61 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(08/23/11 2:00am)
This term, I enrolled in two biology classes. The first, Genetics and Heredity, discussed the established, accepted ideas that form the foundation of the discipline. These concepts' inherent truth had been entrenched through decades of subsequent biological research. However, my second biology class, Philosophy of Biologyan introductory course in a relatively new fieldimmediately challenged these assumptions. Rather than accepting science as the sole truth, it saw scientific knowledge as a fallible human attempt to fit our world into an understandable system. In other words, science, like everything else, is prone to human bias and ambiguities.
(08/12/11 2:00am)
Last week, Princeton Review and Forbes released their college rankings, unleashing the perennial wave of anxiety through college-bound students everywhere. A few days later, Standard & Poor's, one of the most prominent members of the credit rating oligopolies, downgraded the United States' debt from "AAA" to "AA+," striking fear into the hearts of investors and potentially wreaking havoc on the global economy. These events, though seemingly disconnected from each other, are only two of the latest examples of our collective obsession with ratings and rankings of any sort.
(08/09/11 2:00am)
As you know, Dartmouth's 10-week terms allow students to take three classes at a time. What the folks in the admissions office don't advertise is that professors can (and will!) schedule midterms any time from Week 2 to Week 8, which means that you will have to take some time out of your ragey schedule to sit in the library and get your learning on. Since we all want to optimize our fun while maximizing the marginal benefit of our study time (you'll probably know what this means by the end of freshman Fall), use the following guide to find your perfect study space there's one for everybody!
(08/02/11 2:00am)
Dartmouth distinguishes itself from its Ivy League peers through its adherence to liberal arts education, touting on its website that its course load is "structured to maximize your understanding of the world in ways that enable you to be a leader in your future work." During President Kim's inauguration, the College added another adage to its publicity arsenal by challenging its students to "aspire to change the world."
(07/29/11 2:00am)
Last June, New York Times writer David Brooks opined, "Most [college graduates] will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role." He paints recent graduates as restless vagabonds, unwilling to settle down and to fixate on a single niche. Unfortunately, existing data corroborate this allegation. Of the respondents to the latest College survey, 25 percent of seniors have accepted job offers while 20 percent planned to go to graduate school ("Approx. 25 percent of seniors receive jobs," May. 9).
(07/26/11 2:00am)
America loves superheroes. They are traditional staples of summer box offices, with more remakes and reboots than one would care to count. Batman, arguably the most critically acclaimed contemporary superhero movie franchise, has mutated several times in the past few decades, including classics like Tim Burton's 1982 darkly humorous "Batman" to campy disasters like 1997's "Batman and Robin." TV's Incredible Hulk, which ran from 1978 to 1982, was remade into Ang Lee's movie "Hulk" (2003(, which suffered its own reboot in turn less than five years after its release. Despite the repetitive themes, viewers clamor for more, as evidenced by this summer's "Captain America: The First Avenger," and the new "Spiderman," with an entirely changed premise and cast from the original.
(07/12/11 2:00am)
I once wrote a freelance article titled "How the newspaper can win over the next generation" that ran on the opinion pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer a 149-year-old daily. Two months later, in a stroke of irony, the Seattle P-I announced its decision to continue as an online-only operation, citing recent perennial losses.
(07/08/11 2:00am)
When The Dartmouth published an article about "GREEN: Words to Live By, Words to Drink By, Words to Succeed By," ("Students publish guide to college," May 11) my interest was immediately piqued. "GREEN" editors Austin Bowers '11, Cyrus Akrami '11 and Lyman Missimer '11 promised a "satirical" look at the College's history and culture. So when I received four consecutive and identical blitzes announcing the book's release, I contacted one of the editors to ask whether I could purchase a copy on campus. He replied in the negative and instead sent me a link to the Amazon site. While the cost of $17.69 was an interesting allusion to the College's founding year, the price was rather steep for a 194-page paperback. But assured by the knowledge that 100 percent of the profits would be donated to KIVA, a non-profit microcredit development organization, I ignored my initial misgivings and ordered a copy.
(07/05/11 2:00am)
I landed on American soil in August 1999 as a dependent listed on my father's work visa. I attended a public school while my parents set up a small Teriyaki store and paid their taxes, with the hope that we would eventually gain our permanent residency. Unfortunately, due to an unscrupulous immigration attorney, the plan was derailed and my family's application was cast into legal limbo. My parents continued to work and to pay the government, but my own residency status was, at best, murky. As senior year loomed closer and closer, I strove to do well in academics and extracurricular activities, but the constant uncertainty raised a gnawing fear that my permanent residency would never come, effectively barring me from receiving financial aid and building a life in America.
(06/28/11 2:00am)
Take a hypothetical Dartmouth student in her typical day. She'll wake up in the morning and blitz her friends before heading off to class. While her professor lectures on the importance of the cheese industry during World War I, she'll Facebook her friend's profile and "like" a picture that another friend has posted from her Beijing FSP. At the end of class, she'll head to third floor Berry to work on her paper and Google articles on the importance of the cheese industry during World War I. After she finds the necessary documents, she'll meet up with her friend and eventually have dinner and return to her dorm. After getting ready for bed, she will Youtube music videos and Skype her parents on the West Coast before shutting off her laptop and plugging in the charger.
(06/24/11 2:00am)
In February 2010, The Lancet, a preeminent British medical journal, retracted a 1998 article that established a possible link between measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines and the development of bowel disease and autism in young children. Andrew Wakefield, the lead author, was convicted of manipulating patient data, distorting findings and receiving funding from solicitors who sought evidence to file litigation against vaccine manufacturers. Since then, subsequent studies have debunked the connection between MMR vaccines and autism.
(05/31/11 2:00am)
Last week, I scoured through Topside, trying to spend as much non-refundable money from my Declining Balance Account as possible by splurging on enough food to last me through finals. While looking through the instant noodle selection, I picked up a package of "Oriental Flavor" Ramen. I pointed this out to my Chinese-American friend and we both cracked up. We found it amusing that the geographical and cultural vastness of a continent could be summed up in a single, MSG-laced flavor.
(05/11/11 2:00am)
At First-Year Family Weekend two weeks ago, my normally teetotaler friend escorted his Danish relative to one of the Dartmouth frats to show her the archetypical American college drinking scene. The next day, she recounted her observation of the malodor, sticky floor, cheap beer and, most pointedly, students drinking copiously just to get drunk. Her accurate appraisal prompted me to reconsider the convivial and fun-seeking attributes that we typically associate with drinking on campus.
(04/27/11 2:00am)
Dartmouth students are committed to community service. More than 60 percent of students participate in volunteer programs through campus organizations, service grants and Alternative Spring Break programs. "Aspire to change the world" is the charge College President Jim Yong Kim has delivered time and time again. Every week, Novack is filled with bake sales for charitable causes. We are expected to be the "vox clamantis" of the poor and downtrodden, but are we even hearing them correctly?
(03/29/11 2:00am)
When I first learned of the Japanese earthquake, I didn't think much of it after all, seismic activity in Japan is as inevitable as snow in Hanover. It was not until several days later that I realized the grave magnitude of the disaster. The earthquake, at first designated a 8.9 on the Richter scale, was eventually upgraded to a 9.0 a hundred times more intense than the one that struck Haiti. The quake and the resulting tsunami inflicted extensive damage to infrastructures caught in their path, including nuclear power plants. While the United Nations Atomic Agency initially reported positive developments in the nuclear shutdowns, the partial meltdowns, increased radioactivity and plutonium particles found outside some plants have spiked worldwide fears of radiation exposure. Although news of the crisis made its way through the Dartmouth community before spring break, it did not generate a lot of discourse much of our empathy, I suspect, was quashed by the looming presence of finals.
(03/08/11 4:00am)
For the first seven years my life, I lived in Korea, a country that has maintained its ethnic and cultural homogeneity for centuries. My ethnicity, which was inextricably linked to the dominant culture in Korea, strengthened my sense of national belonging.
(02/04/11 4:00am)
In my sophomore year of high school, I was an angry girl with access to a word processor a dangerous combination. At the urging of a mentor, I picked up the proverbial pen and freelanced op-eds for local, state and foreign newspapers, lambasting drug education programs, racial discrimination, workplace inequity and college admissions. I considered writing a temporary endeavor, because my real ambition was to eventually join scientific academia. I ultimately sought a more appropriate venue to channel my aspirations and earned an internship at a stem cell research institute. In shifting my focus to research writing, I expected to table my journalistic activities indefinitely.
(01/20/11 4:00am)
After reading Lauren Rosenbaum's article, ("What's in a Name?," Jan. 13) I could relate to the author's frustration with Dartmouth's relative obscurity outside of the United States. My relatives overseas were dismayed that I had chosen to matriculate at Dartmouth, a relatively little-known institution in South Korea (that is, before College President Jim Yong Kim's ascension). As Rosenbaum pointed out, many of my international and domestic acquaintances were unaware of Dartmouth and mistook it for a school that only offered an undergraduate education. Yet despite its moniker, Dartmouth has been a university in everything but name since 1796, when Nathan Smith established the Dartmouth Medical School.
(01/07/11 4:00am)
In high school, one of the most difficult lessons I had to learn as an opinion columnist was to anticipate the intensity of readers' reactions. After each of my articles was published online, I incessantly clicked on my browser's refresh button throughout the day, scanning the bottom of the page for additional comments that may have appeared since my last visit. This tick of mine did not diminish after my transition into The Dartmouth's opinion page, which generates much, if not most, of the reader response found on The D's website. Despite the wide variety of impassioned commentary located beneath the articles, The D's online comment system faces limitations that render in-depth discussions difficult to carry out.
(10/26/10 2:00am)
Growing up, I often listened to stories about my grandfather, a Pyongyang native who witnessed the end of the Japanese occupation after World War II with strong optimism for the future of Korea. He recognized, however, the potential conflict brewing between the two Koreas occupied by Soviet Russia and the United States, and he chose to seek sanctuary in the south. It was his wish that he would be reunited with the rest of his family once the Korean War had ended. Unfortunately, that day never came.