D-Plan

Angie Janumala ’22

Hometown: Bronx, NY Major: Quantitative Social Science (QSS) Minor: Digital Arts

With Dartmouth’s distinctive year-round quarter system, you customize your own academic calendar. Dartmouth offers four 10-week terms per year. Within some guidelines, you choose which 12 terms to enroll and which to have incredible experiences elsewhere. Here, Angie Janumala ’22 walks you through how she’s explored all Dartmouth—and the world—has to offer.

FIRST YEAR

Fall

I set out to try as many things as possible and not for the most well-thought-out reasons. I went vegetarian just because the dining hall had vegan sausage rolls, started learning Russian just because a drag queen I liked spoke it, and became a member of the Film Society just because they had free Domino’s pizza every Tuesday. Although I’ve had to change my diet and roll back these commitments over time, I try to keep a bit of that spirit with me when I face new opportunities. Now that I’m a first-year undergraduate advisor (UGA), I tell my residents that first-year fall is the term to try anything and everything Dartmouth has to offer—just because!

Winter

Dartmouth definitely felt more difficult after the holiday season wore off, but I kept busy with ENGS 12: Design Thinking, a hands-on introduction to engineering principles and by far the most recommended class I had heard of at Dartmouth. Every project we worked on involved patience, teamwork, and learning to be very comfortable with messing up and starting all over again. The continual late nights at Thayer School of Engineering took their toll, but by the end of term I had engineered six solutions to various community problems and had countless anecdotes for my new job—leading tours for the Office of Admissions.

Spring

I found out I’d be part of the Religion Foreign Study Program (FSP) in Edinburgh, Scotland for sophomore fall. All that was left to do was actually take my prerequisite class in the religion department. I chose REL 21.01: Religion and Social Capital, where we applied sociological and anthropological theory to all sorts of social networks, such as religious mutual aid communities, the phenomenon of regifting, Dartmouth’s Greek life, and the social network itself, Facebook. It also helped that I could study with my roommate, since they were taking the class too!

Summer

Though Dartmouth will cover extra costs associated with off-campus study programs for financial aid recipients, I decided to remain on campus this term to earn some extra spending money for Edinburgh. I worked during the interim with Commencement and Reunions Housing, as well as throughout the term as a tour guide during our busiest season. I didn’t know yet that it would be my only on-campus summer at Dartmouth (thanks, COVID!), but I definitely lived it up by interacting with hundreds of campus visitors a day, getting closer to a few other first-years on campus, and enjoying the summer camp optimism that everyone on campus seemed to share.

SOPHOMORE YEAR

Fall

I have countless stories to tell about my time in Scotland this term—I basically coined the phrase “study abroad changed me.” So I’ll keep it short: we compared prehistoric British rituals with modern synagogues and gurdwaras; celebrated Thanksgiving with Dartmouth alums; chased sheep on the tidal island of Lindisfarne; had many a (legal) dram of whisky; and I met the two loves of my life, haggis and halloumi. Okay, not that short.

Winter

I was really nervous coming back to campus after my study abroad—after all, I was a changed lady, and I had the somewhat silly worry that my friends had moved on from me. But the nature of the D-Plan means you get to keep your old friends and always make new ones too, and I really felt this when I rushed my sorority. Another high point of the term was QSS 18: Introduction to Game Theory, where we used mathematical models to predict policy responses to runoff elections, economic monopolies, and this weird faraway phenomenon called the novel coronavirus.

Spring

I was already planning to take an off-term after seven straight terms of classes, so I was lucky that my plans weren’t affected too dramatically by COVID. Those plans, to be clear, were sitting on the couch at home and watching the entire Twilight series. I also did some dog sitting and interned for a diversity-in-business initiative, where I researched and evaluated how major corporations addressed the pandemic and racial injustice in both messaging and action.

Summer

With my family members also having to work from our new home in London, I took my sophomore summer classes from my neighbor’s house, five hours ahead of home sweet Dartmouth. But in some ways, I felt closer than ever to America and to Dartmouth. In GOVT 27: Racial Justice, we wrote papers about #BlackLivesMatter and Dartmouth’s Say Her Name lecture series, while my GEOG 18.01: Climate Extremes on a Warming Planet class tracked the disproportionate impacts of a heat wave that started in London and later hit Hanover.

JUNIOR YEAR

Fall

This term, I found perhaps the defining experience of my academic career in MUS 36: Songwriting. Professor César Alvarez and teaching assistant Hamed Sinno—lead singer of Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila—somehow turned a Zoom room into a place where 16 students could bring whatever was on our minds to each class and turn it into something musical, vulnerable, and loved. Thanks to my amazing classmates, I really felt at home in this classroom— even in the virtual setting.

Winter

This term came with plenty of opportunities to connect with friends in my residential spaces at Dartmouth. I lived in my sorority house and watched The Bachelorette with fellow members and played plenty of Among Us with members of The Tabard, the gender-inclusive Greek house I joined in the fall. I also became a tour guide trainer this term, working with other upper-level tour guides to hire new members of the team.

Spring

I headed back to London for my last term of remote classes—my first and only four-course term. The class that really stood out was COSC 27: Projects in Digital Arts, the culminating experience for my minor. With a 10-week turnaround, I learned Adobe After Effects and Blender and made an animated music video for a song I wrote in my songwriting class. I can’t overstate how satisfying it is to have total intellectual control over a project from beginning to end. That probably explains why I’m now working on a similar type of project, albeit with a much bigger scope: an honors thesis for QSS.

Summer

I spent my off-term in London traveling around southern England, dog and cat sitting, and undertaking my own personal challenge: watching six seasons of Glee in five weeks. I also began working full-time alongside my awesome team of Senior Fellows, learning how to host information sessions and providing input on the Office of Admissions’ virtual programming efforts. Next year, I’m looking forward to beginning work on my thesis, which will evaluate existing and new ways to address and prevent campus sexual violence.

PETER CHABOT ’22

HOMETOWN: RYE, NY MAJOR: NEUROSCIENCE

& KEVIN PETERSON

PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

PETER CHABOT ’22 MET PALEONTOLOGIST KEVIN PETERSON IN HIS CLASS “THE SCIENCE OF LIFE.” TOGETHER, THEY’RE RESEARCHING THE MORPHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL COMPLEXITY OF THE OCTOPUS. THEIR PROJECT IS A CRUCIAL TEST OF THEIR HYPOTHESIS THAT microRNA IS CORRELATED WITH MORPHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL COMPLEXITY IN HUMANS AND VERTEBRATES. ONE YEAR LATER, WITH ONE PAPER PUBLISHED AND ANOTHER IN THE WORKS, PETER AND PROFESSOR PETERSON REFLECT ON THEIR RESEARCH.

How does this research project inform your respective interests?

Peter: I’m a neuroscience major, but I’ve always had a huge fascination with genetics. So, when I took a biology class with Professor Peterson, I reached out to see what he was doing in the field. Now that I have this pretty substantial knowledge of microRNAs, I think it’s an area of study I can see myself working on in the future. Whether it’s in a clinical application or evolutionary perspective, I’m not sure yet, but as our research shows, microRNAs play a pivotal role in complexity and human consciousness, which is something I’m really interested in.

Professor Peterson: I’ve been working on microRNAs for quite a while. Fifteen years ago or so, we found that there’s a group of genes whose acquisition patterns correlated with big jumps in animal complexity, and these are the microRNAs that we work on. We actually collected the data years ago. Then, when Peter came along, I had the idea that “We should do this now.” This study is the crucial test in terms of our ideas that these genes are behind morphological and behavioral complexity in humans and vertebrates. To make a very long story short, the only thing that correlated with the behavioral and morphological complexity was the microRNAs in the octopus. The implications of this are that we have a handle on what creates complexity. We also have a handle on how you evolve complexity, which is something that people have been looking at for decades. So, for me, it’s the culmination of a career, in a way.

What is this mirgenedb.org database you’ve been working on?

Peter: Our database allows cross-species identification of microRNAs, so you can see how they’ve been conserved through evolution and which ones are new. In the lab that I just started working in, where I’m doing my senior thesis, I still use mirgenedb.org, and I’m going to be using it throughout my studies. It will be a big part of what I do because I’m working with microRNAs to serve as a biomarker for gliomas and glioblastomas, and I won’t be able to tell which ones are robust and have a big purpose in the nervous system without a database like mirgenedb.org. It’s revolutionary for that type of application. Professor Peterson: I started working on this project in 2012. There are now more than sixteen thousand genes from seventy-five taxa and, with help from people like Peter, I have annotated every one of them by hand. The thing is, we wouldn’t have been able to do the octopus study without it. I spent eight years entering data, and we’re now just getting the first papers out. Peter and I have another paper that we hope will be accepted soon that uses the database and does science that would have been impossible to do without it—and I can guarantee you it’s the only molecular database in the world designed by a paleontologist.

What have you learned from working with one another?

Peter: Professor Peterson is easily one of my favorite teachers. BIOL 11 was my first biology course at Dartmouth, and it’s still my favorite. It really established this different type of passion that I had for learning. After that class, I just became genuinely curious about so many things, and I wanted to go and seek answers. It was kind of life-changing. You don’t really realize the implications of learning in those classes until you actually do the research that aligns with them and realize how important that knowledge is to have. As long as you are consistent, try hard, and care about what you’re looking for, you’re going to find research, likely with someone who cares a lot about you and your career path. Dartmouth offers a really good platform for finding research opportunities through coursework.

Professor Peterson: I really like Peter as a person, and that’s ninety percent of working with somebody—it’s about that interpersonal relationship and connection. When I interviewed at Dartmouth, it was clear that the classroom, undergraduates, and teaching all mattered. In the interplay between one’s teaching and one’s research, each reinforces the other. Peter brought perspectives and insights and questions that I hadn’t thought of. That’s what makes Dartmouth special—the relationship that we have as faculty with undergraduates and the positivity that they bring to our science. I walked into this place, saw that the tenor around education with outstanding research was so different, and thought, “I am home.” I knew this was where I wanted to be. This is an institution that fosters relationships across generations, across departments, across peoples, and that matters.

Pictured: Inside the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center