3D Magazine :: April 2024

Cultivating Dialogue Across Difference at Dartmouth

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.

FEATURES

12 Innovating for Impact

26 What is a Liberal Arts Education? And why is it more important than ever in the age of ChatGPT?

44 Dartmouth Dialogues

COLUMNS

2 First Hand

A message from Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid

3 It’s a Fact

The Class of 2027 by the numbers

6 Humans of Hanover

Meet some of the members of the Class of 2028

10 Financial Aid

Learn how a Dartmouth education can be affordable for you

20 My ”Why Dartmouth?“

Advice for high school seniors from a ’24 from New Hampshire

22 Basecamp to the World

Students share how Dartmouth’s off-campus study programs benefit their mental health

32 Goal-Oriented Athletics highlights from Big Green teams

36 Humans of Hanover: Faculty Edition

38 Commitment to Care

Dartmouth launches a strategic plan in support of student mental health

40 Onward & Upward

Meet Dartmouth’s newest Rhodes Scholars

48 D-Plan

A senior illustrates the flexibility of Dartmouth’s quarter system

52 Courses of Study

A computer science major dives into the Dartmouth curriculum

56 Funding Outside the Lines

Financial access at Dartmouth extends well beyond financial aid

60 Tapestry

A thread from Dartmouth’s history

Dartmouth College is located on traditional, unceded Abenaki homelands.

Cover illustration by Greg Mably Photograph at left by Don Hamerman

Conversation animates a college community. Discussion, dialogue, and debate are enhanced by diverse perspectives and backgrounds as assumptions are challenged, ideas are considered, and new opportunities are imagined.

To me, that is the magic of college.

It’s been a few decades since my own undergraduate experience, but what lingers across those years are memories of spirited discussion guided by an informed professor and latenight debates in a dorm room over a shared pizza. My suburban upbringing, my first-gen view of myself and of the world, expanded in those moments.

I listened.

I pushed back.

I stretched.

I didn’t always agree with what my peers thought, but their often-impassioned comments made me consider the issues of the day in a more deliberate way. Those conversations made me a more flexible and nuanced thinker. Sometimes, I changed my mind. Sometimes, it reinforced what I knew to be true for me.

The Lee who emerged from that undergraduate space was more worldly and alert than the boy who arrived four years earlier. That type of growth opportunity might be even more essential now than it was for me in the early 1980s.

At Dartmouth, a small college where discussion-based classrooms are the norm, dialogue is foundational to who we are. Dartmouth is a college, for example, where professors from Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies co-teach a course on Israel and Palestine, welcoming spirited debate and dialogue as

“Discussion, dialogue, and debate are enhanced by diverse perspectives.”

they probe the nuances of history and religion and politics in that ancient region. At Dartmouth, the classroom syncs with current events.

In January, President Sian Leah Beilock announced the debut of “Dartmouth Dialogues,” a new initiative that represents “our shared commitment to…facilitating conversations and skills that bridge political and personal divides.” President Beilock hopes Dartmouth Dialogues will offer “training and practice for students, faculty, and staff in empathetic listening, managing emotions, navigating conversations, and finding points of connection across ideological differences.”

As part of its rollout, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visited campus to understand how Dartmouth had navigated the early weeks of the war in the Middle East, a crisis that has roiled many campuses. The Secretary met a group of students who “highlighted examples of campus life where differences were mostly aired in a civil way without conflict,” the Associated Press reported. Afterward, Secretary Cardona said, “This is what we need to see across the country.”

Dartmouth’s Admissions Committee values dialogue, too. As we shaped the Class of 2028, we assessed qualities that elevate interaction and engagement on campus. Ideally, our next class will seed and facilitate discussion, dialogue, and debate as students bring an openness to other perspectives as well as a demonstrated ability to raise and deepen discourse. The ability to listen, a capacity for empathy, and kindness are core qualities at this campus in the woods.

We live in a fast space. Information is everywhere. Few moments offer an opportunity to digest and assess what we see and hear and read. Navigating that reality is the opportunity of a liberal arts education.

Dartmouth prepares students for “a lifetime of responsible leadership.” The promise of that mission starts with lessons in the art of dialogue, in the discovery of common ground as well as a shared purpose that moves us forward.

That is a big part of the magic of this college.

Lee A. Coffin Vice President for Enrollment and Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid

PHOTOGRAPH

4,447

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

It’s a fact.

student-tofaculty ratio

50

57 U.S. STATES plus D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands

1209 students in the Class of 2027

NATIONS

20

60% of students engage in research of students participate in internships average class size

80%

14%

14%

first generation to college international citizens

41%

of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are students of color Type of School Attended 34% 55% 11% INDEPENDENT PUBLIC RELIGIOUS 971

95%

77 languages spoken graduated in the top 10% of their class

high schools represented

17 %

of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are Pell Grant recipients

~27 %

of students belong to low-income households worldwide

23

EDGAR MORALES ’24

he / him / his

HOMETOWN: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

MAJORS: LATIN AMERICAN, LATINO, AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES AND ENGLISH WITH A CONCENTRATION IN CREATIVE WRITING

America’s Most Promising Young Poet of 2023 is a Dartmouth student. The Academy of American Poets, whose University and College Poetry Prizes recognize students aged 23 or younger, bestowed the honor upon Edgar Morales ’24 for his poem Swim He joins a cohort of renowned poets, including Sylvia Plath and Ocean Vuong, who first won recognition through the program.

“It serves as a model for my poetic work,” Edgar says of Swim, which he wrote about his mother in response to a prompt in Professor Matthew Olzmann’s intermediate poetry class: Write about where you came from. “Intuitively, I thought about my mother’s womb, this space of security and love and fear of the world outside a mother’s protection and the poem was born.”

Edgar wrote his first collection of poems after reading The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo in Professor Marcela Di Blasi’s Latinx Intergenerational Literature class. “I’d never viewed my Latino identity as embodied by poetics because of how I’d been conditioned to believe poetry operates,” he says. “The Poet X was the first place I saw myself in poetry. Professor Di Blasi helped me understand how Latinx literature operates within academia.”

Edgar’s interest in Latinx literature extends to his role as an undergraduate advisor for La Casa, a residential community that provides academic, cultural, and social immersion for students interested in studying Spanish cultures and languages. Together with live-in advisor María Clara de Greiff, he devised programming for residents around migrant justice that “gets at the heart of the intersections of storytelling, culture, and the significance of poetics across borders.”

For Edgar, who entered Dartmouth intending to study engineering, poetry has been a means of probing recollections of home, family, and origin. “Leaving Los Angeles and moving to Hanover was a big shift. I experienced feelings of nostalgia and guilt,” he says. “In poetry, I attempt to relive memories some of them painful, others joyous; some real, others imagined.”

Edgar’s senior thesis, supported by English and creative writing professor and celebrated poet Vievee Francis, centers around the term “motherland.” The project explores the redress of memories lost through immigration and examines themes of innocence, identity, and personhood. In support of Edgar’s thesis research, the English and creative writing department funded his travel to Mexico to meet some of his family for the first time. He is also submitting applications for MFA programs. “I believe that poetry is for anybody. I’m a poet, and I can say that with confidence now. As long as I’m writing and reading, that’s enough for me.”

Lauren Halsey ’26

In Dartmouth’s Classrooms, a Poet Finds His Voice

Pictured: In the Poetry Room in Sanborn House

Lana

Avalos ’28 Monterrey, México

“Surrounded by New England‘s natural woodsy landscape, Dartmouth presents an opportunity to stay connected to and learn from the environment. The balance of nature is a great example for students as we challenge ourselves to not only achieve career-oriented success but also contribute to the world. The ’28s are ready.”

Illeas Paschalidis ’28 Wilton, CT

“I cannot picture a better spot for inspiration than beside the marble fireplace of the Sanborn Library, especially after a four o’clock tea service. I hope to start this winter with an email invite from Robert Frost for a midnight snowball fight. There’s no community I’d rather join than the Big Green.”

Munachiso

Mmuo ’28 Austin, TX

“A flexible academic structure, a brilliant volleyball program, and an inclusive environment constitute Dartmouth as a spot where I know I can flourish. I am particularly interested in Professor Lee’s findings on how a protein functions during somatic cell divisions. Dartmouth is a setting where I can intellectually mature and prepare for a life in STEM.”

HUMANS OF HANOVER

Yvangi Jacques ’28 Brockton, MA

“The D-Plan encourages a vast intellectual foundation. From internships and research to grant funding, there are many ways I can have a oneof-a-kind experience at Dartmouth and contribute to the campus community. The D-Plan, along with the tight-knit community and picturesque landscape, makes Dartmouth a very attractive school to me.”

Talya

Jacoby ’28 New York City, NY

“As a queer, Muslim-Jewish New Yorker attending a progressive high school, I find my classmates and I agree on most things. At Dartmouth, I know I’d be confronted with opinions that challenge me. I would love to engage in this academic tradition by fearlessly opening myself up to difficult conversations.”

Colin O’Reilly ’28 Muskogee, OK

“Dartmouth’s Indigenous Fly-In Program changed my life. Late-night debates at the Native American House, round dancing at the Green, and chalking affirmations on campus the night before Indigenous Peoples’ Day sparked a realization: I am not alone in my journey as an outspoken Indigenous person. Dartmouth gives me a voice.”

Sol Song ’28

Fairfax, VA

“Dartmouth, the birthplace of AI, encompasses collaborative spirit, innovation, and open possibilities. I’d explore the intersection of machine learning and the humanities through courses like Ethics and Information Technology. Using the D-Plan, I’ll study abroad in Budapest to immerse myself in computer science and Hungarian culture.”

Maia Bazo Vergara ’28

Lima, Peru

“Dartmouth’s open-minded community nurtures aspiring policymakers like me. DeShazo’s course Latin America’s Search for Democracy will allow me to explore ways to decrease Peru’s economic gaps. I’d join Shaonta’ Allen to do research on intersectionality and inequality in developing countries, providing insight from my experience as an anti-racism educator.”

Axel Schulz ’28

Tucson, AZ

“After going on a Dartmouth tour and sitting in on two film classes, I’ve had an epiphany: A Dartmouth liberal arts education will build my creativity in a way no film school could. Immersing myself in the rigorous, supportive, and distinctive community that is Dartmouth will uniquely forge my voice as a filmmaker and a person.”

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 2028 SHARE WHAT DREW THEM TO THE COLLEGE.

Olivia Tak ’28

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Jaipur, India

“Through my work and volunteerism with the DCSI, I am leveraging the D-Plan’s flexibility to bridge human behavior and socioeconomic policy, continuing to empower marginalized communities in India. I’m poetizing at Spilled Ink, finding family within Hanover’s intimate campus, and improvising with the Subtleties at the Hop.”

Benjamin Folk ’28

San Diego, CA

“I can clearly picture myself amidst the beautiful rural landscape, where programs such as the Sustainability Action Program, the Stretch, and the Dartmouth Outing Club fuel my love for the natural world. In this campus-wide family where friends and professors alike know me by name, I know I would form deeply personal relationships to last a lifetime.”

Holly Christiansen ’28 Cranbury, NJ

“My Dartmouth tour guide recalled countless memories spent with his friends at a local café, conversing in tightly-packed booths. The fondness with which he spoke of these experiences struck an emotional chord in me. I’ve always yearned for a community where I can form close relationships with my peers and teachers.”

Dartmouth Researchers Call for Energy Justice in the Global South

For more than a decade, Dr. Sarah Kelly has studied hydropower and Indigenous rights within the MapucheWilliche communities in Chile. In 2021, she cofounded Dartmouth’s Energy Justice Clinic, a group of student and faculty researchers whose mission it is to create more equitable energy futures. Nadine Lorini Formiga ’25 became one of the Clinic’s first research assistants. Now, the pair is working together to study just energy transitions in Latin America. Nadine also served as president of the Dartmouth Brazilian Society last year.

Let’s start by defining energy justice. What does that mean?

How does the Energy Justice Clinic support that ideal?

Dr. Kelly: Energy justice is a framework that aims to both diagnose injustices within energy systems and support more just energy alternatives that is, energy transitions away from a fossil-fuel economy and towards a low-carbon, regenerative economy. At the Energy Justice Clinic, we give students across all disciplines the tools and training to ethically and meaningfully conduct research that serves community needs. Some of our projects are hands-on like working to weatherize local homes while others are more theoretical, like comparing how energy insecurity manifests in rural areas versus urban centers.

Nadine, how did you become involved with the Energy Justice Clinic?

Nadine: Last winter, I received funding from Dartmouth‘s Presidential Scholars program to study the importance of transnational solidarity networks among Indigenous groups around matters of energy justice. Indigenous communities all over the world suffer from similar injustices relating to land dispossession and development. When they’re connected on a larger scale, they can make their cases even stronger.

Now, I’ve received additional funding from the Stamps Scholars program to shift my research focus towards the study of alimergia, a grassroots approach to combining understandings of energy justice and food sovereignty, which is the right of communities to control their own food systems, in southern

Brazil particularly in my home state of Rio Grande do Sul. In a country like Brazil, justice needs to be intersectional. It must combine elements of land, energy, and the environment within larger frames of sovereignty because of the country’s legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and other exploitative resource dynamics.

How has the Energy Justice Clinic helped shape your career goals?

Nadine: Before coming to Dartmouth, I had a very abstract understanding of research. Now, I want to be a researcher! I fell in love with this really meaningful way to produce knowledge to take what I’m learning at Dartmouth, return home to Brazil, apply the concepts, and create my own networks of solidarity. I plan to get a PhD one day to keep engaging with energy research and political ecology in the global South.

Dr. Kelly: Mentoring Nadine and juxtaposing our work in Brazil and Chile has been an incredible learning experience. Dartmouth has world-class faculty, staff, and students, and the College has always had undergraduate education at the center of its mission. The infrastructure that supports undergraduate student researchers is unparalleled.

Nadine: One of my biggest takeaways from the Energy Justice Clinic is that change only happens by listening to the communities on the ground. I’ve seen the gaps in the literature and learned how we can contribute to scholarship by uplifting community voices. That’s a beautiful lesson I’ll take with me in my life forever.

she/her/hers

Hometown: Porto Alegre, Brazil

Major: Geography

Minors: Environmental Studies and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies

Sarah Kelly

she/her/hers

Lecturer in Geography Program Manager of the Energy Justice Clinic, Irving Institute for Energy and Society

PHOTOGRAPH

DON HAMERMAN

Pictured: Standing on the docks of the Connecticut River

Nadine Lorini Formiga ’25

Dartmouth is need-blind and meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for all admitted students, regardless of citizenship.

NEED-BLIND

Dartmouth reviews applications without regard for your family’s ability or inability to pay for your education, regardless of citizenship status.

$0 PARENT CONTRIBUTION

Families with total income of $65,000 or less and who possess typical assets will have a $0 expected parent contribution.

AID TRAVELS WITH YOU

Students receiving need-based financial aid pay the same net price for a term on a Dartmouth off-campus study program as they would for a term in Hanover.

100% DEMONSTRATED NEED MET

Dartmouth will meet 100% of your demonstrated need for all four years.

NO REQUIRED LOANS

Dartmouth will not include required loans as part of the financial aid award created to meet a student’s demonstrated financial need.

HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE

Dartmouth will provide financial aid recipients with scholarship assistance towards the cost of Dartmouth’s health care plan.

$67,791

The average need-based scholarship for the Class of 2027

77%

We’re committed to making a Dartmouth education affordable for you.

By Nancy Schoeffler Photography by Don Hamerman

IMPACT INNOVATING FOR

At Dartmouth, collaboration across disciplines sparks bold solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.

Dartmouth College hums with innovative spirit. In dynamic, cutting-edge labs and classrooms, students and faculty translate their ideas on how to solve problems into reality. They push for their discoveries and inventions to move the needle and make a difference. At her inauguration in September 2023, President Sian Leah Beilock cited innovation with impact as one of the five key pillars of her vision on how to move Dartmouth forward.

“The complex problems facing the world today demand urgent, sophisticated solutions, making our push for discovery and breakthrough innovation ever more vital,” President Beilock said in remarks delivered from a podium on the Dartmouth Green. “These problems also need leaders who have an understanding of the human condition, of history, and of the value of interpersonal relationships.”

“We know that the biggest issues health care, climate, growing economic inequality, racial justice, peace and security will not be solved within a single discipline,” she added. “Because of our size and scale, we have the ability to spur innovation at the intersections of disciplines and amplify this combination in service to society. It is in that space between where there is ample ground for new approaches and invention. That’s the Dartmouth way.”

Beilock also noted that the College ranks fourth in the nation as measured by alumni-led companies, based on size; fifth in female founders; and that nearly half the engineering faculty have started their own venture capital-backed companies.

Innovative ideas come to life at Dartmouth and undergraduates play key roles in making that happen.

A VIBRANT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR INNOVATORS

The focus on making the College an innovation hub continues to intensify. Dartmouth embarked on the largest building project in its history with the recent transformation of the West End of campus. Long the home of the Thayer School of Engineering, the West End now boasts the new Engineering and Computer Science Center (ECSC) and the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, which has revitalized interdisciplinary collaborations. The new spaces underscore Dartmouth’s serious commitment to providing an enhanced infrastructure where ideas can percolate, be explored, be developed, and produce results.

Undergraduates can get involved in Dartmouth’s vibrant hive of problemsolving activity right from the start both in their classes and working with professors. In the popular course ENGS 21: Introduction to Engineering, for example, students learn design principles and are challenged to bring their ideas from concept to product. Many students find roles as paid interns and research assistants roles that deepen and expand on their own academic inquiries and quests and frequently propel them into meaningful advanced research or jobs after college.

Opportunities abound. The Digital Applied Learning and Innovation (DALI) Lab, cofounded a decade ago by director Tim Tregubov ’11, employs about 100 undergraduates at any given time who work on projects for partners from outside companies and nonprofits. “One of the critical aspects of DALI is the mentorship cycle where students come in as learners, with an assigned mentor, and then become doers, and then mentors themselves who can pass on their knowledge,” says Tregubov, who also earned a master’s degree in computer science from Dartmouth.

Rashad Brown Mitchell ’24 is a teaching assistant at the Machine Shop, an instructional lab that fosters problem-solving and teamwork skills through hands-on learning.

“Because of our size and scale, we have the ability to spur innovation at the intersections of disciplines and amplify this combination in service to society.”

PRESIDENT BEILOCK

DALI also sponsors The Pitch, a competition in which students get two minutes to present “the next best tech idea” to win startup funding or a partnership with DALI. Recent winners include Blabl, an artificially intelligent avatar for children with speech impediments pitched by Ayan Agarwal ’21, and MEMRY, an app for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and their caregivers, pitched by Tishya Srivastava, who earned a master’s degree in engineering last year.

Meanwhile, the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship runs about 40 programs in addition to the DALI Lab, according to director Jamie Coughlin, including accelerators, entrepreneurship forums, and immersion trips. Magnuson partners with Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business to offer undergraduates full scholarships to TuckLAB, an eight-week crash course on the principles of entrepreneurship finance, so that fledgling company founders learn to analyze data and make informed decisions. Magnuson also co-manages the Cable Makerspace, a well-stocked workshop where students can get hands-on experience with tools, 3D printers, laser cutters, and other machinery to fabricate their own innovative ideas and prototypes. DALI and the Makerspace are just two of about two dozen labs, machine shops, workshops, and design studios housed in the West End.

Coughlin credits Dartmouth’s close-knit community, where people from different fields can readily interact, and its spirit of “rugged individualism in the middle of the woods” as key ingredients that nurture innovation at Dartmouth. “People can really lean into their passions and explore them,” he says. “Those skillsets of being resilient individualists who can plant their own flag and bring people together are really characteristic of successful innovators and entrepreneurs.”

Students work on a collaborative exercise in engineering professor Eugene Korsunskiy’s Design Thinking class at the Engineering and Computer Science Center.

Undergraduates can get involved in Dartmouth’s vibrant hive of problem-solving activity right from the start— both in their classes and working with professors.

Julia Hill ’24, a first-generation student majoring in psychology with a minor in biology, echoes the importance of Dartmouth's close community. “That makes a huge difference in being able to get to know your professors, get to know your peers, and have the opportunity to collaborate,” she says. “And frankly, you get more opportunities than you necessarily have time for. It’s almost a skill in itself to be able to say which doors you want to open, because, ultimately, all of them are open for you here.”

SIMULATING BETTER HEALTH OUTCOMES

Dr. Anant Shukla was in his second year as an emergency medicine resident at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in 2022 and working as the senior resident on a shift in the ER when a critically ill patient was rolled in with a massive nosebleed. The patient’s oxygen level was dropping rapidly, but he had so much blood in his airway that Shukla could not see his vocal cords in order to intubate him.

“I was unnerved by this,” Shukla recalls. “It was very humbling.” Shukla realized he had never seen that situation before, despite being a major in the U.S. Army who had served in combat in Afghanistan. He also realized that someone in a rural environment, a refugee camp, or a war zone might face a similar problem intubating a patient. “What about someone who is in the middle of nowhere?” Shukla wondered. “How could I teach them about this scenario?”

With encouragement from Dr. Matthew Roginski on DHMC’s critical care faculty, Shukla secured funding from The Hitchcock Foundation and has worked with undergraduates at the DALI Lab for several years to create an augmented reality difficult airway intubation simulator. The simulator trains people on various intubation situations they might face and provides immediate feedback on how they can improve.

Andrew Kotz ’24, now the DALI team’s tech lead on the project, joined the effort during the winter of his first year. “I’d say the most exciting thing about this is that we get an impossible task and then we do it,” says Kotz, a double major in computer science and engineering. He already has a job lined up at Apple after he graduates but might like to launch his own startup one day.

The intubation simulator is one of about 15 concurrent projects at DALI, according to Tregubov. He says the experience for students to collaborate in small teams on cool projects, apply concepts they’ve learned in class, and turn an idea into something useful is a major motivator, even “life-changing.” “All of a sudden they see that they’ve solved a problem. They see people’s lives improved,” Tregubov says.

For his part, Shukla says, “We have had exceptional students at DALI, who are absolute whiz kids, who know everything about programming. It’s been an honor to work with them. We are really forging the edge here.”

Karen Fortuna, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, collaborated with Julia Hill ’24 on a venture called RealVision. Hill presented their winning proposal at the Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Digital Health Awards last June. RealVision uses artificial intelligence to detect neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and schizophrenia in patients years before they begin to show clear symptoms.

Gittes

RealVision is rooted in the concept of participatory human-centered design, Fortuna explains. She and Hill partnered with family members and caregivers, who likely are the first to observe possible memory or cognitive loss, and integrated their ideas into the technology. “We bring in the patients as well,” Fortuna adds. “That is where you create the next great discovery. They bring you ideas and insights that we never thought of before. Integrating the voice of the individual is really changing science and how it has traditionally been done. Really, the sky’s the limit.”

ENGINEERING A GREENER WORLD

As an undergraduate, Arianna Gragg ’22 interned at Rondo Energy, a California startup that works on heat battery integration. The technology uses steam as a replacement for fossil fuel-fired boilers in large manufacturing centers and industrial parks. She now works full time at Rondo as an applications engineer and is thrilled to be tackling what she calls “the world’s greatest challenge.” Gragg majored in engineering with a minor in human-centered design. “I took cross-disciplinary courses in art. That mixed the analytical thinking with the fabric of who I am. Even in what I do now, I think it’s critical to understand a human need before we go in and design processes. We need to ask, ‘What are we designing for? What do people really want?’”

Gragg was a member of Women in Innovation at Dartmouth, and by senior year its vice president. She says the student club began on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic and centered on innovation and design thinking. With guidance from Sarah Morgan, senior program manager in experiential learning at Magnuson, the club later broadened its scope to drill into pragmatic questions about business and financing. “Dartmouth, holistically, is a great place to learn about startups and venture capital and entrepreneurship and technology,” Gragg says. “You find your own niche.”

As a first-year student, Vico Lee ’24 competed in a hackathon, designing an app with classmate Elizabeth Frey ’24 to promote recycling in his home country of Singapore. They won, but Lee was frustrated. “I realized I had no analytical skills as to whether this product would be something customers would use, whether it had any potential. Could I sell it in the long run? What about marketing? Sure, it’s really cool to build a product, but what’s the point if there’s no market for it? Otherwise, it’s just a waste of resources.” Lee, who is majoring in computer science and physics, founded DartUP, a program at the Magnuson Center that provides student innovators with practical tools so they can take a deep dive into launching a startup. “It also reminds students that when they build teams, they need to bring in people with different talents and points of view,” Lee says. Teams spend six months developing an entrepreneurial venture from scratch and compete for prizes.

Energy Pools, a fiber arts installation on display in the Irving Institute’s atrium, exemplifies Dartmouth's commitment to confronting environmental challenges and working across disciplines. Created by film and media studies professor Jacque Wernimont, the piece uses recycled textile strands in colors that represent the various types of U.S. energy consumption and the changes needed for a sustainable energy future.

Dartmouth students have gone on to develop companies that tackle environmental problems in unusually creative ways. Matt Rothe ’98 cofounded

Trevor

Taplin ’25 operates a 3D printer at the Cable Makerspace, where students can learn to use laser cutters, soldering irons, sewing machines, hand tools, and more—free of charge.

Blue Ocean Barns and developed a seaweed-based cattle feed supplement that makes cows belch less. That reduces the animals’ methane emissions by a whopping 80 or even 90 percent, according to field tests. Marty Odlin ’04, Thayer ’07, who spent his childhood on fishing boats in Maine, engineered an idea to use kelp to trap carbon. His company, Running Tide, harvests kelp grown on buoys and then sinks these carbon-rich biomasses deep in the sea, where the carbon no longer adds to global warming. Ben Parker ’16 worked as a mechanical engineer for Tesla before he cofounded Lightship, a San Francisco company working to bring electric vehicle technology to recreational vehicles. Within a week of opening for preorders last spring, Lightship had booked more than a year of production of the energy-efficient RVs.

Dartmouth also is a partner in the National Science Foundation’s Interior Northeast Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Hub with nine other universities. I-Corps, which promotes innovation in predominately rural areas and provides free courses for STEM researchers and entrepreneurs, has provided funding support for numerous Dartmouth projects, including an open-source wastewater PFAS removal system developed by a team of four undergraduates and engineering students.

DESIGNING CHANGE FOR GOOD

Film and media studies professor Mary Flanagan wants to make the world a better place. She pushes people to think like children and ask questions. For example, could a video game help promote recycling? Combat bias? The answer is yes. In her Tiltfactor Lab, Flanagan has created commercial games that challenge how people view the world, measurably shift their perspective,

“The best and fastest way to create new knowledge and translate it into impact is by working together, learning together, problem-solving together.”

PRESIDENT BEILOCK

A group of students works together on a project at the Engineering and Computer Science Center.

and spur them to confront stereotypes. “We get used to putting a lot of brakes on ourselves about what’s possible. For social change, persuasion, even public health those areas need people who can think creatively, even playfully, about serious problems.”

In her game design classes, Flanagan gives students prompts every week or two. One assignment was to rapidly prototype a game that would shape players’ thoughts and raise awareness about extremism. “It could be political, or it could be religious,” says Won Jang ’26, a biomedical engineering major with a minor in human-centered design. An earlier assignment involved fake news, recalls Lydia Jin ’26, who is double majoring in computer science and cognitive sciences.

Jang and Jin worked together on an extremism game, turning it into a murder mystery. “The way we approached it was by trying to allow an audience to get in the mind of someone who might become involved in extreme activities or cult behavior,” Jin says. Together, they created fictional Google tools for the game’s main character including her Google searches, Gmail, photos, and calendar which players could then look through, like detectives, to understand what motivated that behavior. Jin, who wants to pursue a career in game design, is interested in developing the game further.

Changing behavior lies at the heart of Balloon, a company Amanda Greenberg ’07 cofounded in 2018 to help organizations avoid groupthink, promote franker discussions by inviting anonymous input, improve decision-making, and sharpen leaders’ priorities and goals. An environmental studies major who had worked as a public health researcher, Greenberg realized that business meetings and processes didn’t work effectively, nor did they address how people actually collaborate, share information, and make decisions.

Balloon got a jumpstart about five years ago when Greenberg won a pitch competition at the Dartmouth San Francisco Entrepreneurs Forum, and several alumni invested in her company, which now has clients such as Amazon, Estée Lauder, the Houston Astros, the Phoenix Suns, and Medtronic. “One thing that stands out about Dartmouth is the reception of the alumni community,” Greenberg says. “Lots of doors open. It’s just such a robust network.” She credits her experience as an undergraduate with teaching her how to identify problems and to be persistent qualities that have been key to her innovative company’s success.

The College continues to broaden and enrich the vast array of meaningful learning experiences it offers students, instilling in them the confidence to pursue their own innovative ideas, launch themselves into careers that pursue new frontiers, and forge breakthroughs that will improve the human condition and the health of our world.

“The best and fastest way to create new knowledge and translate it into impact is by working together, learning together, problem-solving together,” President Beilock remarked at the close of her inauguration speech. “Solutions to make the world a better place are out there; we just need to accelerate their development and apply them more broadly. And I have every confidence that we can.”

Nancy Schoeffler is executive editor of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

Technical instructors Daniel DeNauw and Izzy Labombard (center) work with undergraduates in a Machine Engineering class. Students in the course design remote-controlled rovers that complete "missions" while navigating simulated Mars terrain.

Pictured: At Still North Books & Bar in Hanover, where Eliza works as a barista

ELIZA HOLMES ’24

she/her/hers

Hometown: Keene, New Hampshire

Majors: English; Minor: Sociology

“Why Dartmouth?”

In each issue of 3D, we ask a Dartmouth senior to reflect on a question they answered roughly four years prior: “As you seek admission to Dartmouth’s incoming class, what aspects of the College’s academic program, community, and/or campus environment attract your interest? In short, why Dartmouth?” Here, Eliza Holmes ’24 revisits that prompt in her final year at the College. Now a Senior Fellow in the Office of Admissions, Eliza serves as an ambassador for Dartmouth to prospective students in their college search.

As a senior in high school, I wrote in my “Why Dartmouth?” essay that I wanted to explore “the backyard of my home state.” My hometown of Keene, New Hampshire is only an hour’s drive from the Dartmouth campus. The outdoors were an important part of my upbringing in the southwestern corner of the state. Hiking, skiing, and exploring the surrounding area brought my family and me closer together, and I knew I wanted to continue developing my connection to the outdoors.

I was sure I wanted to stay close to home for college, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to study. Growing up, I was a voracious reader, often staying up way past my bedtime to finish one more chapter. English was my favorite subject in high school, but I often felt alone in that passion: the reading and writing assignments that excited me were usually the same ones my friends complained about. I often felt pressured to pursue a STEM path, which only added to my indecision.

When I started researching colleges, I couldn’t help but be drawn in by the Dartmouth Outing Club, the oldest and largest collegiate outing club in the nation. And I’m sure you can imagine my relief when I learned that I wouldn’t have to rush to pick a major at Dartmouth its liberal arts curriculum would not only allow me to explore, it encouraged exploration.

When I arrived at Dartmouth as a first-year, my surroundings felt simultaneously familiar and unknown. Amid the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, the outdoors was one of the only places that felt normal. I spent any free

moment I could outside, often taking walks around nearby Occom Pond and Mink Brook. I even rode an e-bike to the trailhead of Gile Mountain, a beautiful hiking path near campus that culminates in breathtaking 360-degree views of New Hampshire and Vermont.

I joined the Dartmouth Outing Club, the same organization that had captivated my interest one year earlier. I tried climbing, backcountry skiing, and whitewater kayaking across places like Cardigan Mountain, Dartmouth’s Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, and Acadia National Park. The DOC offers many trips for beginners and even lent me gear for free, which made me feel more comfortable learning unfamiliar skills. In the DOC, I also met my best friend. I found a community.

At Dartmouth, I have rediscovered and solidified my interest in literature especially Victorian literature. As a first-year, I took a course called Victorian Children’s Literature: Fairytale and Fantasy, and since then, I have explored a range of Victorian works. Studying literature across time and place has afforded me new analytical lenses that lead me to think critically about the world.

Dartmouth has taught me that learning can happen anywhere and in many forms, whether that be reading in the library or kayaking on the nearby Connecticut River. Together, the outdoors and English literature have inspired me to pursue a career in education. I’m so grateful to Dartmouth, this college community in the backyard of my home state, for the ways it has challenged me in all its spaces.

basecamp world to the

Students Share How Dartmouth’s Language Immersion Programs

Benefit Their Mental Health

BY AGATHA BORDONARO

When Sasha Usher ’25 signed up to study abroad in Berlin during their sophomore fall, they hoped to improve their German language skills while also learning how to navigate a new country. What they didn’t anticipate was the immense positive impact the experience had on their mental and emotional health.

“I never would’ve expected the kind of growth that happened by nature of having that much freedom in a country,” says Sasha, who hails from Boulder, Colorado.

Sasha’s experience sounds familiar to Gerd Gemünden, a professor of German studies, film and media studies, and comparative literature. This past year, as he reviewed student evaluations of the German studies department’s Language Study Abroad and Foreign Study Program, a theme caught his attention.

“Usually students say they enjoy the experience of being abroad and leaving a familiar environment behind,” Gemünden says. “But there were several who specifically mentioned that they felt like it was a benefit to their mental health.”

Freedom to Slow Down Language immersion programs

boost students’ mental health in distinct ways, say Usher and Gemünden. First, the programs provide students with a greater sense of independence than ever before.

“As I learned Italian, I also learned new cultural norms, values, and ways of life,” says Sohini Mandal ’26 of her time on the Department of French and Italian’s Full Immersion in Rome Experience. “I became more independent and gained insight into who I am as an adult.”

Alice Cook ’25 agrees that the independence afforded her on the Berlin Foreign Study Program was formative. “I got comfortable with city life and riding public transit. At the end of the program, I spent a week traveling by myself in southern Germany, which was definitely something I wasn’t prepared to do prior to beginning the program.”

Sasha points out that being abroad was also extremely “freeing,” as “you can be whoever you want to be for the first time.” And equally as important, they add, you have the freedom to fail.

“I think the person Dartmouth attracts is someone who has very high standards for themselves,” Sasha explains. “But to be able to accept failure in

a lot of different aspects of life is so important, and it was one of the biggest takeaways.”

Forming Crucial Connections

The opportunity to form bonds with a host family, with other Dartmouth students, or with other individuals in the city was also beneficial for many participants. Not only do these relationships strengthen students’ social skills, but they also open students’ eyes to other ways of living and provide a sense of belonging and community.

“Being in another culture made me feel free from the expectations of the culture I knew well back home,” says Chase Harvey ’25, who credits the Rome program with helping him learn how to form deep, long-lasting relationships.

Sasha’s host was a friendly octogenarian who had opened her doors to two other students. “All of us lived very independent lives but we could come back and have these lovely conversations. These people had an amazing influence on who I decide to be as an adult.”

This story is adapted from an article that appeared on Dartmouth's Faculty of Arts and Sciences website in December 2023.

CAROLINE CONWAY ’24

she/her/hers

HOMETOWN: CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

MAJOR: COGNITIVE SCIENCE

MINORS: HISPANIC STUDIES AND PSYCHOLOGY

When Caroline Conway ’24 first arrived at Dartmouth, the COVID-19 pandemic had heightened concerns about mental health and wellness on college campuses across the country. “In my high school, there was no organization or space dedicated to providing support for people experiencing mental illness,” she says, “so when I came to Dartmouth, I was in awe of the Mental Health Union. I found this space where students were honest about the problems they were facing and shared resource gaps that they saw.”

Today, Caroline is co-president of the Mental Health Union. The student group partners with the Dartmouth Counseling Center, the Student Wellness Center, and Dartmouth faculty to support students experiencing mental health challenges. The MHU’s peer ambassador network is a key pillar of its programming, Caroline says. “The goal of the ambassador program is to equip students with the tools to center conversations about mental health in their respective spaces.”

The history of Alzheimer’s disease in her family initially sparked Caroline’s interest in brain-based research, but she wasn’t sure which subfield she wanted to explore. When she took Functional Neuroimaging of Psychiatric Disorders with David Silbersweig ’82, a leading psychiatrist and functional neuroimaging researcher who was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth in 2022, her vision clicked. “We discussed the neuroscience behind mental illness and the emerging field of neuropsychiatry. I wanted to contribute to the valuable role that research plays in the provision of mental health care.”

Last year, Caroline earned a Goldwater Scholarship one of the most prestigious national scholarships for undergraduates conducting research in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics to support her work in psychology professor Mark Thornton’s Social Computation, Representation, and Prediction (SCRAP) laboratory. Her work in the lab, which examines how people form impressions of others based on speech recordings, is laying the foundation for her future research career. “My ultimate goal is to use neuroimaging as a tool to improve diagnosis efficiency, create pathways for earlier intervention, and ultimately better understand the neuroscience underlying mental illness.”

Today, Caroline is applying for PhD programs and research assistant positions. She finds time for fun and self-care, too, with friends in the Dartmouth Outing Club and Alpha Theta, a gender-inclusive Greek organization. Looking back on her leadership as a mental health advocate, she reminds students of the value of taking a pause. “Remember, you are one person with a very human capacity. It’s okay to fail at things, and sometimes, failure is a good thing. Don’t be afraid to explore, but have grace for yourself.”

Selin Hos ’25

A Mental Health Advocate Creates a Culture of Care

Pictured: At the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center

With all the attention that Generative AI is getting these days, and the promise that ChatGPT can even write our essays for us, you might be wondering, “Why do I need to get an education at all, never mind the classic liberal arts degree like the one offered at Dartmouth?”

What is a Education?

BY CECILIA GAPOSCHKIN ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUISA JUNG

And Why Is It More Important Than Ever in the Age of ChatGPT?

What use is a liberal arts education in the age of ChatGPT? It’s a good question. Despite all the promises that proponents of AI are currently making, it is precisely in this environment that a liberal arts education is more critical than ever. To understand why, we need to understand what exactly a liberal arts education is.

Let us begin with what liberal education is not. First and foremost, it is not oriented to political parties, agendas, or philosophies. The phrase predates the creation of the two basic political parties by about 2,000 years. The “liberal arts” (artes liberales) go back to the ancient world, well before even the existence of universities, which emerged in Europe around 1200. The liberal arts were the skills (artes) taught to free men (liberales) that is, non-laborers or slaves. They were what trained free men (and, yes, they were only for men) to be able to think independently, and thus be competent to participate in governance and society.

What else? A liberal arts education is not a technical training in a particular subject matter that leads to a particular job and career trajectory. It is not a nursing degree. Or an accounting degree. Or a degree in computer systems administration. This does not mean that a liberal arts education will not prepare you for a career. It just doesn’t prepare you for a single career. Indeed, what it does is prepare you for any multitude of careers. It is precisely because holders of liberal arts degrees are not pigeon-holed into a single vocation and thus a single career path that they have the enviable ability to make and take new professional opportunities.

A liberal arts education should also not be confused with a degree in one of the humanities. Ars (ars artis, for those of you who have had Latin) means “knowledge,” “science,” “skill,” and “craft.” It is a false friend (that is, a word that does not mean the same thing as a similar sounding word in a different language) that has not served the STEM fields well. Physics is an ars. Engineering is an ars. Robotics is an ars. So too are art history, sociology, and economics. A liberal arts education encompasses all academic disciplines, including the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences (everything from engineering, to chemistry, to computer science). In fact, a liberal arts education is defined precisely by its multitude of disciplines, which invites multiple ways of thinking about the world, about knowledge, and about “truth.”

This is one of the reasons that liberal arts institutions like Dartmouth value diversity so much, because a diversity of knowledge, and a diversity of people who bring in different types of knowledge, is one of the foundational building blocks of this philosophy of education.

So what, then, are the liberal arts? And what is a liberal arts degree?

In short, a liberal arts degree is a degree in thinking. What does this mean? It means that a liberal arts education, done right and undertaken with enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion, makes you smarter. That is, it hones your natural skills of discernment and intellect to productive thought and the creative application of knowledge.

It exposes you to different types of thought (often through distribution and general education requirements there’s that diversity principle again) so that you can at once understand the power and the restrictions of different ways of thinking about the world (that is, different disciplines).

It teaches you how to use your thinking, and the skills acquired in honing your thinking (reading, writing, numeracy, analysis, synthesis, the persuasive expression of ideas, and the creative application of knowledge), in novel and creative ways, to solve problems and imagine new possibilities. That is, it teaches you how to be nimble and creative.

A liberal arts education teaches you to distinguish between claims and evidence, and between fact and opinion, and then to use facts and evidence to pursue informed agendas. These skills are honed first in the context of an area of major study, but they are also transferable skills, to be used in any or many context(s).

This is why, when employers hire students from liberal arts colleges, they care less about the student’s major than about the student’s ability to talk about their major intelligently. That is, employers hire our students not for what they know, but for how they think. Likewise, medical schools are eager to accept students who have studied the humanities, since these applicants bring a set of interpretive abilities with them that is vital in the practice of medicine; and it is also why law schools want students from the gamut of the disciplines, because the law touches on all areas of the human endeavor.

This approach to higher education has served us well. The liberal arts scheme has been the driver of knowledge production and intellectual inquiry since the Middle Ages. Indeed, it was the Middle Ages that invented both the institution of the university and our notion of critical thinking. Peter Abelard (d. 1142) is perhaps the most profound intellectual of the 12th century and a central figure in the development of formal learning that became university education. He rejected the intellectual method of the previous centuries that rested on the loyal acceptance of past authorities and taught a new generation of students to discover new knowledge by applying human reason to intellectual problems. Abelard explained simply that, “By doubting we examine, and by examining we come to the truth.” Many historians recognize this moment in the 12th century to mark the beginning of the European “take off” and the seeds of modernity.

It is a history we should pay attention to, at a moment when ChatGPT and Generative AI invite us to rely on large language models and algorithms (even if massive) that depend on existing knowledge, texts, and formulas. Useful, to be sure, in telling us what we already know, but what Abelard showed was

that relying on past authorities prevented the discovery of new ideas, and that it was only through the critical application of human reason by trained minds to vexing or unsolved questions that new discoveries were made, and that knowledge as a whole moved forward.

In this sense, ChatGPT is just a souped-up version of eleventh-century scholarship, repackaging material from the body of previous writing (and here, not necessarily even the good writing) to reformulate existing ideas.

The point of a liberal arts education is to train the brain to look for new ideas, new ways of thinking about problems, new solutions. And to do so using knowledge framed with ethical values rooted in core principles of common humanity. For Abelard and his contemporaries, it was understood that one had to master the basic grammar of thought before tackling the more difficult and more important work of theology and philosophy. To that end, the standard university curriculum was rooted in the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). One had to learn to think critically, rationally, logically, and creatively before one could undertake more ambitious intellectual work. The seven liberal arts the precursor of our own conception of “the liberal arts education” were the building blocks of the competent mind.

The same premise underlies our own system of liberal education. The standard liberal arts curriculum is designed to ensure that students, upon completing their course of study, will have mastered the basic grammars of critical thought in order to then tackle, with creativity, reason, and inspiration, the more specialized tasks of professional life. This is why, looking back, careers often have so little relationship to majors. Amy Coney Barrett majored in English literature. Anthony Fauci majored in classics. Nikki Haley studied accounting and finance. Michael Bloomberg studied electrical engineering. Kirsten Gillibrand, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1988, majored in Asian studies. It is also why so many career successes appear to have had such varied career paths.

What then, in this context, is the function of the required major if not to learn a specific amount of disciplinarily-defined content? It is not not! to

train in a field that is based on information learned in that major. It is to practice thinking, researching, interpreting, writing, learning, and synthesizing with increasingly complex arenas of knowledge. It is to confront ambiguity and be able to reason toward the best solution. It is to come to a position on a question and argue for it convincingly to others. These, not discipline-specific information, are the skills (artes) that employers seek to capitalize on when hiring our graduates.

The major is thus, in a sense, the “thought laboratory,” the brain’s sandbox. Working within a defined discipline, with large and challenging data sets (whether in chemical data, or historical data, or philological data), the liberal arts student is prompted to manage, assess, and apply increasingly sophisticated ideas and information. Managing and interpreting complex concepts works the brain, like any muscle, to become stronger and more nimble that is, smarter.

This is also why, if you want to get the most out of your undergraduate experience, you are probably better off writing a senior thesis in a discipline rather than double majoring in two closely related disciplines. This is what will push your brain farther make you smarter and this is the best investment you can make.

Because, in final analysis, a liberal arts education has, over the past millennium, proven to be the best way to develop the capacity to think in sophisticated, multivalent (there’s the diversity principle again), complex, and reasoned ways. And this is the thing that will permit you to do what ChatGPT, which constructs ideas from existing knowledge, will never be able to do: to imagine and create new vistas for the future.

Cecilia Gaposchkin, the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor in History at Dartmouth, studies late medieval cultural history, and has published on the crusades, on the kings of medieval France, and on liturgy. She also served as Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major advising between 2004 and 2020.

Pictured: In a lab at the Engineering and Computer Science Center

An Engineer Applies a Human-Centered Lens to Medical Research

MOSES MATANDA ’25

he/him/his

HOMETOWN: DALLAS, TEXAS

MAJOR: BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

MINOR: AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Moses Matanda ’25 is tinkering with new ways to bridge the gap between technology and medicine. During his high school years, his younger sister was often hospitalized. “I knew that I wanted to pursue medicine because of the health problems my family faced,” Moses remembers, “but I wanted to do it at a larger scale. So, I asked myself, ‘What am I good at?’” He liked math and science in high school, so he took Mathematical Concepts in Engineering during his first term at Dartmouth and was immediately hooked.

Moses next took Design Thinking, a popular engineering course that teaches students how to devise creative, user-focused solutions to problems. The class, he says, deeply informed his belief in a patient-centered approach to health care. “I started thinking, ‘How can I bring the best of engineering into medicine? How can I use the skills and concepts I’ve learned in my engineering classes to create better patient outcomes?’”

Moses quickly dove into research through the First Year Research in Engineering Experience, a program that offers first-year undergraduates early exposure to hands-on work and mentorship in the field of engineering. Under the guidance of engineering professor Solomon Diamond, Moses and his teammates won the Brieanna S. Weinstein Engineering Design Prize for their work to improve a neonatal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) interface.

Dartmouth’s Health Professions Program, which supports students and alumni with career goals in health care, helped Moses find an internship at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City during the summer after his first year. “There, I shadowed physicians who thought the same way as engineers,” he says. “They identified specific needs and devised multiple personalized solutions to patients’ problems.” The following summer, Moses joined the Summer Undergraduate Research Program for Underrepresented Scholars at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he investigated the impacts of the HIV-1 viral protein Vif on the human genome.

Today, Moses is the Alumni Outreach and Mentorship Chair for Dartmouth’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and is applying to medical school with the support of the Health Professions Program. Looking back on his college career, he credits Dartmouth’s liberal arts curriculum, which encourages students to take classes across a wide range of subjects, with pushing him in new academic directions. “After taking an African and African American Studies class, I decided that I wanted to know more about my history, where I came from, and the history of my people,” says Moses, whose extended family lives in Zambia and Zimbabwe. “If I want to help better serve them in my future, I need to know about what happened in the past.”

Sydney Wuu ’24

Goal-Oriented

Whether you are interested in playing a sport at the varsity or club level or cheering on those teams there are plenty of opportunities to do so at Dartmouth. The College offers 35 varsity sports as well as club and intramural teams, and three of every four Dartmouth undergraduates participate in some form of athletics. They benefit from Dartmouth Peak Performance, a comprehensive program designed to position student athletes to achieve the highest levels of physical, intellectual, and personal growth.

A Few Big Green Athletics Highlights

Dartmouth Football Wins 21st Ivy Championship

The Big Green finished its 6-4 season with a definitive 38-13 victory over Brown to secure the Ivy title, shared with two other teams. Coach Sammy McCorkle dedicated the championship to the memories of the team’s beloved coach Buddy Teevens ’79 and teammate Josh Balara ’24.

Heavyweight Rowing Earns Gold at Head of the Charles

After four Dartmouth rowers medaled at this summer’s World Rowing U23 Championships, the men’s club eights captured bronze, and the club fours secured gold 12 seconds ahead of 52 other teams. First year Isaac Lawrence ’27 showed a dominant performance in the club fours, guided by returning senior Alex Robertson ’23.

Women’s Cross Country Picks Up 1st Place Individual Win

Despite suffering an injury last spring, Ellie Tymorek ’25 placed first in the Women’s Championship 5k individual race at the New England Championship in October. The support of her teammates and coaches during her recovery, Tymorek says, was key in clinching the win.

Dartmouth Musicians Bring Mexican Compositions to the International Stage

Percussionist Abi Pak ’26 has a deep musical background in folk accordion and classical piano. Last year, she traveled to Mexico City with the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble to perform original Mexican music, including an accordion concerto she collaborated on with a graduate student in Dartmouth’s digital musics program. The trip was supported by the Mexican Repertoire Initiative, an ongoing commitment by wind ensemble director Brian Messier to bring Mexican compositions to the international stage. At the center of their work is Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, which is undergoing an $90 million transformation and is slated to reopen in the fall of 2025.

Abi, how did you decide to continue your musical career at Dartmouth?

Abi: At the end of my college search, I had to choose between my state school and Dartmouth. I’d decided that if I attended a liberal arts college, I would have to leave music behind. Nevertheless, I decided to sign up for an admitted student program at Dartmouth, and Brian invited me to come listen to the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble.

When I heard them play cumbia, a Latin music genre that I grew up playing, I was shocked. I certainly did not expect to hear cumbia from a college wind ensemble, let alone in a place like New Hampshire. I also didn’t expect to see so much opportunity, support, and interest in this type of music at Dartmouth until Brian told me about the Mexican Repertoire Initiative.

Brian: The Mexican Repertoire Initiative started out of curiosity. I wondered, “Why isn’t there more music by Mexican composers?” That got me started on trying to solve two problems: to provide the huge number of talented composers and musicians in Mexico with more platforms for performance and to improve the representation of Mexican music in the United States.

Does a student need to declare a major or minor in music to engage in musical opportunities at Dartmouth?

Brian: No. A key phrase I use all the time is “regardless of major.” All of the musical and artistic activities at Dartmouth are intended for everyone, no matter their field of study. One of the benefits of music and art at Dartmouth is that every student has access to our premiere faculty and ensembles.

Abi: Exactly. There’s a very diverse range of student music groups at Dartmouth. Majors and non-majors have the benefit of time with and mentorship from instructors who really care. Brian in particular has a clear curiosity and willingness to support students’ ideas and creativity.

Brian: It’s important to me to do work that is advancing the field of music. When students come to Dartmouth and join my band, I don’t want them to just recreate their high school music experience. I want them to use their high school experience to create and find something new. I want them to join me in advancing their artistry and exploring new territory.

How has Dartmouth supported you in your music making?

Brian: The support of Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts and my colleagues in the music department is truly the centerpiece of everything we do. The Mexican Repertoire Initiative bringing in guest artists, performing at premiere venues is funded by the Hop. Abi recently took another trip to Mexico with me that was funded by the music department. I’ve never worked anywhere where I felt such unilateral support to pursue my impulsive curiosity. It’s really special.

Abi: I’ve found that when you put forth your ideas, Dartmouth will support you. It really hit me when we premiered in Mexico City, and I thought, “Wow, I’m playing music that is so important to me in a place I never thought it would be played with people who understand one another in such a unique way.”

Brian: What I love about Dartmouth is that I’m untethered from the expectations of a conservatory or of a music major-dominant program. I get to work with lifelong music makers who are willing to take some risks with me. It’s one reason Dartmouth should be at the top of the list for students who are interested in the arts.

PHOTOGRAPH

DON HAMERMAN

Pictured: At the Hanover Inn, a historic hotel overlooking the Dartmouth Green

Abigail Pak ’26 she/her/hers

Hometown: Germantown, MD

Major: Linguistics; Minor: Music

Brian Messier he/him/his Director of Bands, Senior Liaison for Hopkins Center Ensembles; Lecturer, Department of Music

HUMANS OF HANOVER FACULTY

Alexandra Leewon Schultz

Assistant Professor of Classics

“As a literary critic and cultural historian of the Greco-Roman world, I study the politics of literature, the history of knowledge, and gender and sexuality in classical antiquity. I also examine how ancient ideas about the past have influenced modern ideas about classical antiquity.”

Casey Stockstill

Assistant Professor of Sociology

“I am a sociologist and race scholar. My work focuses on race, class, and the microlevel of social life. Much of my research is focused on childhood. My new book, False Starts: The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers, is an ethnographic account of how young children experience segregated preschools.”

Tucker Burgin

Assistant Professor of Engineering

“My research focuses on the use of computational models to better understand and engineer enzymes and other proteins with a wide variety of applications in health care, energy, and the environment.”

Aseel Najib Assistant Professor of History

“I am a historian of premodern Islam specializing in the late antique and early Islamic periods. My interests lie at the intersection of Islamic law and politics, which I explore in conversation with contemporary debates in political, critical, and postcolonial theory.”

Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Dávila Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

“I am a terrestrial ecosystems ecologist. My research program addresses the above- to below-ground dynamics of plants, their influence on the global carbon cycle, and their interactions with the environment, as well as the future trajectory of forest carbon and their policy implications.”

Raquel Fleskes

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

“My research uses ancient DNA to understand histories of historic period archaeological populations in North America. I am specifically interested in understanding the lived histories of European- and African-descended individuals by co-interpreting ancient DNA data with archaeological, osteological, archival, and oral history sources.”

MEET SOME OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DARTMOUTH FACULTY.

Herbert Chang ’18 Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science

“I am a computational social scientist who studies social networks, online politics, and how artificial intelligence reshapes human relationships. My research considers how technology impacts political debate, such as how social bots share election misinformation on social media.”

Anthony Romero

Assistant Professor of Studio Art

“My areas of expertise are spatial justice, public art, Indigenous studies, critical border studies, performance studies, food sovereignty, Indigenous cultural resurgence, sound studies, and sonic arts.”

“We’ve lost brain tissue equal to the volume of a lime.”

Professor of Anthropology Jeremy DeSilva discussed his research on gray matter loss in humans since the Ice Age with The Wall Street Journal.

“We do have to treat rural areas differently. Geography matters, and the nature of the built environment matters.”

Assistant Professor of Engineering Erin Mayfield talks about her study on clean energy adoption in rural communities in a CNET article.

“It all points to our planet being a rare gem in a Universe that is very hostile to life.”

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Marcelo Gleiser wrote an article for Big Think that explains how exoplanet discoveries shed light on Earth’s rarity in the cosmos.

“Even when partisan Americans disagree with the candidate from their party on a large number of issues, most are unwilling to entertain crossing the aisle to vote for a candidate from the other party.”

Associate Professor of Government Sean Westwood speaks with The New York Times about partisan polarization in the United States.

Commitment

President Sian Leah Beilock, a cognitive scientist who has long studied why people sometimes choke under pressure, has made student mental health and wellness a key priority of her administration. “Understanding how anxiety and stress play out in the brain and body has been the focus of my research for the past 20 years,” she said in her inaugural address in September. “What I’ve learned is that there are discrete steps we can take to better care for ourselves and others and that well-being is directly linked to academic achievement.”

In November, Dartmouth released the Commitment to Care, a strategic plan for supporting student mental health and well-being. The plan, which consolidates and builds upon significant progress that Dartmouth has made recently including the implementation of 24/7 teletherapy, a new “Time Away for Medical Reasons” policy, and the elimination of overnight infirmary charges has five strategic goals.

1 4

Center well-being in all we do, both inside and outside the classroom.

Centering well-being will be accomplished by taking a holistic approach that prioritizes the well-being of our students; recognizes and draws upon students’ inherent strengths; provides intentional and widely available support; and aligns our policies, environments, curricula, and resources with best practices for mental health and well-being.

Proactively work with those experiencing mental illness to aid students in reaching their goals.

At Dartmouth, we will promote mental illness awareness and reduce stigma; implement systems to identify students in need; and expand access to high-quality mental health services.

to Care

2

Create an inclusive community to foster mental health and well-being for students with diverse lived experiences.

As a community attentive to the nuances of diverse experiences, we will reconfigure outdated systems, practices, and paradigms and continue to create new traditions in support of mental health and well-being.

Dartmouth launches a strategic plan in support of student mental health and wellness.

3 5

Invest in innovative applications of evidence-based approaches to respond to changing environments and needs.

By listening to our community’s voices and applying an evidence-based approach to system improvement, we will use data to guide how we direct our resources to meet changing environments affecting students’ mental health and well-being.

Equip students with the resources and skills to navigate both success and failure with strength and confidence.

We will lower barriers to support in our environment by surrounding students with a well-informed network of staff, faculty, and students trained to support students’ mental health and well-being; enhancing resources to ensure students have easy access to services; and redefining stereotypical notions of strength to promote healthy help-seeking behaviors.

onwardupward &

ALUMNI WHO CARRY DARTMOUTH INTO THE WORLD

Two Dartmouth Community Members Named Rhodes Scholars

The scholarship the oldest and among the most celebrated international graduate scholarships in the world funds graduate study at Oxford.

Jessica Chiriboga ’24

A history major and government minor from Glendora, California, Jess plans to use the Rhodes to pursue an MPhil degree in history at Oxford, where she will study Latino environmentalism and outdoor recreation in the San Gabriel mountains around Los Angeles from the early 20th century to the present day.

“I hope the Rhodes Scholarship will broaden my understanding of our biggest environmental and political challenges and nurture my growth as a leader,” says Jess, who plans a career in history or law.

Jess currently serves as student body president of Dartmouth Student Government, where she has been active throughout her time at Dartmouth. In particular, she has been deeply involved in advocating for student mental health. “I am passionate about creating spaces that are better fit for the people in them and working to improve mental health resources and policies and other student life issues for undergraduates on campus,” she says. “I am eager to use what I have learned as a student leader, outdoorswoman, and student of history and government to advance justice in the United States and beyond.”

Zachary Lang ’23

Zachary, who hails from Franconia, New Hampshire and double-majored in history and philosophy at Dartmouth, is currently on a Fulbright Program award in Belgium, where he is teaching academic English to undergraduates and graduate students at Hasselt University.

He plans to use the Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a BPhil degree a stepping stone to a doctoral program, and, ultimately, his dream of an academic career in philosophy. Zachary says he has always been interested in philosophy, but it wasn’t until Dartmouth that he was able to study it formally. “I was not only interested in philosophy as an intrinsic matter, but also because it was helpful for the kind of sexual violence prevention work that I was engaged in,” he says.

That work includes serving as a member of the student advisory board for the Sexual Violence Prevention Project and as executive policy chair of the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault, through which he worked to expand restorative justice pathways for survivors.

Equally important to Zachary is the community of peers that Rhodes brings together. “My thinking has benefited a lot from talking with similarly minded, motivated peers, and I view the Rhodes community as an extension of that students who are academically and practically interested in advancing social issues coming together and working collaboratively across disciplines.”

This story is adapted from an article by Hannah Silverstein that appeared on the Dartmouth News site in November 2023.

A Sociologist Brings Her Lived Experience to the Classroom

SHAONTA’ ALLEN

she/her/hers ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

Shaonta’ Allen distinctly remembers the first sociology course she took in college. “The instructor taught the course around four topics, three of which were race, education, and religion. As a Black Christian girl from Washington state who loved school, I saw myself in the materials of that class. So, it’s not surprising to me that I now teach about Black communities and sociology in a way that allows students to see themselves in the material.”

Professor Allen studies the intersection of race, religion, and social movements. Specifically, her scholarship focuses on how Black communities perceive and respond to social inequality at both individual and group levels. Her current research project examines how Black Christian millennials “make sense of race, racial inequality, and their faith, the ways that Christianity has been complicit in perpetuating inequality, and how to reconcile those tensions within the Black Lives Matter movement.”

For Professor Allen, lived experiences are an important form of knowledge in the classroom. “I like to share with students my identity as a first-generation, low-income woman of color from the West Coast. I also share with them my background as a qualitative sociologist trained in the Black feminist tradition.” In turn, she encourages her students to think critically about their own identities in relation to the course material. “I love that Dartmouth encourages students to shed the traditional power dynamics between professors and students to emphasize that faculty really are co-collaborators in their learning experience.”

Professor Allen’s favorite class to teach is called Dangerous Intersections: Intersectionality Beyond Boundaries. The course examines, through a variety of social lenses, the concept of intersectionality, a framework for understanding how social categories shape lived experiences. It was originally taught by leading intersectionality scholar Deborah King, who retired in 2023. “Teaching that course reminds me that the work I do is bigger than me,” Professor Allen says. “Sociology encourages us to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. It compels us to think about who benefits from and is harmed by societal norms. It pushes us to think more deeply about power.”

Her teaching and research, she says, also allow her to leverage her childhood curiosity in transformational ways. “My mom emphasized at an early age that education is the key to success. Had I played by the rules and allowed myself to believe the expectations others had of me, I wouldn’t be here. My advice is to always remember that you have the power and the agency to get yourself to the places that you deserve to go.”

Selin Hos ’25

Pictured: In the Tower Room of Baker Library

Dartmouth Dialo

gues

In today’s world, and on today’s college campuses, informed and respectful debate across difference is more critical than ever.

In January, President Sian Leah Beilock announced the launch of Dartmouth Dialogues. It’s a wide-ranging series of initiatives that will showcase Dartmouth’s commitment to programming across the institution that facilitates conversations and ensures that people have the skills to bridge political and personal divides.

It’s also a project that has deep roots in Dartmouth’s history. “Dartmouth has long championed dialogue across difference,” says President Beilock. “From the Great Issues course introduced by then-President John Sloan Dickey in 1947 to presidential debates held on campus since 1984, Dartmouth Dialogues brings a renewed focus on our ability to think critically, to question, and to probe and reflect, rather than blindly follow a predetermined ideology.”

The first phase will center on the Dialogue Project, a campus initiative years in the making that will offer training in the development of collaborative dialogue skills among students, faculty, and staff.

The Dialogue Project currently features four main components: a special topic series, the first of which is Middle East Dialogues, encompassing courses and events related to timely challenging topics; a new partnership with the nonprofit StoryCorps’ One Small Step program, which brings strangers with different perspectives together to record a conversation about their lives; workshops where faculty, staff, and students can practice the skills of collaborative dialogue; and guest speakers on campus who model and specialize in dialogue-related skills.

Dartmouth’s interdisciplinary programs in Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies have a longstanding commitment to fostering dialogue, community, and joint academic inquiry. Dartmouth Jewish Studies professor Susannah Heschel and Middle Eastern Studies professor Tarek El-Ariss were interviewed in November on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition about how their programs collaborated to present public forums fostering dialogue about the Israel-Hamas war. With thanks to NPR, we’re pleased to provide a transcript of that conversation in the pages that follow.

SCOTT SIMON (host): Anger and fear are felt on many college campuses since the October 7 attacks on Israel. A student at Cornell University in upstate New York has been arrested and charged with threatening the lives of Jewish students. And both Jewish and Arab students at a number of schools say they’re reluctant to express their views publicly. At least one campus, though, has tried to do what educational institutions are supposed to do teach. Dartmouth College is putting on forums where faculty from the Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies programs answer questions about the conflict and its roots in history. The forums have drawn packed auditoriums, and many hundreds of people have also watched the events online. The two professors who’ve organized these forums, Susannah Heschel and Tarek El-Ariss, join us now. Thank you so much for being with us.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: Thank you.

TAREK EL-ARISS: Thank you for having us.

SIMON: Let me ask you both I gather you were on the phone shortly after the October 7 attacks and decided we need to do something.

What was your thinking? Professor El-Ariss?

EL-ARISS: I was actually in Cairo when the events happened. And we immediately talked Susannah and I and said we need to address these issues. We need to create a forum for students to come and understand and think and reflect and ask questions. And we’re also, you know, teaching courses about these topics. We wanted this conversation to extend to the wider community and engage with what people were feeling, thinking, engaging with.

SIMON: Professor Heschel?

HESCHEL: It’s very important for us that we’ve worked together as faculty, as student groups, as programs Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies for many years. So we have a relationship already on campus. And because of that relationship for so many years, we were able to jump right in immediately

and bring the campus together and make sure we would not become polarized. So we wanted students of a range of political views Jewish students, Arab students, Palestinian students, Christian students to come together and talk together with faculty in an academic setting.

SIMON: Were you concerned about events getting out of hand, for lack of a better word, becoming even unsafe for people?

EL-ARISS: Susannah and I teach a course called The Arab, The Jew and the Construction of Modernity. And it’s a packed course, and we have students who are originally from Palestinian background, Arab background, Jewish backgrounds. And these were the students who came. And these are students who know us, who trust us, who are already part of a conversation. And so some of them, of course, were upset, angry, scared. But they brought these emotions, the soul baggage also and expressed it. But they expressed it in a thoughtful way, and things remained really civil throughout.

HESCHEL: I’ll just say that when I started to hear about the slaughter that Hamas was perpetrating against Israeli civilians, I was shattered and terrified. And I have to say I was overwhelmed emotionally. I did not expect the kind of rage and polarization on college campuses. I didn’t anticipate that. I don’t think anyone did. And I‘m horrified by what’s appeared around the country. We’ve also both of us have been consulted by colleagues at other universities, thanking us for what we’re doing and asking us what they can do what advice. And the problem is that in many colleges, Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies have not been allied, working together all these years the way we have. That’s a problem.

SIMON: I want to play a question for you that I gather was asked at the second forum. And I say this as someone who was once a reporter in the Middle East I don’t know how I’d handle it. The question is, is Israel can it be fairly called an apartheid state? Here’s the question.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: My question all major international human rights organizations Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, even Israeli

ones like B’Tselem, use the term apartheid to describe the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. But it seems like in a lot of these spaces, apartheid gets kind of dismissed and ignored, as though it makes people uncomfortable. I would like to get your direct thoughts on apartheid and stop skirting around the question. Thank you for your time.

SIMON: Two of your colleagues took that question, I gather. What would you have said if you were there that night?

HESCHEL: So I was there. Our colleague Ezzedine Fishere, who is, in fact, a former diplomat from Egypt, responded to the student and pointed out that the definitions and the international law of apartheid do not apply in that blanket way to Israel, first of all. And second of all, he asked the student, what are you trying to accomplish? So what’s the purpose of calling Israel an apartheid state? It becomes an epithet to arouse people’s rage in Israel. And what does that accomplish? More anger, more tension, more conflict, more war. What is the point? So we have to think about the kinds of questions we want to raise here and think about the goal we want to achieve. And the goal is ultimately peace, two people living in peace next to each other.

EL-ARISS: Yeah. You know, when does the conversation stop? Or when does recognizing the power differential becomes the end of the conversation, you know? OK, now I identified who’s the bad guy and who’s, you know, being violated, and we stop there. And it’s and this is not our job is simply stop at the condemnation. We want to understand, want to revisit the historical context, want to imagine a different future. You know, we need to do all this other work around. And we don’t want to stop at just simply saying, this is the bad guy. This is the good guy, you know, and then stop just right there.

SIMON: Let me ask you both if there as the great teachers you are if there’s one thing you could isolate now to tell all of us during this time, what would that be? Professor Heschel?

HESCHEL: I want people to think in complex terms, not to be satisfied with the reductionist approach, to place the present in a larger context of the past

but also, as we’ve been saying, to think about a better future, to imagine it. I had to give a talk recently about the Sabbath. The Sabbath is supposed to be a foretaste of Paradise. And the problem is nobody thinks about Paradise anymore. We’re so immersed in the horrors of the present and the past...

SIMON: Yeah.

HESCHEL: ...We don’t have a vision of a future. And that, I think, is true society wide. So what can we envision for a future and not in a punitive way? That’s also part of the problem. There’s something right now in the response to this current horror in the Middle East that feels very punitive and a bit sadistic. People need to be punished. Israel has to be punished. Hamas has to be punished. Why are we thinking in those terms? We’re talking about human beings.

SIMON: Professor El-Ariss?

EL-ARISS: I grew up in Beirut during the civil war, and I’ve experienced bombing and displacement. And actually, I just wrote a book about it. And I also had to teach the Middle East in New York on 9/11. I was supposed to meet with my students on that day. So I learned the hard way of how to deal with these talking about the region, talking about conflicts but also engaging when conflicts arise and how to really listen. And this is not the first time. For many of us, this is an ongoing spectacle, which but every time it fills us with sadness. But also, it is something that we need to engage and allow, you know, those emotions, as well, to make us reflect more and do more work, to teach more courses and bring more people into this conversation.

SIMON: Susannah Heschel is chair of the Jewish Studies Program, and Tarek El-Ariss is chair of Middle Eastern Studies both at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Thanks for being with us.

EL-ARISS: Thank you, Scott.

HESCHEL: Thank you, Scott.

Scan

Hometown: Northbrook, IL

Major: Engineering Sciences modified with Public Policy

Minor: International Studies

Rujuta Pandit ’24 she/her/hers

D-Plan

FALL

During my first-year fall, I took Multivariable Calculus, Introduction to Psychology, and my first-year writing class, a course called Social Media and You. I started college during the COVID-19 pandemic, so I met many of my current close friends in my first-year dorm and through outdoor activities like kayaking on the Connecticut River, hiking Gile Mountain, and walking around Occom Pond.

During my sophomore fall, I really began to feel at home at Dartmouth. I joined a sorority, met new friends in classes, and experienced the first of many homecoming bonfires and football games.

Embracing the flexible schedule of the D-Plan, I spent my junior fall in Washington, D.C. interning at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. At CEQ, I focused on the Net-Zero Emissions Supply Chains portfolio, writing policy memos and assisting with the Inflation Reduction Act implementation process. I also took my cousin trick-or-treating at the White House, watched the Thanksgiving turkey pardoning live, and attended conferences and events all over D.C.

SPRING

I always look forward to watching the campus evolve from stick season to springtime. Green Key weekend, an annual event featuring live music and free food, is easily my favorite of the year. It’s a great moment to step back and relax before exams commence. I’ve taken some of my favorite classes in the spring, including Global Health and Society during my sophomore spring. My classmates and I learned about various types of health conditions, including vector-borne illnesses like Zika and Lyme and non-communicable diseases such as obesity and drug abuse, and analyzed them through a political ecology lens.

By the end of the spring, I usually find myself spending warm days walking through Pine Park or lying on the docks by the Connecticut River with friends after they open for the season. During senior spring, I plan to visit local farmers markets and spread a blanket out on the Green during the first few days of warmth. Despite the busy academic terms, spring reminds me of how lucky I am to attend school in a place where I can calm myself and connect with nature.

Dartmouth has a distinctive year-round quarter system the D-Plan that enables students to customize their individual academic calendars across four years. Dartmouth offers four, 10-week academic terms per year that loosely align with the four seasons. Within some guidelines, students choose how and where they’ll spend each of those terms, whether taking classes in Hanover, studying away on an off-campus program, or embarking on a “leave term” to pursue an internship, research, creative pursuit, or time off. Here, Rujuta Pandit ’24 shares snapshots drawn from her D-Plan, organized by season.

WINTER

I love winter in New Hampshire, and low-cost equipment rentals from the Dartmouth Outing Club have made it easy to embrace the snowy outdoors. During sophomore winter, my friends and I sledded, ice skated, and enjoyed the huge piles of snow all across campus. That same term, I took Science Policy and Diplomacy with Professor Melody Burkins. The course introduced me to the idea of science and environmental communication and helped me decide to concentrate in environmental engineering. Professor Burkins became a mentor for me beyond the classroom, and I even took her to Pine Restaurant on Dartmouth’s dime through the Take a Faculty Member to Breakfast or Lunch program.

Coming from Chicago, I was a bit more prepared for the early sunsets and cold weather than some of my friends from the southern hemisphere, but I’ve always enjoyed how the campus seems to settle in for the term. Senior winter, I took skiing lessons at the Dartmouth Skiway, the College-owned ski mountain just a short drive from campus.

SUMMER

During my first-year summer, I interned at a think tank through the Rockefeller Center’s First-Year Fellows Program, which places students in policy internships with alumni mentors in Washington, D.C. That internship transformed my path at Dartmouth and helped me decide to modify my degree with public policy.

For me, sophomore summer encapsulated the best that Dartmouth and the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire has to offer. I really enjoyed living off-campus in a house with friends, watching Fourth of July fireworks over the Connecticut River, and visiting diners and farmers markets.

Building on research I’d done with engineering professor Mark Laser, I spent my junior summer in Uganda with a group of students from my Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering team and our faculty advisor from the Irving Institute for Energy and Society. There, we helped develop a community-scale solar water heating system to replace polluting firewood cookstoves. I bartered with Ugandan salesmen, became an expert on wrenches of different sizes and uses, and most important, witnessed sustainable development first hand.

FEDERICA BORDONI

RAMSEY ASH ’24

he/him/his

HOMETOWN: HUNTINGTON, WEST VIRGINIA MAJORS: QUANTITATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE AND MUSIC; PRE-HEALTH TRACK

“To my friends back home from smaller surrounding towns, I’m very much a city kid,” reflects Ramsey Ash ’24, whose hometown of 45,000 sits near West Virginia’s border with Ohio. “But when I arrived at Dartmouth and met people who are actually city kids from places like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston I thought, ‘Oh, wait a second. Maybe I’m not as much of a city kid as I thought.’ Within the U.S. or even a global context, I definitely grew up in a rural place.”

Ramsey graduated from high school at age 16 and arrived at Dartmouth ready to study engineering. His first-year seminar The Values of Medicine, taught by renowned medical anthropologist Sienna Craig changed everything. “She taught us how the concept of medicine has varied widely over time and place, especially from a cross-cultural perspective,” Ramsey says. “I learned that the cultures you exist in, the identities that you hold, the things you experience impact your health in very real ways. I became infatuated with the humanistic approach to medicine as it relates to pressing health challenges. That class opened my eyes to the possibility of becoming a doctor.”

In his sophomore year, Ramsey secured funding from the Undergraduate Research Assistantships at Dartmouth program to study health care network vulnerabilities with Dr. Erika Moen at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. A year later, Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding connected Ramsey to a global health internship in Hanoi, Vietnam. There, he studied how cross-cultural differences can affect the quality of eldercare. “It’s the norm in the U.S. to hire trained caregivers for senior citizens, but in Vietnam, where intergenerational living situations are common, that’s rather unheard of,” Ramsey explains. “In fact, my research showed that medically trained individuals do not provide the same level of care as family members in the Vietnamese context.”

Equally important to Ramsey, who is the son of musicians and who plays the clarinet himself, are his musical ambitions. At the encouragement of senior lecturer Jan Halloran, Ramsey auditioned for the wind ensemble, founded a clarinet choir, and joined the music department’s Foreign Study Program in London during his sophomore spring. He also declared a second major in music. “Forming a community around music was a transformative experience for me in terms of thinking about the ways that music can positively impact individual health, particularly mental health,” he says.

Drawing on his hometown roots, Ramsey is writing his senior thesis on vaccine hesitancy in rural areas. He encourages other college-bound students from rural backgrounds to embrace that as a defining feature of their identity. “Colleges are interested in your story, and that includes the answer to ‘What is the place you grew up like?’ If you’re a rural student and that’s your story, tell it. Your experiences are interesting, different, and important.”

Joanna Jou ’26

A Pre-Health Student Draws on His Rural Roots

Pictured: At Dunk’s Sports Grill in Hanover, where Ramsey works as a server

Courses of Study

Curious about the areas of study that Dartmouth has to offer? Dartmouth students can wait until sophomore year to declare a major, leaving plenty of time for exploration. Regardless of what you choose, the classes you take at Dartmouth will span disciplines far outside your chosen concentration. Here, Syed Hussaini ’24 highlights the departments in which he's taken courses— and shares the inside scoop on his favorites. How will you explore?

he/him/his

Hometown: Waukegan, Illinois

Major: Computer Science modified with Engineering; BE in Computer Engineering

African and African American Studies

Ancient History

Anthropology

Art History

Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages

Astronomy

Biological Chemistry M

Biological Sciences

Biomedical Engineering Sciences M

Biophysical Chemistry M

Chemistry

Classical Archaeology

Classical Languages and Literatures

Classical Studies

Climate Change Science m Cognitive Science M

Comparative Literature M

Computational Linguistics M

Computer Science

Digital Arts m Earth Sciences

East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies

Economics

Education m Engineering Physics

Engineering Sciences

ASCL 61.07/REL 19.32

Shinto: Foundations, Festivals, and Fox Shrines

I took this class my first-year spring to fulfill a distributive requirement (every Dartmouth student takes at least one course in each of the eleven areas of inquiry that make up the “distribs.”) We learned about the ancient Japanese religion Shinto and its development throughout history. For one project, my partner and I created a Shinto shrine in Minecraft and took our classmates on a virtual tour of its history. We also presented a podcast-style talk to the class about a Shinto kami (the Japanese word for deity).

JWST 34.03/GERM 44.06

The History of Jews in Germany (Migration and Memory)

This course on German-Jewish history has a unique travel component. At the conclusion of the fall term, my classmates and I traveled to Berlin, Germany for three weeks during winter break. There, we studied the history of modern Berlin, visited with leading scholars, and lived with German host families. I was able to connect much of the material from this course to what I learned about the origins and history of Judaism the previous winter in History and Culture of the Jews I: The Classical Period.

English

Environmental Studies

Film and Media Studies

French

French Studies

Geography

German Studies

Global Health m

Government

History

Human-Centered Design m

International Studies m

Italian

Italian Studies

Jewish Studies

Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies

Linguistics

Markets, Management, and the Economy m

Materials Science m

Mathematical Data Science M

Mathematics

Medieval and Renaissance Studies *

Middle Eastern Studies

Music

Native American and Indigenous Studies

Neuroscience

Philosophy

Physics

Portuguese (Lusophone Studies)

Psychology

Public Policy m

Quantitative Social Science

Religion

Romance Languages M

Romance Studies M

Social Inequalities m

Sociology

Spanish (Hispanic Studies)

Statistics m

Studio Art

Theater

Translation Studies m

Urban Studies m

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Writing Program

m = minor only M = major only *= major modification only

MUS 56.01

Individual Instruction Program, Strings

The Individual Instruction Program (IIP) allows students to take one-on-one instrument or voice lessons with a music instructor for course credit. My bass guitar lessons have been a blast! I was inspired to start the IIP after taking Beginning Music Theory my first-year spring—with no musical background whatsoever. In that class, I learned the basics of music theory and picked up key skills like reading sheet music and understanding rhythm.

COSC 056/ENGS 031

Digital Electronics

I had been struggling to narrow down a career focus until I took Professor Geoffrey Luke’s Digital Electronics class, which helped me fulfill a requirement for my Bachelor of Engineering degree. For my final project, I created a transmitter that uses keyboard input to flash morse code with an LED light. The knowledge I gained in this course came in handy while interviewing for jobs. After graduation, I’ll be designing computer circuits as a hardware ASIC design engineer!

WRIT 5

What Does It Mean to Be “Normal?”: Rhetoric of Disability and Accessibility

Part of Dartmouth’s first-year writing curriculum includes Writing 5, a course designed to help students develop college-level writing skills. There are dozens of options to choose from, each themed around a different topic. In this course on disability rhetoric, I applied my interest in technology to study how innovative solutions to the world’s problems can be accessible to all. This course also inspired me to delve into research on human-computer interaction, developing accessible solutions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in virtual classrooms.

A Government Major and Public Policy Expert Study Factors at Play in Elections

Carson Goh ’25 and Jason Barabas ’93 have been researching a wide spectrum of topics within American politics. Professor Barabas, an expert in political knowledge, deliberation, public policy, and democratic performance, is the director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences. Colloquially known as “Rocky,” the Center is Dartmouth’s hub for students, faculty, and staff engaged in policy research and teaching.

How did the two of you begin working together?

Carson: Growing up in New Hampshire, I was interested in learning how redistricting the process of drawing electoral district boundaries is done in this very politically active state. Specifically, I’m passionate about studying how independent redistricting commissions impact minority representation. So, while taking Professor Barabas’ class Polling, Public Opinion, and Public Policy my first-year fall, I approached him about my deep interest in polling and data, and he brought me on as a research assistant.

Professor Barabas: First of all, Carson is being modest here he did really well in the class. He’s a great example of how Dartmouth undergraduates can get involved with topics that really interest them. He absorbed the lessons, understood the techniques, and has been able to apply them in our research projects, in other courses, and most recently, through two major scholarships that he’s won to pursue collaborative research.

It’s an election year in the United States, and there’s a spotlight on your field of study. Tell us about your research project and how it started.

Professor Barabas: We’re studying how a candidate’s age impacts public support for that person in office. A couple years back, one of my students did an honors thesis on retirements in the Senate, and that got me thinking about why people voluntarily step aside. Age is often a factor in those kinds of decisions. It’s fascinating that in the United States, we have age minimums for candidates seeking federal offices, but we don’t have maximums. So that led to the question: Should we have mandatory retirement ages? If so, what should those be? There are a lot of competing factors and ethical implications here, like ageism and increases in the average lifespan.

How has the Rockefeller Center supported you in your scholarship?

Carson: The Rockefeller Center offers students a lot of opportunities to gain funding, connect with expert faculty, and foster interdisciplinary study in a way that’s applicable to real-world jobs and internships. For example, I interned at the New Hampshire Supreme Court last winter with the support of Rocky.

Professor Barabas: Many years ago, my own honors thesis in the government department was supported by the Rockefeller Center. Rocky also hosts speakers from all sides of the political spectrum, sponsors fellowship programs based in Washington, D.C. and abroad, offers leadership training courses, and houses Dartmouth’s public policy minor.

What is the value in studying government within the context of a liberal arts education?

Professor Barabas: Within a liberal arts college, students take classes in many different fields. I see a lot of students who are able to apply what they’ve learned in one area to another.

Carson: Absolutely. I took a South Asian art class this past term and learned about the history of the political systems in the region. It was really interesting to see that connection through a class that I didn’t expect to take when I started at Dartmouth.

What are your future plans, Carson?

Carson: I hope to go to law school after graduation. Dartmouth fosters students who are interested in giving back to their communities and making change in the world through public service, and that’s where I see myself. If you’re a student who values close partnerships with professors and small classrooms where you feel free to speak up, then Dartmouth is the place for you.

he/him/his

Hometown:

Majors:

PHOTOGRAPH

DON HAMERMAN

Pictured: In front of Tuck Hall

Carson Goh ’25

Nashua, NH

Quantitative Social Science and Government

Jason Barabas ’93

he/him/his Director of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences; Professor of Government

Dartmouth’s financial aid covers 100% of the demonstrated need of all its students, but the opportunities for funding don’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 range of opportunities Dartmouth has to offer. We asked current students to share experiences made possible with Dartmouth’s financial support.

Financial Support for Graduate Study

“Dartmouth is paying for the majority of my master’s degree tuition through the Reynolds Scholarship for Foreign Study, an award that supports postgraduate study or projects for Dartmouth seniors and recent graduates. I’ll be attending Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to earn my master’s degree in English. I also received two research grants from Dartmouth’s Leslie Center for the Humanities to support my research with English professor Carolyn Dever and German studies professor Petra McGillen.”

’23 from Florida

A Stipend for Research Abroad

“I received funding from the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact to conduct field research in Istanbul, Turkey on the root causes of voter disenfranchisement ahead of the then-upcoming Turkish presidential elections. Thanks to the generous stipend from DCSI, I was able to extend the project’s reach to oft-overlooked low-income and ethnic minority populations in Istanbul by conducting interviews at local churches and synagogues. It was an experience I still recount with a great sense of pride.”

’26 from Turkey

Funding for an Energy Immersion Trip

“Over spring break, I went on a cost-covered Energy Immersion Trip sponsored by the Dartmouth Sustainability Office and the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society. Students and staff leaders spent ten days traveling throughout Appalachia—a region of the United States that spans northern Mississippi to southern New York—to learn about the history of the coal industry and its impacts on the region. We visited a fracking site and a mountaintop removal coal mine, tried our hands at a lineman’s school lesson, and studied macroinvertebrates from rivers containing acid mine drainage.”

’26 from Tennessee

A Cost-Covered Backpacking Adventure

“Last winter break, I went on an 8-day backpacking trip with fellow Dartmouth students through the Catalina Islands off the coast of Southern California. The trip was sponsored by the Viva Hardigg Outdoors Club, a sub-club of the Dartmouth Outing Club for people whose gender identities have been historically marginalized women, trans folks, and non-binary people. The DOC generously subsidized the trip, providing equipment, meals, and financial aid for flights.”

’25 from California

ILLUSTRATION

RAFE STEINHAUER

he/him/his ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING

Rafe Steinhauer traces his interest in education back to the 9th grade, when he switched from a Montessori school, which focuses on hands-on learning and real-world projects, to a traditional public high school. “I’d had this rich, holistic approach to education and I thought, ‘Why did my daily schedule and school experience just change so much?’” Today, he combines his expertise in education and engineering to teach design thinking, a methodology that takes a human-centered approach to problem solving.

When Professor Steinhauer first learned design thinking in graduate school, it resonated with him for a few reasons. “For one, it nicely explained everything that went wrong with the first startup that I was involved in.” (He had been an entrepreneur in his early twenties.) “It also taught me that approaching a problem like a designer is an effective way to break down a complex matter. Design thinking is project-based, so it also resonated with me as an effective pedagogical vehicle.”

In his design thinking courses, Professor Steinhauer trains students to apply design mindsets like creativity and empathy to complex challenges. “Empathy is an important design skillset,” he explains. “What tools can we use to understand the perspectives of various stakeholders in a problem?” Some students show up on the first day believing that they are inherently uncreative, but Professor Steinhauer tries to dispel such preconceived notions. “If you allow yourself to come up with different ideas, some good and some bad, and then test the best ideas, you can replicate creativity,” he says. His teaching places a premium on collaboration, too. “In my classes, effective teamwork is an explicit learning objective.”

Professor Steinhauer starts most academic quarters by taking a campus walk with each of his students to discuss their goals. “One of my core values of education is that the broader learning about how to be a happy person and a good citizen is more important than any disciplinary expertise,” he says. He also practices what he calls an “open doors for life” policy. Each year, he sends an email to his former students to invite them to share their post-Dartmouth paths and sign up for a chat. “If they’re at a juncture where they feel I can be helpful, I want them to know I’m there.”

For Professor Steinhauer, design thinking encapsulates a key goal of Dartmouth’s liberal arts curriculum: to teach students several ways of thinking and apply those to improving society. In further support of that goal, he’s designing a new course at the intersection of design thinking and education. Students in the course will work with real stakeholders at local schools to co-design a solution that addresses an issue at the heart of the education system. “Dartmouth is a place of storied traditions, and I have also found it to be a supportive place for pedagogical creativity.”

Chukwuka V. Odigbo ’25

In His Classrooms, an Education Design Expert Flips the Script

Pictured: Inside a classroom at the Engineering and Computer Science Center

Students Tap Into Dartmouth’s Maple Sugaring Operation

Nothing, arguably, says “New England” quite like maple syrup. From January through April, a team of students sweetly named “Sugar Crew” runs its very own maple sugaring operation at the Dartmouth Organic Farm. In partnership with the Dartmouth Sustainability Office, Sugar Crew collects sap from approximately 120 sugar maple trees, boils the sap in the on-site sugar house, processes the syrup, and sells the finished product on the Dartmouth campus.

In preparation for drilling the trees, Sugar Crew travels around Vermont and New Hampshire visiting maple syrup dispensaries and small-scale maple sugaring operations. They learn about

sustainable farming practices and the history of maple sugaring in the region, including from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.

Lucy Coleman ’26, who is from Calgary in Alberta, Canada, joined Sugar Crew in her first year at Dartmouth. She says she especially savored the community that she and her fellow Crew members forged through group problem-solving. “After more than a week of work, it’s difficult to describe how delicious the maple syrup tasted,” says Lucy. “I kept serving myself until it was physically impossible to consume any more of our hard work!”

Caroline York ’25

TAPESTRY :

A THREAD FROM DARTMOUTH’S HISTORY

Admissions Editorial Board

Erin Burnett, Editor

Isabel Bober ’04

Clarissa Hyde

Sara D. Morin

Jacques Steinberg ’88, Editorial Advisor

Produced by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions of Dartmouth College

Design: Hecht/Horton Partners

Student Contributors

Clara Goulding ’25

Lauren Halsey ’26

Chase Harvey ’25

Selin Hos ’25

Joanna Jou ’26

Chukwuka V. Odigbo ’25

Sydney Wuu ’24

Caroline York ’25

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.

PHOTOGRAPH BY

ELI BURAKIAN ’00

Dartmouth College

Office of Undergraduate Admissions

6016 McNutt Hall

Hanover, NH 03755

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