Congratulations to Sng Byon on her recent engagement to Evan McNeil, MED’22! Everyone loves a Dartmouth love story, and nothing gets better than a proposal during a Cardigan hike.
As a reminder, please send any life updates to the email below!
—Louisa Gao, 154 E 29th St., New York, NY 10016; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
Gap year stories are always my favorite to write for the column, but few get better than Scarlett Souter’s year around the world.
Scarlett received her A.B. in 2022 and stayed on campus for a fifth year to complete her B.E. Scarlett was a biomedical engineering major and a physics minor. During her fourth year on campus, she applied and got accepted to the Geisel Early Assurance Program, but ultimately decided to defer her admission by a year to travel and pursue her interest in marine preservation.
Growing up, Scarlett loved surfing and the ocean and has always been passionate about biological and marine sciences. She spent the summers of 2021 and 2022 in Costa Rica doing turtle research and the year after graduation in Hawaii and Indonesia doing animal protection work. In August 2023 Scarlett moved to Oahu and volunteered with Hawaii Marine Animal Response (HMAR), where she did animal rescue work for sea turtles, monk seals, and sea birds.
Scarlett then moved to a small island off Lombok Island in Indonesia in April and interned with Project Hiu, hiu being the Indonesian word for shark. The project was founded to provide alternative income to fishermen in one of the largest shark fisheries in Indonesia, which leads the world in shark fin exporting. Scarlett described shark fishing as an extremely dangerous trade, where fishermen rely heavily on generational knowledge, go out to the ocean in small boats, and fish mainly by hand. By providing them an income with ecotourism, Project Hiu aims to stop the fishing activities on the island and eventually eliminate the generational knowledge that teaches these fishermen how to hunt for sharks.
In August Scarlett returned to Hanover and started her first year at Geisel. She admitted that she didn’t feel fully certain about going to medical school until after her gap year abroad. She loves marine biology and thought that, if it weren’t for medical school, she would have pursued a career in marine biotechnology. Scarlett appreciated the time to explore the world and make friends who are passionate about the same fields, and she felt like she could always go back to Costa Rica or Hawaii or Indonesia as a volunteer, whereas medical school was a “now or never” decision.
During her fourth year as an undergraduate, she was missing a strong sense of purpose despite how interesting her classes were because she didn’t know what that knowledge would be applied to. She had always liked the problem-solving component of physics and engineering but wanted a more fast-paced and interactive environment, where she could directly make a difference in people’s lives. At Geisel, although the workload has been stressful at times, she has finally rediscovered the joy of learning and a clear path in applying what she learns every day.
Besides her day-to-day in labs and classes, she is actively trying to connect her love for marine biology with her medical school courses. She’s been thinking about how she could return to Lombok and help the local community in a more medical way. During her internship she ran a course on first aid and CPR, but she wants to eventually help improve the islanders’ access to healthcare, as the only doctor in their small community does not have access to medical technology. As a Geisel student, she has found many interesting groups and scholarships related to global health as well as the number of resources available for her to pursue a project of her own. The summer between her first and second year is the only summer she can allocate her own time, and I already cannot wait to hear about it, wherever in the world she decides to go next.
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
When I think of books, I immediately think of Mia Nelson. I took an English class with her during our senior year at Dartmouth and the way she talked about books and literature made me want to live in her mind and read everything with her. This conversation was nothing different.
Mia has always loved reading. In high school she attended a creative writing program that naturally led to her English and creative writing major at Dartmouth. After graduation she went to Spain to teach English as a Fulbright scholar at a community college. She spent a year in Galicia, an autonomous community in northwestern Spain, where students learned English via other academic subjects. Students would talk about a subject of familiarity or interest, such as marketing or tourism training, in English. The focus was to communicate rather than learning English the “correct” way—ideally creating an environment where more students felt curious and creative in their language studies.
Mia thinks ENGS 12: Design Thinking at Dartmouth made her a better writer and teacher, and she still remembers a quote from the class that “creativity is something you do, it doesn’t just happen to you.” As for creative teaching, it has become clearer that she is good at teaching because she is good at being a “beginner” with endless curiosity and eagerness.
After a year abroad Mia was glad to return to the East Coast and a community that shares her love for words. She is currently enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Vermont (UVM), where she takes two classes and teaches two classes during her first year. She loves that she can be equally invested in being a professor for 66 freshmen and continue learning as a student. One of her classes is a foundational composition course where students learn to write academically, which means she now has to balance her position of authority with past teaching experience that focused more on co-creation or peer teaching.
Being the first English professor for a lot of her students has allowed her to be a part of other people’s academic story while creating her own. She has always loved contemporary literature and thinks that institutions don’t give enough credence to the genre that reflects upon the present moment. As an undergrad Mia wrote a thesis on ecological girlhood—how girls are fixated as protagonists in fictional environmental apocalypses such as The Hunger Games. She looked at a Jesmyn Ward novel and a Lydia Millet novel to find out what it means to be a girl at the end of the world and what that means for the environment. At UVM she took a class called Frankenstein in Climate Change, which applies contemporary reading theory to examine Frankenstein as the “first climate change novel.” She really enjoyed that reading practice and is inspired to revisit Frankenstein and Louise Glück’s Nobel Prize-winning poetry and examine how these narratives link together climate change and sexuality for her master’s thesis.
Mia is always reading and will always have a list of recommendations. She had just finished Come and Get It by Kiley Reid, a book about academia that reflects on privilege and neoliberalism, and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which tackles the opioid crisis and talks about the environment. Mia has always gravitated toward fiction as the stories create an inventive distance, but she recently loved Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, a nonfiction book about the author’s quest to find meaning in the world through her obsession with one of the world’s most flawed and prolific taxonomists.
Try asking her for recommendations, and I’m sure she will give you five different books every time you ask.
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
Interviewing a close friend for the alumni magazine columns always brings me joy, and I finally had a chance to talk to Olivia Gish about her interest and career in sustainability.
Sustainability has been a part of Olivia’s life for as long as she can remember because her dad has been working in the renewable energy space since before she was born. Growing up with awareness of climate change and the clean-energy transition, Olivia became an anthropology-modified-with-environmental-studies major at Dartmouth and minored in Native American studies. During her four years in Hanover she spent most of her time on environmental studies and became interested in environmental policy and energy policy.
After graduation she joined Ortus Climate Mitigation, a global developer of renewable energy projects across wind, solar, and green-hydrogen technologies in Europe, including the United Kingdom, and North Africa. Working at Ortus has helped her gain insight into renewable energy development as an industry and what the clean-energy transition will look like.
Although Ortus’s work has been valuable and critical to fighting climate change, the company is focused on broader utility-scaled projects; Olivia’s interests lie in community-based energy development. To expand her knowledge and understand what other solutions exist in the space, Olivia will be attending Columbia’s climate school for a master’s in climate and society this fall to further explore her interest and career path.
Olivia believes that the best decision she made at Dartmouth was to take classes in the Native American studies department. The classes helped her discover new worldviews in learning about historical and current environmental degradation and environmental stewardship. In conjunction with environmental studies classes, she researched national parks systems, in particular the management of land in the United States and South Africa. She focused on how the land and natural resources are managed, both historically and in the present day, and how local communities, especially Indigenous people, are involved in the governance of land. These research projects sparked her interest in community-based resource management, addressing issues such as energy security, inequitable access to clean energy, and finding solutions that help communities that are disproportionately impacted by climate change.
Olivia talked about her interest in “agrivoltaics,” which is the use of land for both agriculture and solar energy generation. The solution creates a symbiotic system whereby crops benefit from the presence of solar panels and solar panels benefit from being on agriculture land. Although agrivoltaics is still a nascent business model in the United States, it is a system that could be effective in addressing sustainability issues and reconciling conflicting need for land.
Olivia views the clean-energy transition as both a policy issue and availability issue within communities. For instance, current permitting processes are not efficient and can slow down energy developments. The energy grid in the United States needs to be upgraded, which makes development on a utility scale more difficult. Although microgrids can avoid utility-specific problems, they still face issues with policies and community awareness. Going into her master’s program, she is eager to learn what incentives for community-based solutions exist or could in the future with the implementation of climate-related policies. Additionally, community involvement is critical for any sustainability initiatives. She hopes to understand all the moving pieces in clean energy transition at a micro scale and the ways she can help address them.
One way to increase awareness about climate action and solutions is to simply have conversations about it.
Because the sustainability space is constantly evolving, it’s easy to find people who are working on something relevant. Olivia is excited to have these conversations inside and outside of Columbia, and New York City is excited to have her back.
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
One of my core memories senior year was sitting next to Ethan Moon in the first floor of Berry, bothering him with Stata questions and watching him work on his economics thesis. Naturally, when he finished his master’s program with Fulbright, I was thrilled to learn about his year in the United Kingdom.
Similar to some other ’22s I’ve interviewed for the column, Ethan wanted to go abroad for his master’s program because his study-abroad term was cancelled due to Covid. His senior thesis examined the relationship between corporate board composition and firm performance, and Fulbright provided both the opportunity to study abroad and the flexibility to pursue research as an extension to his work at Dartmouth. For his dissertation, he used the same data as his undergraduate thesis but asked a different question: How does corporate governance affect sustainability? Ethan admits that his research at Dartmouth was vital to win the scholarship and produce the results for his dissertation. Because Dartmouth did a good job in promoting climate change, he realized that his project and data were very interesting from a sustainability perspective during senior year, but it was too late for him to change topics. He then worked with Professor Levin to fine-tune his Fulbright scholarship application so he could continue to examine the data with a different question at Lancaster University.
The master’s program at Lancaster consisted of four quarters: fall and winter were mostly coursework, and the last two terms focused on formulating the dissertation. Although the structure was similar to Dartmouth, the approach to education and research was very different from what Ethan experienced as an undergraduate student. “The United Kingdom was surprisingly different for how similar it was expected to be compared to the United States,” he said. He described the focus on research as qualitative and philosophical, while most research classes in the economics department at Dartmouth would require data to back any theory. As an example, a Dartmouth economics class would talk about climate change through health outcome, lifespan change, and economic productivity, but his program at Lancaster would encourage students to discuss the relationship between sustainability and ecofeminism movements. Ethan embraced the differences as a part of his philosophy of “trying to experience as much as possible,” and his qualitative dissertation was published in the Harvard Business Review the day I interviewed him for this column.
Besides his academic success, he enjoyed making new friends in London and keeping in touch with old ones. Joking that he “loves these people too much,” Ethan kept in touch with many Dartmouth friends through almost weekly calls. He’s also wrapping up a collaborative paper that he started with Claire McMahon and Yangyang Li, and the paper will be published with their Dartmouth professors via the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Ethan is now back home in Atlanta and starting his job as a consultant at Bain. He admits that he will strongly consider moving to Boston, where he can be more connected to the Fulbright community, research institutions, and Dartmouth classmates. Before his move down the road, we can at least read his work in the Harvard Business Review or catch him on a Bain recruiting visit back on campus.
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
Growing up in Beijing, I’ve always had a special admiration for the Schwarzman Scholars program, a one-year master program at Tsinghua University. For this column I was thrilled to interview Isabella Lichen, who had just traveled back from Beijing after finishing her one-year master with Schwarzman Scholars.
A double-major in Chinese and biology modified with chemistry, Bella had started thinking of attending a graduate program since junior spring. She knew she didn’t want to start medical school right away, so she went through fellowship advisory at Dartmouth and stumbled upon Schwarzman. The program offered the learning experience that she was looking for and a perfect opportunity to visit China given her language study abroad at Beijing Normal University was canceled due to Covid.
Bella arrived in China in the fall of 2022. After a two-week hotel quarantine in Shanghai and one-week at-home quarantine in Beijing, she started her year-long program at Schwarzman College, a residential college within Tsinghua University and the homebase of the Schwarzman program. As a part of the program Bella needed to complete a capstone project. Because the students had to plan for resources and find an advisor, they needed to define a field of interest early in the year. Knowing that she wanted to research something healthcare-related, Bella soon identified the current time period in China was particularly special given the rapid changes in Covid-related policies and restrictions.
After four years of “zero-Covid” policies, at the end of 2022 China finally began rolling back restrictions. Daily Covid cases surged rapidly soon after the restrictions were lifted, and the healthcare system was facing severe stress from the unprecedented numbers of Covid infections and deaths. During these months Bella conducted a qualitative study on how public and private Chinese hospitals managed Covid before and after lifting restrictions and as the country was pushed into a new normalcy. She emphasized that she felt extremely lucky to talk to people about their experiences and observe the day-to-day life of physicians. Although some were wary about sharing their experiences with a foreigner, physically being in the hospitals was still an incredible learning experience for Bella.
Schwarzman Scholars accepts college graduates from ages 19 to 29, so her classmates had a spectrum of life experiences before the program. Some were recent graduates like Bella, but others were well into their careers. Some have already gone through what she wanted to do, so she not only had the perspective of witnessing a public health crisis in China but also the wisdom from classmates who have completed medical school.
“It was crazy to see history unfold in front of me,” Bella explained, adding that her year in Beijing has inspired her to think deeper about medical school. She has gained more interest in global and public health because although China’s Covid restriction lift turned into a public health crisis, the accessibility and affordability of general healthcare still makes an impressive case study. Studying in China while Covid restrictions were lifted was completely unexpected for her, but the year in Beijing has given her more perspectives on the impact of policymaking on the well-being of a community.
In other news, huge congratulations to Katie Lutz for attending Columbia Law School this fall! If you’d like to share any exciting life updates or want to be featured for future columns, please feel free to send them directly to me or to Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
A first-timer in Africa, Ian Stiehl has lived in Tanzania since graduation for a fellowship program through Princeton in Africa (PiAf). Through PiAf, Ian was paired with a local nongovernmental organization, Tanzania Education Corp., which partners with a pre-primary, junior, secondary, and senior secondary school in Makuyuni, Tanzania. I’ve admired the landscape and animals of Tanzania through glimpses of Ian’s social media for the past year, and I finally had the opportunity to talk to Ian about his experience teaching in the computer science program at the Tumaini Senior School.
In Tanzania, secondary school is divided into ordinary level (Forms 1-4) and advanced level (Forms 5-6). Ian spends most of his time teaching Forms 1-3 and rolling out a new class for the older students. Form 1 students start with learning to use computers and get comfortable with the Microsoft Suite. Form 2 students focus on Scratch programs and later apply those skills to operating robots and Python. Form 3 students learn web development, moving from HTML through JavaScript. Every class period focuses on an activity and mini coding projects. Even though the class is only once a week due to the extracurricular nature of the computer science program, Ian makes sure the students always have ongoing afterschool projects, from using Adobe Photoshop to create a logo for the Tumaini STEM program to building a robotic arm kit for a presentation at graduation.
The program is currently operated by international people. Though the curriculum is spreading digital literacy for students of all ages, the more sustainable solution would be for a local teacher with a computer science degree to take over. The older students can participate in an international certificate program, where they learn about modules that are essential for jobs or higher-level computer science concepts such as artificial intelligence. However, computer science is still considered technical and niche, and many students find it hard to focus on such a particular field instead of pursuing a more practical profession in Tanzania. When I asked about the students, Ian proudly admits that there are lots of impressive kids doing self-teaching projects to explore their curiosity beyond the standard curriculum. He writes in his blog (which is a must-read) that “knowing that I’ve reached a few students and shown them how technology is changing the world is my biggest motivator.” One of his students, who’s always in the lab, asked how difficult it would to be a teacher—it’s exciting to imagine the students, less than 10 years younger than us, changing the program into a more sustainable form in a few years.
When asked how he chose PiAf, Ian admitted that he always wanted to go abroad in some capacity and participants’ testimony on fellowship experiences encouraged him to do meaningful work in a continent he’s never been to before. The one-year program showed him the language and cuisine of welcoming locals and bright minds of his students as well as some problematic ways international aid works and operates. Ian admits the program has shifted what he wants to do in the long term, but for now he will be moving to New York City. It’s hard to fit the shortest version of Ian’s year abroad into a 600-word column, but I’m eager to hear more about it in a few months.
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
For this column, I had the chance to catch up with my friend Ben Squarer. Ben and I have grown close since we took “Physics 15” together freshmen fall, and although I have admitted defeat in the face of higher-level physics classes, Ben has always talked about physics with passion.
After completing Dartmouth with a major in physics and writing a thesis on nuclear plasmas, Ben headed across the pond and started his internship in Oxfordshire, England. He noted that the internship required fixed hours in the office, but he had to manage his time just like he did in college. The hours were more structured but less structured at the same time, which followed naturally from the thesis project.
He interned at a nuclear fusion company, where technology related to fusion energy is developed with the aim of inventing a world’s first commercial power plant. Ben’s field of academic interest fits into the company’s core research, and the internship has provided him with more clarity and direction on going to graduate school for physics. Ben’s passion for math and physics has always come from a pure academic perspective. I’ve always been inspired by how Ben can immerse himself in a 500-page textbook full of theories and Greek letters to extract information and how much he enjoys solving difficult problems even if it means being stuck for hours and days. The internship gave him a glance at the impact of research beyond theories, and he realized that having an industry perspective helps motivate more abstract work and bridge it with what makes sense in the real world.
He still wants to study more pure physics, but now with an industry application in mind. Fusion, as a field, requires discoveries in physics and solutions to engineering problems, where physicists, mathematicians, and engineers simultaneously contribute to the building blocks of a project. Ben admits that he first imagined grad school as independent work and solving problems that he finds interesting, but now he is inclined to work on larger projects. His close friends who also completed theses in physics, Owen Eskandari and Henry Prestegaard, worked on projects within a larger goal under their professors, and Ben now understands the motivating richness that comes with working on larger projects.
Every time Ben and I facetimed after graduation, he was in a different time zone. He was visiting family abroad and traveled across the United States to see friends from Dartmouth. Ben enjoyed spending time with people in their new “homes,” and seeing his college friends adjusting to new places and forming new circles allows Ben to meet people exactly where they are. He’s happy to be around Dartmouth people and excited to see where the next step takes him. If you ever catch him in your city, please give him a hug for me!
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
A post-New York Fashion Week (NYFW) show launch party turned into a mini-Dartmouth reunion this September. At the Bobblehaus venue, Ronnie Ahlborn was setting up the show, managing social media, and greeting many Dartmouth students and alumni who came to the event because of various connections with the brand. The launch party attracted alumni from industries inside and outside of fashion and art, and in Ronnie’s words, “Dartmouth people were bound to come.”
As a part of the effort to connect with the class of 2022 after graduation, I’m planning to feature different classmates every other month and tell their stories. In this column, we are very lucky to have Ronnie share with us some cool things she has been doing in New York City.
Ronnie is currently the community and marketing lead at Bobblehaus, a sustainable, genderless, streetwear brand based in New York City. She started her journey with the brand as an intern her sophomore winter. The brand was young and small at the time, and Ronnie worked closely with the cofounders, who taught her everything she needed to know about graphic design after she took just one class on the subject the term before, “Digital Drawing.” The tight-knit team at Bobblehaus introduced Ronnie to how graphic design could be used outside of projects and classrooms—the impact of her work on the growth of this young and exciting brand taught her the longevity of art, which eventually inspired her to major in studio art.
The knowledge and relationships from the studio art major followed Ronnie from Hanover to New York City. When asked whether she keeps in touch with other ’22s in art, she laughed and explained how she just saw Wylie Kasai and Alice Crow in August. She is currently curating an exhibition for Bobblehaus and created the open call for the exhibition under the guidance of Professor Park, who has chatted with Ronnie multiple times after graduation about career, which has come full circle from her first graphic design internship to assisting in putting on a NYFW show for the brand.
Months after graduation Ronnie has recruited two girls from Sheba, Ana Reyes and Huwon Kim ’19, who are working as store managers. She also introduced Nikki Harrigan ’20 to the brand when Bobblehaus needed a model for fashion week. Ronnie sees Bobblehaus as an inclusive platform and loves the message it sends as a fashion brand, which is entirely operated by minorities and primarily women. Prior to the store opening the team talked about how high-end brands pride to be exclusive, but “our party was open to all—we just want to say this is our house, this is your house, and we’d love for you to come hang out.”
This interview is, I hope, the first of many opportunities that I will get to talk to a classmate and share a sneak peak of their lives. If you would like to volunteer yourself, your friends, or anyone who would like to be featured in this column, please feel free to reach out!
—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com
