On the ride back from a Cords show in Wayland, Massachusetts yesterday, the guys I was riding with had a conversation about the kinds of students that are here at Dartmouth. I didn't say too much because I've already drawn my own basic conclusions that I've shared with many prospective students in forums and through email, and I was interested to hear some new thoughts. On top of that, as a senior I've more or less forgotten my first impressions and I kind of just take things for granted. Two of the other Cords in the car were a freshman and a sophomore, so from the perspective of someone who shares information with prospective students, their opinions are probably more useful than my own.
The conversation ended up focusing on the seeming contradiction between the great minds that come to Dartmouth and how not-obvious it is that they're here. In other words, it is actually strange how normal it is here. Or maybe it just feels normal. Outside of the context of Dartmouth, its students' experiences and accomplishments would seem nothing short of remarkable. But here, you'd be hard pressed to find a Dartmouth student making a show of his/her credentials and accolades. I think that in general, Dartmouth students are very humble about their abilities and are way more down-to-earth than you might expect. At the same time, we maintain very high standards for ourselves and for each other, which leaves little room for complacency. All of this has combined to make a very enjoyable undergraduate experience for me. I'm friends with people who are going to be exceptionally successful at whatever it is they choose to do, but to me, they're just my friends - people I'll hang out at Lone Pine or work on an Arabic project with. And you know when you think about it, that's pretty cool.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
A Day in the Life...
Hey everyone,
It seems that no matter how much we talk about what students do at Dartmouth, it's still hard to convey a sense of what life us actually like here. So I've decided that for this post, I'm just going to walk you through my day today.
The alarm went off this morning at about 7:05, but it took me until about 7:20 to get out of bed. Seriously every morning this term I ask myself why on Earth I decided to start taking Arabic (and its corresponding 7:45am drill) my senior year. I mean, seriously.
But to drill I went, about 5 minutes late. You can read about what drill is in this post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. That ended at 8:35 and with my actual Arabic class starting at 9, I used that bit of time to finish my homework.
We finished learning the Arabic alphabet last week and have moved onto learning some basic grammar and sentence structure. Because I didn't put enough work into learning some of our early vocab in the past couple weeks, I'm struggling a bit now. But don't worry (la'a batz!), I'm catching up. It really is amazing how quickly you can fall behind when learning a new language! Still, breaking into small groups to make some basic sentences like "I'm a student at Dartmouth and I study Arabic" and "Do you like the United Nations?" (is it me, or is the vocab you learn when you're just starting to learn a new language really random?) was really fun. Like I mentioned in my last post about Arabic, it's cool to be able to be so cognizant of your own learning.
Arabic ends at 9:50, giving me almost an hour and a half until Astronomy starts at 11:15. I stopped by Novack - the café in Baker-Berry Library - on the way back to my room to get a coffee, bagel, and today's copy of the D (the Dartmouth - our daily paper). I still find it difficult to make efficient use of hour-long chunks of time, but I did manage to get a start on tomorrow's Arabic homework before heading over to Wilder for Astro.
I'm taking Astro 3 - Exploring the Universe - because I need a science lab credit (look for a post in the near-future about Dartmouth's distributive requirements). Though my major and minor are in the social sciences, I used to be a huge space nerd in middle/high school and I'm having a lot of fun in this class. And I mean, what's more college than taking about Newton, Einstein, and special/general relativity? We had a quiz today (short weekly quizzes on Wednesday make up a good chunk of our grade for this class) and I'm pretty sure I aced it, so that was good.
Lunch at Collis Café - one of my favorite places to eat - came next. I didn't have plans to meet anyone but ended up running into some friends. I really think Dartmouth, with 4100 undergraduates, is the perfect size. You can usually bet on running into people you know at places like Collis and the library, but there's no way you'll ever end up meeting everyone in your class, let alone the whole school. Anyway, it was good to run into them because I'm really busy this term and have had a lot of trouble making time to actually see people, unless we work together or are in the same organization. So it goes, senior year.
And now here I am at the admissions office, working on this post. I'm going to leave at 3 today (I'm usually here until 4) because I'm actually working for an admissions event tonight. We're hosting a bunch of high school guidance counselors from all over New England and the full-time interns from the summer are going to do a D-Plan presentation for them, followed by dinner. Never one to turn down a free dinner from the Hanover Inn, I'm definitely looking forward to the event. Still, with everything that's going on this term it's tough to give up extra time, so I figured I'd compensate a bit and leave work early. Plus, I've got my senior portrait at 4:24 (yeah, really), and could use some extra time to get ready for that and hopefully even make some progress on that Arabic homework. ARABIC, WHY MUST YOU REQUIRE SO MUCH TIME!?!?
Ahem, excuse me. The dinner ends at 6:30, giving me an hour before my UGA staff meeting starts at 7:30. Hopefully that won't go more than an hour, because I've got a government midterm tomorrow morning that I'd really like to study for. And in the meantime, I'm trying to put the finishing touches on the new Cords CD album art and info so that we can get that to DiscMakers tomorrow. I will be so glad when that whole project is finished (and it almost is!) but that's an entirely different story.
If this sounds like a really crazy day, well, it is. My freshman fall didn't really look anything like this term, and today is busy by even the current standards. Tomorrow's not much better with a midterm in the morning and a presentation (which I've barely started) for Rocky Leadership Fellows tomorrow night, but Friday and Saturday are really looking good right now. And I'm sure you can all relate to that.
Cheers,
John
It seems that no matter how much we talk about what students do at Dartmouth, it's still hard to convey a sense of what life us actually like here. So I've decided that for this post, I'm just going to walk you through my day today.
The alarm went off this morning at about 7:05, but it took me until about 7:20 to get out of bed. Seriously every morning this term I ask myself why on Earth I decided to start taking Arabic (and its corresponding 7:45am drill) my senior year. I mean, seriously.
But to drill I went, about 5 minutes late. You can read about what drill is in this post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. That ended at 8:35 and with my actual Arabic class starting at 9, I used that bit of time to finish my homework.
We finished learning the Arabic alphabet last week and have moved onto learning some basic grammar and sentence structure. Because I didn't put enough work into learning some of our early vocab in the past couple weeks, I'm struggling a bit now. But don't worry (la'a batz!), I'm catching up. It really is amazing how quickly you can fall behind when learning a new language! Still, breaking into small groups to make some basic sentences like "I'm a student at Dartmouth and I study Arabic" and "Do you like the United Nations?" (is it me, or is the vocab you learn when you're just starting to learn a new language really random?) was really fun. Like I mentioned in my last post about Arabic, it's cool to be able to be so cognizant of your own learning.
Arabic ends at 9:50, giving me almost an hour and a half until Astronomy starts at 11:15. I stopped by Novack - the café in Baker-Berry Library - on the way back to my room to get a coffee, bagel, and today's copy of the D (the Dartmouth - our daily paper). I still find it difficult to make efficient use of hour-long chunks of time, but I did manage to get a start on tomorrow's Arabic homework before heading over to Wilder for Astro.
I'm taking Astro 3 - Exploring the Universe - because I need a science lab credit (look for a post in the near-future about Dartmouth's distributive requirements). Though my major and minor are in the social sciences, I used to be a huge space nerd in middle/high school and I'm having a lot of fun in this class. And I mean, what's more college than taking about Newton, Einstein, and special/general relativity? We had a quiz today (short weekly quizzes on Wednesday make up a good chunk of our grade for this class) and I'm pretty sure I aced it, so that was good.
Lunch at Collis Café - one of my favorite places to eat - came next. I didn't have plans to meet anyone but ended up running into some friends. I really think Dartmouth, with 4100 undergraduates, is the perfect size. You can usually bet on running into people you know at places like Collis and the library, but there's no way you'll ever end up meeting everyone in your class, let alone the whole school. Anyway, it was good to run into them because I'm really busy this term and have had a lot of trouble making time to actually see people, unless we work together or are in the same organization. So it goes, senior year.
And now here I am at the admissions office, working on this post. I'm going to leave at 3 today (I'm usually here until 4) because I'm actually working for an admissions event tonight. We're hosting a bunch of high school guidance counselors from all over New England and the full-time interns from the summer are going to do a D-Plan presentation for them, followed by dinner. Never one to turn down a free dinner from the Hanover Inn, I'm definitely looking forward to the event. Still, with everything that's going on this term it's tough to give up extra time, so I figured I'd compensate a bit and leave work early. Plus, I've got my senior portrait at 4:24 (yeah, really), and could use some extra time to get ready for that and hopefully even make some progress on that Arabic homework. ARABIC, WHY MUST YOU REQUIRE SO MUCH TIME!?!?
Ahem, excuse me. The dinner ends at 6:30, giving me an hour before my UGA staff meeting starts at 7:30. Hopefully that won't go more than an hour, because I've got a government midterm tomorrow morning that I'd really like to study for. And in the meantime, I'm trying to put the finishing touches on the new Cords CD album art and info so that we can get that to DiscMakers tomorrow. I will be so glad when that whole project is finished (and it almost is!) but that's an entirely different story.
If this sounds like a really crazy day, well, it is. My freshman fall didn't really look anything like this term, and today is busy by even the current standards. Tomorrow's not much better with a midterm in the morning and a presentation (which I've barely started) for Rocky Leadership Fellows tomorrow night, but Friday and Saturday are really looking good right now. And I'm sure you can all relate to that.
Cheers,
John
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Autumn in Hanover
It's getting to be one of my favorite times of the year, and once again I'm thrilled to be able to experience the fall in New Hampshire. The air is cool and dry, the sky is bright and clear, and Homecoming is just around the corner. But the best part - and that part you'll hear about from many of the tourists that come through the area every fall - is the spectacular vistas afforded by the Upper Valley's miraculous combination of knolls, vales, and stunning foliage. I'm hoping I have some time this weekend to get on my bike and ride out of the valley for some breathtaking panoramic views, but you know, the view from the campus Green isn't that bad either... Here are some pictures I took here last year.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Arabic at Dartmouth
Though I feel that most of my time at Dartmouth is devoted to the extracurriculars I'm involved in and social development, there's no escaping the fact that academics are way up there when it comes to important aspects of my education. And so, at the beginning of the fall term, it seems appropriate for me to talk about the classes I'm taking.
If you read my entry about the D-Plan, you know that Dartmouth students typically take three classes per term. This term, I am taking Arabic 1, Government 58 (International Political Economy), and Astronomy 3 (exploring the Universe, with lab). In this entry I'm going to talk a bit about Arabic.
First of all, I guess I should explain why I've decided to take Arabic my senior year. Basically, it's the result of a small chain of decisions. After having studied in France, I really wanted to take another language here. But I figured that if I really wanted to learn a romance language like Spanish or Italian (or even continue with French), I could pretty much do that on my own (provided, of course, I put the time in). If I were to devote three courses my senior year to a new language, it should probably be one that didn't use the Latin alphabet and thus, I assume, would be harder to learn on one's own. So that left Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of those, Chinese and Arabic seemed the most attractive to me, and since I've taken a few classes on the Middle East and may in the near future end up working in that region for the State Department, I figured that I'm more likely to use Arabic in the next few years than Chinese. So that was that.
The language instruction program at Dartmouth is remarkably strong. Decades ago, Professor John Rassias invented a language teaching method (called - go figure - the Rassias method) that uses a unique combination of classroom instruction and language drill. The classroom portion is pretty straightforward; we meet from 9:00-9:50 am 5 days a week and it's pretty much what you'd expect from a language class. Drill, however, is pretty unique. It's led by a student who's fluent in the target language, and is based on a rapid-fire system of exchanges between the instructor and students. Right now we're just learning the alphabet and a few basic words, so it's pretty straightforward: the instructor says a word, we repeat it, and then she snaps and points at us individually to have us repeat the word by ourselves. As we begin to learn verb conjugations and things like that, it will become a bit more complicated. For example, when I took French, my instructor might say "être" (to be), then "je" (I), snap and point at himself, and say "J'ai été" (I was), indicating that he wanted us to conjugate the verb and put it in the passé composé. Then he might say "nous," snap and point at someone, and the student would have to respond "Nous avons été" (We were). (That's about what we did for the first couple days of French 2 - it got a lot more difficult after that). Importantly, the target language is spoken throughout the entire drill session; English is completely avoided.
What's nice about beginning a new language is that there's instant gratification built in and you can be very conscious of your own learning. Last week, something written in Arabic was a scribble. Today it is a sound. Next week it will be a word. It's really neat to have someone say a word and actually know how to write it in Arabic. Sure it's a lot of work, but being aware of your own progress is very encouraging.
My plan is to take Arabic 2 in the winter and 3 in the spring. Because it's such a difficult language, I know that I'll be somewhere between proficient and mildly conversational when I'm finished and will still have a lot of work in front of me if I really want to be able to use Arabic socially or professionally. But I'm confident that with the Rassias method, drill, and the quality of classroom instruction here, I'll be well on my way to having learned a whole new language. And to me, there are few things more exciting than that.
If you read my entry about the D-Plan, you know that Dartmouth students typically take three classes per term. This term, I am taking Arabic 1, Government 58 (International Political Economy), and Astronomy 3 (exploring the Universe, with lab). In this entry I'm going to talk a bit about Arabic.
First of all, I guess I should explain why I've decided to take Arabic my senior year. Basically, it's the result of a small chain of decisions. After having studied in France, I really wanted to take another language here. But I figured that if I really wanted to learn a romance language like Spanish or Italian (or even continue with French), I could pretty much do that on my own (provided, of course, I put the time in). If I were to devote three courses my senior year to a new language, it should probably be one that didn't use the Latin alphabet and thus, I assume, would be harder to learn on one's own. So that left Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of those, Chinese and Arabic seemed the most attractive to me, and since I've taken a few classes on the Middle East and may in the near future end up working in that region for the State Department, I figured that I'm more likely to use Arabic in the next few years than Chinese. So that was that.
The language instruction program at Dartmouth is remarkably strong. Decades ago, Professor John Rassias invented a language teaching method (called - go figure - the Rassias method) that uses a unique combination of classroom instruction and language drill. The classroom portion is pretty straightforward; we meet from 9:00-9:50 am 5 days a week and it's pretty much what you'd expect from a language class. Drill, however, is pretty unique. It's led by a student who's fluent in the target language, and is based on a rapid-fire system of exchanges between the instructor and students. Right now we're just learning the alphabet and a few basic words, so it's pretty straightforward: the instructor says a word, we repeat it, and then she snaps and points at us individually to have us repeat the word by ourselves. As we begin to learn verb conjugations and things like that, it will become a bit more complicated. For example, when I took French, my instructor might say "être" (to be), then "je" (I), snap and point at himself, and say "J'ai été" (I was), indicating that he wanted us to conjugate the verb and put it in the passé composé. Then he might say "nous," snap and point at someone, and the student would have to respond "Nous avons été" (We were). (That's about what we did for the first couple days of French 2 - it got a lot more difficult after that). Importantly, the target language is spoken throughout the entire drill session; English is completely avoided.
What's nice about beginning a new language is that there's instant gratification built in and you can be very conscious of your own learning. Last week, something written in Arabic was a scribble. Today it is a sound. Next week it will be a word. It's really neat to have someone say a word and actually know how to write it in Arabic. Sure it's a lot of work, but being aware of your own progress is very encouraging.
My plan is to take Arabic 2 in the winter and 3 in the spring. Because it's such a difficult language, I know that I'll be somewhere between proficient and mildly conversational when I'm finished and will still have a lot of work in front of me if I really want to be able to use Arabic socially or professionally. But I'm confident that with the Rassias method, drill, and the quality of classroom instruction here, I'll be well on my way to having learned a whole new language. And to me, there are few things more exciting than that.
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