry solutions we design are intended to ultimately make a positive impact, but we also want to learn about fundamental molecular design principles in our research. How do we design functional materials from molecular components with the targeted properties and the performance desired in a particular context? Carly: Right now, we’re looking at certain molecules to understand their adhesive properties and whether they can sublime. Looking at these molecules and being able to predict or explain the properties that we observe is really exciting. And there’s a lot we could do with that knowledge.
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Katherine: Carly has been a part of this project since its inception in my laboratory. To join a very new lab puts a young researcher like Carly in a unique position. Not only does she get to push the boundaries of science, she has the opportunity to really establish an area within the group that has the ability to grow and flourish. Future researchers can then build on that foundational work. Carly, you got involved in Dr. Mirica’s lab through WISP, which has a major mentorship component. What’s that been like? Carly: Dr. Mirica and the graduate students I work with right now have been great mentors. Having Dr. Mirica always there and supportive of my project — especially in the beginning — has been really valuable. Katherine: The experienced graduate students who work full time in the lab can help undergraduates get up to speed, avoid making certain mistakes, and learn skills relatively quickly so that they can collaborate meaningfully. I also think it’s really important for professional growth to have a preview of what exists beyond an undergraduate degree — that you could not only apply the knowledge of chemistry or engineering, but take an active role in advancing the frontier of scientific knowledge. You’ve cultivated a strong community within your lab. How do you keep that going? Carly: One of the best things about my research is our lab environment. It just makes me happy to walk in the door. I’ve gotten to know everyone. It’s become a space where I can relax. Katherine: My goal always is to cultivate an inclusive, dynamic environment where people are committed to excellence, but don’t lose sight of the fact that science is fun!
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
How did you each find your way to chemistry?
Pictured: In Katherine Mirica’s lab in Burke Hall, home of Dartmouth’s chemistry department
FUNDING
OUTSIDE THE LINES
While Dartmouth’s financial aid covers 100% of the demonstrated need of all its students, the opportunity for funding doesn’t stop there. Dartmouth students have access to resources that make all kinds of experiences possible and ensure that every student can take advantage of the diverse opportunities Dartmouth has to offer. We asked current students to share experiences made possible with Dartmouth’s financial support.
“This past fall, I received funding through the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy (lovingly called “Rocky”) to intern with the White House Council of Economic Advisers. I had the chance to participate in economic research that goes directly to the president to help inform policy decisions. The grant helped cover the cost of rent, transportation, and food for the duration of my internship. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up!” —Cindy Shen ’21
When the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) invited students to join a rock climbing class in the mountains, I signed up immediately. The trip, food, and gear were all free, and our group leaders taught us how to tie figure-eight knots, belay, and use command terms. After our climb was over and the sun set, we left the mountains for dinner at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. Dinner at the Lodge is something special — there’s nothing better than homemade cornbread, soup, and lasagna after a long day outdoors. — Robin Martinez ’23
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Tutoring is an amazing resource that can help you get through a tough class. Tutors at Dartmouth are completely free. The College pays the tutor for you. All you have to do is make use of the resource. You never struggle alone at Dartmouth. There are plenty of resources to support you. — Guilherme Marinho Ramos ’22
One of my linguistics professors mailed me a textbook for a class because it would’ve been a financial difficulty to purchase it. The professor of my First-Year Seminar met me outside of class at a cafe to go over an essay during his own busy schedule after flying back from a conference in California the night before. My professors have been there, nonstop, and are continually supportive. They want to see me succeed. — Gabriel Gilbert ’23
ILLUSTRATION BY JAN KALLWEJT
Inside the Hopkins Center for the Arts, you’ll find the Donald Claflin Jewelry Studio, which offers free jewelry-making classes to Dartmouth students. At my first class, we tested out our designs using scrap metal and special stamps. Although the rings I made would definitely not be sellable, I learned so much about the process of jewelry-making. I’m glad I finally made the trip to the jewelry studio. I know it will not be my last! — Jenny Chen ’21
I developed a strong bond with the professor of my writing seminar class, so I took him out to lunch under Dartmouth’s “Take Your Professor Out to Lunch” program, which allows students to invite a professor for a meal at Pine Restaurant on Dartmouth’s dime. We talked about our lives, and he gave me advice on the rest of my Dartmouth career. I was told that Dartmouth’s small school setting allowed for the development of strong bonds, even with professors — and after taking only three classes at Dartmouth, I can already tell you that that’s the truth. — Shuyi Jin ’23
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Courses of Study The liberal arts shape the Dartmouth experience, creating an academic culture imbued with critical thinking and creativity. One that promotes experimentation, reflection, learning, and leadership. A curriculum where poetry and neuroscience are natural partners and collaboration across disciplines happens organically. A course of study without boundaries. Forget the intellectual lines people draw. You won’t find them here. African and African American Studies Ancient History Anthropology Applied Mathematics for Biological and Social Sciences m Applied Mathematics for Physical and Engineering Sciences m Art History Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages Astronomy Biological Chemistry M Biology Biomedical Engineering Sciences M Biophysical Chemistry M Chemistry Classical Archaeology Classical Languages and Literatures Classical Studies Cognitive Science M Comparative Literature M Complex Systems m Computational Methods m Computer Science Digital Arts m
Creative problem-solving and design thinking come together in Dartmouth’s Human-Centered Design minor. Run by Thayer School of Engineering, it brings together anthropology, engineering, and entrepreneurship to solve complex problems across varied fields — exactly what the liberal arts at Dartmouth are all about.
Earth Sciences Economics Education m Engineering Physics M Engineering Sciences English Environmental Earth Sciences Environmental Science m Environmental Studies Film and Media Studies French French Studies M Geography German Studies Global Health m Government History Human-Centered Design m International Studies m Italian Italian Studies M Jewish Studies m Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Linguistics Markets, Management, and the Economy m Materials Science m Mathematical Biology m Mathematical Finance m Mathematical Logic m Mathematical Physics m Mathematical Data Science M Mathematics Medieval and Renassiance Studies m Middle Eastern Studies Music Native American Studies Neuroscience Operations Research m Philosophy
Portuguese (Lusophone Studies) Physics Psychology Public Policy m Quantitative Social Science Religion Romance Languages M Romance Studies M Russian Russian Area Studies Social Inequalities m Sociology Spanish (Hispanic Studies) Statistics m Studio Art Sustainability m Theater Urban Studies m Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies m = minor only M = major only
Can’t decide what to study? It’s not uncommon for Dartmouth students to double major or modify their major. A modified major consists of 10 courses, six in one field and four in a second — or even third — field. For example, you could modify your comparative literature major with art history or Medieval and Renaissance studies.
Dartmouth guarantees to meet your demonstrated need for all four years. See what you might be eligible for. The MyinTuition Quick College Cost Estimator asks only six questions to provide an early estimate of what a year at Dartmouth could cost for your family. Go to dartgo.org/quickcost to get help anticipating your college costs.
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DEVIN SINGH ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF RELIGION
At a glance, Professor Devin Singh’s life and work are woven from unlikely connections. Art, religion, economics, and even martial arts converge in his research and teaching. These interests— and the connections between them — piqued his curiosity from an early age. Having grown up in a multifaith, multinational family in Cameroon and Morocco, questions about cross-cultural and interreligious issues arose naturally for him: Why do people have certain ideas about God? What is the “good life”? What is ultimate meaning? “I did my undergrad in a liberal arts context similar to Dartmouth’s, very much open to exploring big questions of meaning and significance,” he says. Today, Professor Singh studies connections among religion, politics, and economics —particularly links between God and money. His recent work focuses on how the language of debt has blended with ideas of guilt and sin in different religious traditions, and how it’s been used to describe humans’ relationships to deities. These connections, Professor Singh suggests, could account for the power of debt in modern society. Classroom discussion encompasses everything that matters most to him about teaching: fostering and deepening a sense of empathy in his students. Dialogue and debate challenge us to inhabit perspectives that might not necessarily align with our own. “I’ve appreciated Dartmouth students’ willingness to be down-to-earth, open, and transparent about their concerns,” he says. “They’re willing to be real rather than maintaining a front of having everything together.” Ten minutes into our conversation, Professor Singh offered me the same advice that shaped his own career: explore. “Maybe there’s something in biology or astronomy that could be really interesting for you,” he told me (an English major), “so don’t shut that out.” Committed to furthering a legacy of investigating what matters, he integrates the existential and the practical, the personal, the academic, and the esoteric into his teaching. He empowers his students to dig deep into what matters most to them and to find and forge their own enriching connections, however unlikely they may seem. —Sofía Carbonell Realme ’20
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Good
PHOTOGRAPH BY NAME DON HAMERMAN
Life Lessons
Pictured: In the Tower Room in Baker-Berry Library
THREADS :
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A PAGE FROM THE DARTMOUTH STORY
Baker Bells Fun fact: less than a year after the bells in the Baker Library tower pealed for the first time in 1928, a professor in the music department named William Durrschmidt invented a system to automate the ringing. Integrating three machines and a clock, his system was similar to the one found in a player piano. Nearly a century later, Dartmouth is one of the few remaining universities in the country that uses real bells instead of recordings or synthesized chimes, but the tradition is anything but oldschool. Today, the bells are programmed from within the tower or remotely thanks to custom-designed software written years ago by an electro-acoustic music student. Baker’s bells ring on the hour and half hour and play songs three times a day. Dartmouth’s alma mater plays every evening at 6 PM. The other two daily selections are requests by members of the Dartmouth community and often include Happy Birthday, the Jeopardy theme song, and Lean on Me. Since April 1st, the bells have pealed for two minutes every evening at 7 PM in recognition of the healthcare workers battling COVID-19. During special weekends, students can book tours of the tower—and snap some of the most spectacular selfies on campus.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELI BURAKIAN
Produced by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions of Dartmouth College Writing/Editing: Thurston-Lighty, Ltd. Design: Hecht/Horton Partners
Note: The officers of the College believe that the information contained herein is accurate as of the date of publication, and they know of no significant changes to be made at the College in the near future. However, Dartmouth reserves the right to make, from time to time, such changes in its operations, programs, and activities as the Trustees, faculty, and officers consider appropriate and in the best interests of the Dartmouth community. Equal Opportunity: Dartmouth is committed to the principle of equal opportunity for all its students, faculty, staff, and applicants for admission and employment. For that reason, Dartmouth prohibits any form of discrimination against any person on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, sexual orientation, marital or parental status, national origin, citizenship, disability, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other legally protected status in the administration of and access to the College’s programs and activities, and in conditions of admission and employment. Dartmouth adheres to all applicable state and federal equal opportunity laws and regulations.
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The Search
A Guide to Navigating College Admissions
The Search is about helping you see a path forward in your own college search, wherever that path might lead you. It’s a conversation in 12 parts, each one a 30-minute blast of advice and reflection drawn from the Dean’s resources at Dartmouth as well as friends and colleagues from other schools and colleges. It’s available on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, and just about anywhere else you find podcasts.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN
Join Dean of Admission & Financial Aid Lee Coffin for The Search, a college admissions podcast for high school students and their families.