Plans are now being finalized for the Class of 1996 Senior Symposium, a six-day event that will focus on this year's theme "They Said It Couldn't Be Done."
"The topic encompasses a lot of disciplines and at the same time has a lot of great stories associated with it," Senior Class Vice President Tom Caputo said.
Scheduled to run from March 8 to March 13, this year's symposium is one day longer than usual due to the wide variety of fields encompassed by the theme.
The Class of 1978 began the senior symposium as an intellectual gift to the College from the senior class.
This year's symposium will include 18 speakers in total, according to Leslie Jennings '96, chair of the senior symposium.
Roger Launius, chief historian at the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, will give the symposium's keynote address.
He will speak about the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jennings said.
This is the "traditional thing you think of" when you think about things that were at one time thought to be impossible, she said.
Some of the other topics the symposium speakers will discuss include sports, medicine, technology, social movement and government.
One of the speakers for the sports section of the program is Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four-minute mile, Jennings said.
The symposium will also include a panel discussion about coeducation at Dartmouth. Seven alumni who attended the College during the formative years of coeducation will sit on the panel, Jennings said.
Lieutenant General Wesley Clark, Director for Strategic Plans and Policy at the Pentagon will also be speaking at the symposium. He served as the Pentagon Representative at the Bosnian Peace Deal.
Jack Lemley, chief engineer of the Chunnel project will speak about the difficulties he surmounted in order to build the underground tunnel linking England and France.
Dr. Joe Rosen of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will speak about his expertise in the area of virtual reality surgery.
Dr. William DeVries will discuss his experience as the first surgeon to the first artificial heart patient.
The segment of the symposium dedicated to technological issues will include "open houses and tours through the Thayer school to see what people are doing now that perhaps was once thought could never be done," Jennings said.
"A number of the speakers are going to be fascinating. Some of the lesser name speakers may turn out to have the most fascinating stories to tell," Caputo said.
"We wanted to make the whole senior symposium project a little broader than purely a speaker series. We are looking to incorporate a number of different activities," Caputo said.
Caputo said some of the other symposium projects, such as the senior cocktail reception, are still "very much in the planning stages."
