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(10/26/12 2:00am)
One day in August, I shadowed an alumnus physician at his clinic. I sat in his examination room as unobtrusively as possible, jotting down notes as he tended to his patients. Between his appointments, we passed the time by comparing notes about our experiences at Dartmouth. Like most other alumni whom I have had the pleasure of meeting, he reminisced about his undergraduate years with warm fondness. He asked about the current makeup of students, the local eateries and the professors. We were surprised to discover the sheer number of similarities between our narratives, despite the nearly two decades that separated our respective classes. We attributed this phenomenon to the College's strong adherence to traditions.
(10/09/12 2:00am)
Going to Dartmouth is a privilege. Thousands of other students were denied the seats that we currently hold, and virtually all of us will be graduating with shiny Ivy League degrees that many of us hope will give us an edge in landing lucrative and prestigious careers. On the other hand, a bachelor's degree from any college has been catapulted from a means of academic accreditation to an absolute prerequisite for entering the white-collar job market.
(09/25/12 2:00am)
Jonah Lehrer, the author of popular science nonfiction books such as "How We Think," first came under scrutiny following allegations of self-plagiarism in various web and print publications. The allegations soon led New York University journalism professor Charles Seife to investigate the contents of Lehrer's Wired.com blog. Seife demonstrated that Lehrer had, on multiple occasions, eschewed facts, misrepresented quotes and plagiarized sometimes outright from other bloggers and journalists. I had devoured Lehrer's books, which pushed me to join The Dartmouth and the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science in hopes of developing the skills necessary to communicate to the public as a future scientist. It was difficult for a former fan like me to witness his fall from grace, and Lehrer's deception is sure to have disappointed his many readers. The success of Lehrer's books could be attributed to the fact that they fed a market that craves accessible forms of academic literature. The realm of pop-academia has been lorded over by bestselling authors such as The New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, the author of "Tipping Point" and "Outliers," and Stephen J. Dubner, the journalistic half of the duo behind the nonfiction phenomenon "Freakonomics." Yet while these pop-academic books have succeeded in making scientific concepts more widely available, the outsourcing of complex academic ideas to professional journalists leads to thorny caveats. For instance, while Lehrer's misconducts may place him at the extreme end of the moral spectrum, journalistic misrepresentation of academia is nothing new, given the formidable challenge of condensing a substantial volume of research into a magazine article or a 200-something-page book. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University and a pop science author, criticized Gladwell's "Outliers" in The New York Times Book Review as a work that lacks rigor and "consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies." The co-authors of "Freakonomics" were subjected to similar criticisms from the American Scientist, which charged that their book contained an array of mistakes "from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of ["Freakonomics" co-author Steve] Levitt's friends and colleagues."
(09/24/12 2:00am)
A fair number of my now-graduated friends are struggling in the dismal job market, still trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. Some have accepted internships with meager pay to bolster their resume. Others have entered master's programs, avoiding the long-term commitment of a PhD while holding onto the hope that an advanced degree will qualify them for a whole range of careers. When I ask these friends what they are looking for, their eyes light up and they say that they are looking for a job that they could be passionate about they aren't willing to settle for anything less.
(09/10/12 2:00am)
Over the summer, I first heard of the stratospheric popularity of Korean music artist Psy's "Gangnam Style," not from my Korean friends or relatives, but from a Taiwanese-American acquaintance who is an avid aficionado of American rap music. He told me that he had stumbled upon the music video through a shout-out on T-Pain's Twitter feed. By the time that I had clicked on the YouTube link, the official music video had garnered over 30 million views, and in less than two months since its original release, the video exceeded 131 million views.
(09/04/12 2:00am)
By the virtue of the fact that you have been admitted to one of the most elite universities in the nation, you've likely scored astronomically on your standardized tests and reaped numerous distinctions and accolades. Now, you've stepped onto a more level playing field. Students at Dartmouth have started their own companies, published their research in Nature magazine, authored New York Times bestsellers and have won a vast spectrum of national and international competitions many of them before their freshman year even started.
(08/21/12 2:00am)
For my past two consecutive off-terms, I've crisscrossed the North American continent whenever my jobs allowed, seeing the sights in Boston, Montreal, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Vancouver, New York and Los Angeles. I've crashed in motels, hotels, friends' guest rooms, trains, charter busses and on airport floors.
(08/14/12 2:00am)
Last week, over 750 research interns convened at the National Institute of Health's 2012 Poster Day to present their findings. The topics ranged from molecular mechanisms in biology to the reasoning behind physicians' reluctance to prescribe gene testing for patients. In this vast spectrum of the life sciences, my own project lengthily titled "Repair of Double Strand Breaks Containing DNA Sequences Distant from the Genome" fell somewhere near the former. I fielded questions from students, post-baccalaureates, post-docs and principle investigators, leading my viewers through the introduction, experiments, results, analysis and future directions the staples of a typical scientific poster presentation.
(08/07/12 2:00am)
As the members of the Class of 2012 received their diplomas in June, they faced a job market with a 9.4 percent unemployment rate for degree holders and were expected to receive lower starting wages compared to those who graduated a decade ago, according to the Economic Policy Institute. During the Commencement ceremonies an event filled with excitement and dread I asked a graduating Phi Beta Kappa member what he wished he could have learned during his time at Dartmouth to prepare him for the real world. One of the things he stated was "finance." He was not talking about the Wall Street variety but rather the pragmatic means of dealing with one's money.
(08/03/12 2:00am)
At the 104th meeting of the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director on June 14, the NIH associate director for budget reported that the organization received about $30.9 billion for the 2012 fiscal year and that the NIH expected a flat budget for 2013. When asked how the overall budget compared to inflation, NIH Director Francis Collins reported that the NIH has been losing purchasing power every year since 2003 and currently faces a 20 percent decrease in relative research funding.
(07/17/12 2:00am)
Imagine you develop a mysterious pain in the side of your neck. After months of trying to ignore the discomfort, you finally make an appointment with your primary care provide, then a specialist who combs through your medical history, your family background, X-ray images and MRI images and comes to a conclusion. She tells you the name of your condition and prescribes the proper therapy regimen.
(04/03/12 2:00am)
The day that President Obama announced the nomination of College President Jim Yong Kim for the presidency of the World Bank, my Korean friends and family bombarded my inbox with messages even before I had even woken up. Unbeknownst to me, South Korean media outlets had been having a field day, reporting with nationalistic glee that a Korean-American had been elevated to such an important position in the international community.
(02/21/12 4:00am)
Last November, the Korean percussion group SamulNori came all the way Hanover to perform at Dartmouth. The audience consisted of an eclectic potpourri of multicultural townspeople, Dartmouth professors and college students. Also in the audience were clusters of South Korean international students waiting eagerly to see the renowned Kim Duk-Soo.
(01/30/12 4:00am)
This past winter, I attended a public thesis defense of a Dartmouth biology PhD candidate. Following the defense's successful completion, I asked the new doctor which institution she'd be off to next. To my surprise, she replied that she would not be joining academia. Rather, she was hoping to join a research patent law firm and take night classes to earn a law degree. When I prodded further, she replied that there were limited opportunities in the United States for a freshly-minted PhD, and rather than trudging along for years in postdoctoral positions while grasping for chances at tenure, going into law or industry would allow her to reap immediate pecuniary benefits from her degree. Other members of the same lab from first-year graduate students to weathered post-docs all seemed to agree with this bleak forecast of the academic job market.
(01/05/12 4:00am)
I hadn't planned on venturing beyond the microcosm of Hanover during my interim stay at Dartmouth, but when a former floormate invited me to tour around Boston in mid-December, I eagerly accepted. On a whim, we decided to make a pilgrimage to Harvard University, considered by many to be the mecca of post-secondary education. I had naively envisioned a physical establishment that would represent a perfect embodiment of open intellectual growth. Instead, I saw security officers guarding every gate, barring entrance to those without Crimson identification cards while unhappy protesters and transients shuffled aimlessly with sleeping bags tucked under their arms.
(11/17/11 4:00am)
In my sophomore year of high school, I figured out what most people already knew: To get into a highly selective college, I needed to spice up my resume. Lacking personal connections, I contacted over 60 research facilities in search of an internship position. I received a grand total of two positive responses, including a reply from the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington Medical School.
(11/01/11 3:00am)
According to Peter Carini, the College Archivist, the enduring tradition of ragging on freshmen during the Homecoming bonfire likely began in 1904, when upperclassmen chased first-year students around the bonfire.More than a century later, a small group of students rose to challenge this cherished custom.
(10/21/11 2:00am)
You are marching on a brisk Friday night, decked out in your green class jersey and adorned with cheap green flair provided by your undergraduate advisor. Your floormates, along with hundreds of 'shmen, have joined you. Intoxicated by the collective effervescence and most likely alcohol your peers parade across the streets of the College, shouting exuberant cheers, brandishing butcher paper signs, and growing in number as members of other 'shmen clusters trickle in to coalesce into the amorphous 'shmob.
(10/04/11 2:00am)
Freddie is a senior whom I am delighted to see almost twice a week. He never fails to don his Dartmouth shirt proudly, and he always keeps his pong paddle close by. He volunteered in Africa during his off-term, constantly tries to impress of the opposite sex and strongly dislikes the '15s. For better or worse, Freddie is the stereotypical Dartmouth student except for the fact that Freddie doesn't actually exist.
(09/22/11 2:00am)
On Sept. 11, I was both mentally and physically as distanced from Ground Zero as was possible in the continental United States. I lived on the West Coast in a quiet seaside town, and as a recent emigre from South Korea, I had no pre-existing knowledge of the World Trade Center, al Qaeda or Islam. My mother woke me up, urging me to watch the news. I stared at the screen and went back to sleep for a few more minutes before preparing for school. During recess, my schoolmates chattered excitedly, filled with speculation and innocent curiosity. Blame our suburban isolation or our youthful naivete, but I don't think any of us in that playground grasped the gravity of the situation, or what we would face thereafter.