Erin Purcell

Erin comes to Dartmouth from Terrace Park, Ohio, and is an alumna of Mariemont High School. She plans on majoring in English with a minor in education policy. This term, she's taking Patterns of Religious Experience; Dialogues with the Classics; and Multiculturalism, Immigration and Citizenship. Outside the classroom, she's a member of Dartmouth's Cheer Team, is a Dickey Center Great Issues Scholar, and volunteers with America Reads. One of her favorite books is The World According to Garp. You might catch her reading it in Sanborn Library, famous for its daily 4pm tea service! But don't let the sleepy setting fool you - before Dartmouth, Erin performed in a circus! She even brought her unicycle and clown nose collection to Dartmouth with her. Keep up with her posts, and when you come to Dartmouth she just might teach you how to juggle!

Applications!

 Posted by Erin Purcell at 4:00 pm  1 Response »
Feb 072012
 

No, not college applications. You’re done with those, and now hopefully you’re taking a couple months to soak up the end of high school before decisions come back. But while you may be finished with applications, we here at Dartmouth find ourselves awash in them once again.

Even though we’re spending four years at the same school, there are still so many parts of these four years to plan out. Dartmouth’s calendar, known as “the D-plan”, keeps students on campus for the fall, winter, and spring of their freshman and senior years, as well as the summer after their sophomore year. Students can decide from the remaining quarters when they want to be “on” (campus) and when they want to be “off”.

I know some students who will be “on” this summer because they are going on study abroad programs known as LSA’s or FSP’s. They applied awhile back, and just heard back this week that they will be spending the summer studying language and culture in places like China and Brazil. Most freshmen, however, are taking off this first summer. This means that we’re all madly trying to figure out what we want to spend the summer doing and how we can make that possible. We’re applying to internships and jobs both back home and around the world. While my roommate is considering being a summer camp counselor in Wisconsin, one of my friends on my floor just got accepted to go to Thailand for three weeks with a global health club at Dartmouth.

I’m having flashbacks from senior year as I sort through all these applications and deadlines. But at the same time, I’m really excited for planning my summer and my other two leave terms. Today I attended an event called “Love Your Leave Term” that featured a panel of students describing their various leave term experiences.There are so many possibilities: internship at a business? working for a nonprofit? international service trip? Though at times the choices and applications seem overwhelming, I’m confident that I’ll figure out some awesome plans for this summer.

College Responsibilities

 Posted by Erin Purcell at 11:41 am  No Responses »
Jan 112012
 

Hello from Hanover, once again!

First and foremost: welcome to all the ED ’16s! Lots of my friends were facebooking and tweeting their excitement about you on the day the decisions came out. As fun as it is being the fawned over babies of the school (usually), we really are looking forward to meeting you all!

Winter break provided a lot to think about. I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, so these past few weeks were my first time being back in Cincinnati since September. I expected it to feel strange, but it didn’t at all. Instead, I found myself maneuvering through the scene of my pre-Dartmouth life like I was on autopilot. I didn’t forget how to drive or where anything in the house was kept. Though I feel like all the new things I’ve been doing and learning at Dartmouth have changed me, it was startling how much home had stayed the same.

Being away from home made me realize how spoiled we are at Dartmouth. For all the bellyaching about tiny dorm rooms and cafeteria food, I really do feel like the college life is a pampered one. We don’t have to worry about cleaning the bathrooms– the custodians do that for us (tip: befriend your custodian. they’re great people and you’ll need their help sooner or later.) We don’t have to cook our own meals, or even pull something out of the fridge and put it in the microwave. Once we’re finished eating, we put our plates on a conveyor belt and they magically disappear, returning in clean stacks next to the salad bar by the next mealtime.

bye, dishes!

At home, I found myself a bit jolted by all the household chores and compromises I had left behind. I was now expected to walk the dog and make sure she was let out frequently. I had to coordinate use of the cars with my family members, instead of heading out whenever and wherever I pleased. I had to sort out and fold laundry for my parents and siblings, instead of merely taking care of my own clothes. If I wanted clean utensils, I actually had to load and unload the dishwasher. All these things are normal household tasks that should be expected of me– but all the services provided with a college education had let me off the hook from them over the past three months.

This is not to say that we don’t have responsibilities to fulfill in college. We do, just of a different variety. Instead of being accountable to a family team, we are accountable to ourselves and what we are making ourselves into during these four years. College is a self-indulgent time, in that we get to work on ourselves in whichever ways we choose. We can take all sorts of classes to become more knowledgeable about certain subjects, we can join activities to gain new skills, and we can meet new people to expand our perspectives and provide us with companionship. But what we have to remember is how we will use these new selves we are building to help others.

There are certainly ways to help others while still at Dartmouth; the Tucker Foundation, spring break service trips, and many campus-wide charity and activism events all make this an easy thing in which to be involved. They are awesome programs, and I recommend that all you ’16s check them out. But I also think it’s okay if college is in some ways a latency period, where we build ourselves up with the skills and ideas we will need to be generous, productive, engaged members of society for the rest of our lives. We all have certain lifelong humanistic responsibilities to each other, like being respectful and kind. But I also think it’s okay to think of this great Dartmouth opportunity as a time of responsibilities to ourselves and our futures. Eventually we’ll have more occupational and familial obligations to fulfill, but for now we have the resources and time to make ourselves into adults capable of handling those obligations with skill and poise. There will be plenty of time to wash our own dishes after graduation.

Live free!

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Studying, Studying, Yeah!

 Posted by Erin Purcell at 9:53 pm  No Responses »
Dec 022011
 

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta study for finals, everybody’s looking forward to winter break…

Sorry for the awful song reference, guys. My caffeine-addled brain couldn’t come up with anything better. Also, sorry we’ve been a little lax in posting lately! It’s finals week here at Dartmouth, so things have been a bit busier than normal.

Actually, things feel less busy in a way. Even though it’s Friday evening, the atmosphere is
way more subdued than a typical Dartmouth weekend. We had our last classes on Wednesday, so yesterday and today were the “reading period” to catchup and study before most of the tests are held. Most people have been holed up in their favorite study spots for the past several days. People can get pretty aggressive about the prime study spots– I’m not nearly brave enough to try and snag a table on the third floor of the library, where most of the seats have had jackets and books permanently marking them as occupied for days. I miss hanging out with my friends in the evenings, but I know I’m getting more work done by going off by myself.

Besides, things haven’t been a total grind. Everyone from President Kim to the Gospel Choir have been holding “study breaks” with treats to help lighten the mood. If I went to all the study breaks offered, I’d never get anything done! And tonight was the tree-lighting on the Green– in the midst of all this schoolwork, the lights and carols finally made me realize that the holiday season is right around the corner.

I actually don’t have any finals tests this term; instead, my final grades are all papers. This is sort of nice because I have more control over my time and when I choose to work on each one. My humanities paper was due on Wednesday. It feels so nice to have that over with and to know that I only have two classes left to worry about. My religion paper is due on Monday afternoon. I took a draft to my professor during her office hours today, which was super helpful because I got to hear where my paper was weak from the person who will be grading it. Just one more plug for going to office hours– they really are worth it!

My biggest challenge is the research paper I’m writing for a sociology class on multiculturalism. I started off thinking about a topic in multicultural education, since I’m really interested in education policy, but I soon realized that “multicultural education” is way too broad of a topic. I decided to focus on “parachute kids,” wealthy Asian students who travel alone to the United States to go to school here. I want to see how their sojourn specifically for education and away from their parents affects their incorporation into American life. Even though writing my first college-level research paper is a bit daunting, I’m so interested in the topic that I’m actually having fun with the research.

Off to do more reading …and use my meal swipes to procure more caffeine! (who needs dinner when there is 5-hour Energy?)

Good luck with your own pre-break schoolwork, and happy holidays!

Live Free

Erin

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Great Issues Scholars retreat!

 Posted by Erin Purcell at 5:38 am  No Responses »
Nov 212011
 

When I arrived on campus, there were so many clubs and activities I wanted to try. Even though I am in no way qualified for a hip-hop dance group and I don’t really know what Boggle is (yes, there’s a club for that), I eagerly watched as blitz after blitz poured in to my inbox during the early weeks of September. I’d joined the Cheer Team over the summer, but I was looking for a non-athletic campus activity that was totally different than anything I’d done before.

I found what I was looking for in the Great Issues Scholars program, run through Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. If the title sounds vague, that’s because the program is so broad– we basically learn about the most pressing concerns of people all over the world through speakers, lectures, and discussions. GIS is just for first-years, which is one reason why I’ve enjoyed it so much. I’ve met other students my age whom I might not have met on my floor, in a class, or on a team. To get to know each other, our first event of the term was a retreat!

We left in school buses on Friday afternoon and drove about forty minutes off campus to a beautiful camp in Vermont. We started out with icebreaker games in a barn and then had a delicious dinner in the main lodge. Though I’m still having my honeymoon period with the food here at Dartmouth, the home-cooked meals at this camp were amazing.

Next we got down to the main part of the retreat: a simulation of the conflict going on in the South China Sea. Most of us had never even heard of that region, so we attended a lecture by Dartmouth professors Jenny Lind and Daryl Press, about a week prior to the retreat. At the lecture we were all assigned to different country groups involved in the issue. In the week leading up to the retreat we read news articles with more specifics on our particular country’s motivations and involvement. The simulation was run by Fred Hill, who makes simulations for the U.S. Department of State. We are so spoiled here at Dartmouth.

After a talk from Fred Hill we split into our seperate “countries” and began planning what we would say in conference with each of the other countries the next day. It was a lot of information to take in, but we had been provided with the necessary resources to sort through it. After the meetings we made s’mores in the barn and then headed to bed in the cabins.

Before breakfast the next morning, some other girls and I went on a morning walk around the camp grounds. There was a fresh autumn breeze, and the leaves on the trees were absolutely gorgeous. This part of the country is so stunning in October. As if the natural landscape wasn’t enough, we found a small wooden castle up on a hill! We ran around inside of it and posed on the top like little kids on a playground. That morning was easily one of my happiest moments at Dartmouth so far.

The morning was spent doing teamwork exercises in the woods, and the afternoon was full of diplomatic meetings amongst countries. I have no debate or Model UN background, so I wasn’t really expecting how intense some of the meetings became! I was a representative of the United States; we were trying to support countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia without coming into direct conflict with China. We ran from meeting to meeting, trying to keep up with new developments amongst countries and prevent ourselves from committing to anything too hastily. Even though we’d known next to nothing about the South China Seas conflict only a week before, we still managed to take many different viewpoints into account. We didn’t reach an overarching solution by the end of the afternoon, but I know I still enjoyed playing diplomat for a day. After the concluding summit, we ate another delicious dinner and headed back at campus in time for Saturday evening.

The retreat was such a fun part of my freshman fall. It sort of felt like DOC trips all over again. We’ve had several other GIS events since, and it’s been great catching up with the friends I made during the retreat. I’m so thankful that I’m in GIS this year. I knew next to nothing about international affairs when I came here, so it’s been great to learn a bit about topics as varied as human trafficking in Kyrgyzstan or U.S. policy towards the conflict in the Middle East. I’m already looking forward to the rest of the year with GIS.

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