Want to make something cool to show your mom, so she knows you have tangible skills? Then this blogpost is for you!
The Book Arts Workshop
At the Book Arts Workshop located in the basement of Baker Library by the Orozco Murals, you can learn to design your own print, make stamps, coasters, books, posters, or anything printmaking-and-book-related that your heart desires.To learn more about the Book Arts Workshop, sign up for a Letterpress Orientation on the Book Arts Workshop’s website. All of their workshops are free, so be sure to check it out.
The Digital Lab in BVAC
Jess Smith hosts 2-3 free workshops every week to teach you how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and much more! The digital lab is located on the first floor in the Black Family Visual Arts Center. Check out the workshops available for the rest of the fall on the Digital Lab’s website.
The Jewelry Studio
The Jewelry Studio is located downstairs in the Hop. The staff is fun and friendly. You can drop in during their open hours to work on a project of your choice, and you sign up for a workshop on the Hop’s website.You will have to pay for materials you use if you go during open hours, and there is a fee for workshops.
The Ceramics Studio
The Ceramics Studio is also located in the lower level of the Hop. To use the Ceramics Studio, you have to sign up first, and you will have to purchase the clay you use. For more information, check out the Ceramics Studio’s page on the Hop’s website.
The Woodworking Workshop
Like the Jewelry and Ceramics studios, the woodshop offers paid and guided workshops that cover the cost of the material you’ll use during the workshop. You can also enter the woodshop, without an appointment, to work on a personal project, but you’ll have to attend an orientation first. You will have to pay for the materials you use for your project. Learn more about the woodshop on the Hop’s website.
Ask yourself why you’re not understanding the reading.
Is the content difficult to understand with your current knowledge? Are you bored and falling asleep while reading? Are you reading in a loud/quiet or distracting environment where you can’t focus on your readings? Are you disinterested in the topic? Pinpoint these issues and try to solve them one problem at a time.
Go to office hours and ask your professor how you can best approach your readings.
The easiest way to be successful in a class is to ask your professor what makes a successful student in their class. If you are struggling with the readings in particular, or anything else, ask your professor for help. It is their job to help you learn.
Try to understand the purpose of the reading.
What is your learning goal? What does your professor want you to take away from the reading? If you have to write essays in the class, what information can you take from this reading and apply to your essay? If you take exams and quizzes in the class, what information do you think you’ll be tested on?
Try a change in environment.
If your study space is too quiet, and you work best with chatter around you, try reading on FFB or in another collaborative study space. If you need quiet and the accountability of being around others, try somewhere like 3FB, 4FB, or Rauner. If you find being around others distracting, find somewhere you can be alone, like a study room or your dorm.
What to look for in your readings.
If your reading has headings or subheadings, read them and turn them into a question. For example, “Ways to Fix Internal Validity” could turn into “What are the ways to fix internal validity?” After you read or skim the section, answer yourself.
In addition to headings and subheadings, it’s important to define bolded words and topical words that you don’t know. This will help you understand the reading and future readings better, and if you know what something means, it’s a lot easier to talk about it in class.
Lastly, take a look at any figures, diagrams, illustrations, or tables in your reading. Visualizing a concept is useful for applying it to different situations. Tables that provide definitions and applications can also help you differentiate between two similar concepts.
If you would like more reading tips, please visit our website!
What do you want out of your Dartmouth experience? Make a list, then number the list items in order of importance, and rewrite the list in that order. For example:
Lifelong friends 3 Lifelong friends To get into med school
To get into med school 1 To get into med school To learn time management
To learn time management 2 To learn time management Lifelong friends
Now that you have your goals in order, organize your time such that you’re spending the most time on your most important goal. If you have a goal that is urgent but not time consuming, such as learning time management skills, make time for it as soon as possible, but don’t spend more time than necessary on it.
Budgeting your time based on your goals will help you feel satisfied with your time spent. You can make a list of long-term goals and weekly short-term goals to help you allocate time for specific projects or studying for an exam. Revise your long-term goals monthly and your short-term goals as needed (daily/weekly).
Planners
The most basic time management tool is a planner. As some meetings might still occur via zoom, I recommend using Google Calendar. With Google Calendar, you can put the zoom link in your calendar and easily access it. We also offer a Dartmouth weekly planner with the start time of courses built in. You can print it out and highlight the time blocks of your commitments, or you can fill it in using text boxes in Microsoft Word.
Now that you have your goals established, you should plan your recurring time blocks according to your long-term goals. Be sure to include rest time. Using the free space, you should add in time for accomplishing your short-term goals.
Other Tips
The Foco lines are long. If you want to be productive while you wait for your omelette, you can pull up a pdf of an assigned reading, (for psychology students: you can do your InQuisitive assignment on your phone), you can review pictures of your notes, or do whatever you can do for your classes and extracurricular commitments. If you have an audio version of readings, you can listen to them while you walk around campus!
Use your goals as a guideline for your priorities, but trust yourself as you determine your priorities throughout the day, and stick to them.
Only concentrate on one thing at a time. This will help you get your work done faster, and you’ll find that you have more time this way. For more information and time management tips, check out our website!
I had my first in-person exam during 21X, after five quarters of remote learning. Needless to say, it was an experience. Here are five practices that made my in-person exam experience as painless as possible.
Study with physical material.
For example, if you have a PDF of a practice exam and reference sheets, print them out, and try to do the exam within the time limit that your professor will give you for the actual exam.
Try to recreate the conditions of your testing environment while you study.
If you know the classroom your exam will be in, see if there’s a time when it’s empty and unlocked. If there is, then the classroom makes an excellent place to do practice questions.
Even if the exam is open-book, do your best to remember the material without referencing your notes.
Switching between tabs and using the finder command on your computer is a lot easier than flipping through sheets of paper to find your relevant notes. If you know the material by heart, you’ll do better with time management on your exam.
Go to office hours.
Ask your professor for help with material you want to be more comfortable with. If you’re nervous about taking the exam in-person for the first time, ask your professor if they have any suggestions that will help you succeed on their exam.
Create practice questions for yourself.
The best way to learn material is to practice information retrieval. Ask yourself questions and try to answer them without looking at your notes. Spend more time quizzing yourself than rereading your textbook or notes.
This blogpost is the final part of the freshman FAQ series, and it will answer the following questions:
“How can I pick a balanced course load?”
“How can I choose classes while being considerate of my major and the liberal arts curriculum?”
Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society, Venkatramanan Subrahmanian, teaches a class on Artificial Intelligence.
Picking Balanced Courses: Workload
Before you select any course, read reviews either on layuplist.com or the course assessment portal. You can access the course assessment portal through Darthub, search “Course Assessment Portal,” click on it, and once you’re in, you can type the course or professor name into the keyword search. For example, “PSYC 11.”
The course assessment portal does not have reviews of every course nor every professor available, but it is worth checking out as it will give you less biased reviews. Layuplist is great in that it has every course/term, usually the medians, and for most courses, it has reviews for various professors. However, it tends to be biased. If you see terrible reviews for a professor, try to ask upperclassmen (trip leaders, UGA, teammates, etc) if they have taken a course with the professor or if they know someone who has. They can give you more information and help you figure out whether taking the course is worth it. I would take reviews from 20S-21X with a grain of salt because many professors teach much differently over zoom than in-person.
If you’re wondering where the name “layup list” comes from, at Dartmouth, a layup is considered to be an easy course. Layuplist.com has an option for students to upvote or downvote a course as a layup, but remember that just because a course is a layup for another student does not mean it will be a layup for you. Likewise, just because a course is a layup for you, it might not be a layup for another student.
I advise you to use the course assessment portal and layuplist.com to gauge the workload of a course and find three with varying degrees of workload or two lighter workload courses with one hefty workload. Some questions you can ask yourself while figuring out workload:
How many essays will I have to write?
How many words/pages are they?
How many exams will I have to take?
What is the format of the exam?
How much time do I plan to spend studying?
How many projects will I have to complete?
How many homework assignments or problem sets will I have to do?
How often are they due?
How many pages of reading will I have to do per class or per week?
Do I actually have to do the whole reading for little details, or can I succeed while skimming for the most important conceptual information?
For language courses: How many times per week will I have drill?
Note: Drill is an extra class, taught by a fluent student, that you take for language courses. For Asian Society, Culture, and Language courses, it is usually four times per week. For European languages, it is usually three times per week.
Will my professor be using all x-hours? How many times per week will we meet?
Ultimately, the choice is yours, but please do not take three intense courses at once. Try to leave time for yourself.
Picking Balanced Courses: Subjects
When picking courses, it is important to balance the workload and types of work. I find that one reading-and-writing-intensive course, one STEM course, and one creative class (though I am a Studio Art Major, so this isn’t necessarily applicable for everyone) is a good combination. Try to balance your subjects so that you aren’t doing too much of one thing (for example, two reading intensive classes might have you doing 500 pages of reading per week). This should be easy regardless of your academic path because we are required to take distributive classes.
From personal experience, I find that the best way to transition to the academic rigor at Dartmouth would be to take two layups and one hard class. With this method, you’ll have a taste of what academic rigor really means here, but you won’t be overwhelmed by multiple classes at once.
For your freshman fall course load, you should have your Writing 2 or Writing 5 course, one easier class, and one harder class in a subject you are interested in exploring. The workload for humanities tends to be more intense than Writing 2 or Writing 5, as you have to read multiple novels, but regardless, I encourage you to take a course with a lighter workload and one course in a subject that you are interested in majoring in regardless of its workload.
Choosing Classes While Being Considerate of Major and Liberal Arts Curriculum
When planning courses, the most important thing to keep in mind is your goal after college. Are you going to medical school? Check out course requirements and suggestions for your med school of choice. Do you want to be an engineer? Meet with your dean, your academic advisor, or the department chair for help with planning your courses.
If you aren’t sure what you want to do yet, identify a few departments that you’re interested in and see how many requirements there are for the major, including prerequisites.
You will pick up distributive requirements as you explore departments, so you don’t have to take classes for the sake of getting distributives during your freshman year. If you do not have most of your distributives by your fifth term (in your sophomore year), then it’ll be time to worry about taking classes to get distributives.
The bottom line is that your first priority should be your plans after college.
Why are you here?
Your second priority should be your major.
What do you want to learn while you’re here?
Your third priority should be the liberal arts curriculum requirements.
Which courses do you need to graduate?
If you are worried about the liberal arts curriculum and picking a major that isn’t applicable to your goal after college, you can justify your studies to employers by saying that any major at Dartmouth teaches you how to think critically. For fields in which your undergraduate studies aren’t essential for your next steps, don’t worry about majoring in any particular department. Employers who hire Dartmouth students know that this is a liberal arts school. They want students who know how to think.
Have fun choosing classes, and have a great first year! If you have additional questions, feel free to DM our instagram account @dartmouthacademicskills.
