With this year's commencement, another group of talented students will leave Dartmouth's undergraduate community and make their own paths in the real world. These four seniors, like all of the Class of 2005, have left their mark on the College.
REBECCA HELLER
Becca Heller '05 says she has Attention Deficit Disorder -- she can hardly name all of the projects and activities she has been involved in at Dartmouth. The effects of her work have been felt on campus, in the Upper Valley community and internationally.
Heller's contributions range from organizing a conference on hip-hop music and race relations, in the winter of 2004, to working on food safety legislation for the New Zealand parliament that spring.
Two of her primary interests, Heller says, are hunger prevention and AIDS outreach. One recent project at the College, called Harvest for the Hungry, works with farmers in the Upper Valley to salvage extra crops, which are then prepared as meals frozen by Dartmouth Dining Services and distributed to homeless shelters and local soup kitchens. The program has won Heller the Howard Swearer Student Humanitarian Award, which is given to five students annually and comes with a $1,500 prize to enable continued work on the project.
Though the project has worked directly to feed needy members of the Upper Valley community, Heller says that she is not completely satisfied with what Harvest for the Hungry has accomplished.
"I always feel like it's never enough. I rarely look back on a project and say, 'Oh I did a good job there,'" she said. "Sometimes it feels like butting my head against a brick wall, but I have seen a lot of evidence that the work is changing things in a small way."
Heller has also worked internationally, helping AIDS patients in poor rural areas to set up community gardens where they can grow fresh, nutritious food. Her senior fellowship, which focused on AIDS, poverty and malnutrition, enabled her to travel while performing research. Heller received a Fulbright scholarship that will allow her to continue her work with AIDS patients and community gardens after graduation.
The College's many resources and funding opportunities have enabled Heller to subsidize work that she would not have been able to do on her own.
"Dartmouth itself geographically is sort of shut off, but it has all these resources to help you explore all that you want to," she said. "The Dartmouth bubble is pretty self-imposed, I think."
After completing her Fulbright work, Heller hopes to go to law school and practice law pro bono, advocating for "people that don't normally have good lawyers," she said.
JESSE ROISIN
Any student who voted in last fall's November election saw a familiar name on the ballot; Jesse Roisin '05, president emeritus of the College Republicans, ran for state house on the Republican ticket.
According to Roisin, he garnered more votes in Hanover's district than President Bush, though he did not win the position.
"It was a campaign that we put some effort into that hopefully inspired some students from either party to try and do that as well," Roisin said of his run.
After Bush won the national election, Roisin and other members of the College Republicans went to the Green, where they interrupted a group students that reacted more somberly to the election results by hosting a candlelight vigil.
"We just wanted to show that there were two reactions to the election," Roisin said in reference to that evening. He noted that Republicans at the College are sometimes frustrated at Democrats' apparent dominance on campus.
"I think part of it was just a spontaneous reaction on the part of some of the Republican students," he said. "In general it was a little bit of exuberance about the election."
Although some were upset by the Republicans' actions, Roisin says that the event inspired conversation between the two factions.
"The four years I've been here, I've noticed a good opening of dialogue between the [Young] Democrats and the College Republicans. I hope that the political conversation keeps going the way it's going."
Roisin believes that New Hampshire is one of the best places for that type of political dialogue due to its swing state status and the fact that voting is less adherent to party lines.
"It's more about who you are and what you stand for [in New Hampshire] so every politician who comes here is subjected to some real honest questioning," he said.
While he will be attending law school at Boston University in the fall, Roisin says he is glad he won't be living too far from the "fascinating" climate that surrounds New Hampshire politics.
DAVID GARDNER
At 6'10", David Gardner looks his part of basketball team captain. Under the leadership of Gardner and his co-captain Steve Callahan '05, the team posted the secondbiggest turnaround in Ivy League history.
While the four-year athlete says he can't imagine his Dartmouth career without basketball, Gardner was also highly involved with the College off the court. The sociology major has fond memories of his academic experience at Dar tmouth, and co-founded BuzzFlood.org, the informational website that celebrates the accomplishments of members of the Dartmouth community.
As an athlete, Gardner has improved exponentially at Dartmouth. While in high school, he didn't play varsity basketball until his senior year, but has been the Big Green's MVP for the last two years. In his senior year, Gardner was an all-Ivy League player.
One of his best experiences with the team, he says, was Senior Night, the last game of the season when the team beat Yale in the final seconds. Gardner emphasized the community aspect of being a player at such a close-knit school.
"I got a few great blitzes from people after the game thanking me for having so much fun at the game; things like, 'You made me realize why I love Dartmouth,'" he said. Reactions like that are especially rewarding, Gardner said, because while he loves the game itself, "if we can make other people have as much fun as we were having on the court, that's even better."
Because he is so enthusiastic about the Dartmouth community, Gardner helped found BuzzFlood to pay tribute to it. Thus far, the site has had over 3 million hits -- a huge accomplishment, Gardner said, especially in a community like Dartmouth that is comparatively small.
Gardner says that even before he got to college, he knew that Dartmouth was where he wanted to spend his four years.
"It's tough for me to imagine having gone to any other school just because I've been so happy with my Dartmouth experience," he said. "Dartmouth students have so much pride in their school and each other, and that was something that I really wanted to be a part of."
Gardner says he will miss the vibrant intellectual community at the College, but looks forward to playing professional basketball in Europe for a few years after graduation.
KRISTA OOPIK
The meat freezer that was situated outside of the Courtyard Caf last winter caused most passersby to do a double take. While at first glance the installation looked like a new vending machine, it was the first piece that studio art major Krista Oopik '05 constructed for her senior thesis.
Through her concentration in sculpture and her independent study in costume design, Oopik has worked with fabrics and other materials in unconventional ways.
The work that probably garnered the most attention from other students, though, was her piece entitled "The Butcher's Bargain."
Oopik took pieces of an old mink coat and wrapped them around pieces of meat that she bought at food shops.
"I wanted to put them back where they originally came from," she said.
The meat was displayed in a refrigerator outside the Courtyard Caf for a week.
According to Oopik, the concept for the piece first came to her when she was on a foreign study program in Florence, Italy, and became enamored with the Italian lifestyle, where sensuality and quality are more readily appreciated.
"Italians have incredible materials, but they'll have one really great shirt that they take great care of," she said. "They don't have to have ten from the Gap to be happy."
While the piece was originally imagined as a commentary on American consumerism, Oopik says that it grew to mean much more than just that, adding that she does not intend for every observer to fully comprehend her art on every level.
"I think in a community like Dartmouth where people are so intellectual, they want to know the answer about everything. When people can't fully understand art or a piece like that it makes them mad, but art isn't supposed to be fully understood," she said.
The questions that the piece inspired, though, caused many friends and acquaintances to ask Oopik to explain her intentions, and she appreciated the opportunity to enlighten curious students. Oopik also said that she spent time near the piece observing peoples' reactions and was interested to notice how the piece fared when it was outside the environment of the studio.
"It was living on its own and there was nothing I could do," she said. "It was exciting."
While Oopik says the experience of putting her art out in public was important, she does not have firm plans for another public piece in the near future.
Oopik is glad she made the decision to attend a liberal arts institution instead of a school that focused only on art.
"You have to have a firm intellectual foundation to be able to make good art," she said.
