On Course

ENGS 33: Solid Mechanics

ENGS 33: Solid Mechanics reminded Bronson Starsiak ’23 of his love of tinkering and reaffirmed his passion for mechanical engineering. The course, taught by Assistant Professor of Engineering Yan Li, encourages students to apply a hands-on approach to engineering concepts. Whether constructing wooden model bridges or testing the limits of super-stretchy dough, Bronson enjoyed how ENGS 33 breathed life into the engineering theories he was learning. “My favorite aspect of the course was being able to put our lectures to the test,” he says. “Being able to apply the equations and theory we learned in class added meaning to the material. Intuition is best gained through getting your hands dirty and experimenting.”

Professor Li welcomes students from any discipline—STEM or not—to join ENGS 33. “I like to hear diverse voices so that we can make the engineering classroom more accessible, more inclusive, and better connected to the real world,” Professor Li says. “In my opinion, a good engineer is a team player, an open-minded problem-solver, and a good communicator using both the plain and engineering languages.” Excited to brainstorm ideas with undergraduates, Professor Li develops assignments that mold her students into collaborative creators ready to approach real-world engineering problems.

ENGS 33 sparked the curiosity of Hannah Burd ’22 for the mechanical engineering design process and inspired her to pursue sustainable product design. She remembers applying concepts from class to the lab during the scaled wood bridge design project, which sees students build an economical model bridge, subject it to extreme pressure using an Instron machine,

What are Dartmouth students studying? In every issue, we feature a class plucked somewhat randomly from a deep reservoir of fascinating courses.

and compare the results with theoretical predictions. “Our class projects were the best introduction to hands-on engineering that I’ve experienced at Dartmouth,” Hannah says. “The time I spent in the machine shop and in maker spaces this summer was invaluable.”

As Professor Li collects more designs over the years, she plans to build a knowledge base where students can access previous plans and determine the pros and cons of existing work before they begin their own designs. She hopes to implement new technologies like artificial intelligence and smart sensors in future wood bridge developments.

“One of my teaching goals is to help students develop the skills necessary to perform higher-level analytical, creative, and problem-solving tasks,” Professor Li says. “Seeing them build friendships through the course projects is a bonus!” —Sydney Wuu ’24

TAREK EL-ARISS

THE JAMES WRIGHT PROFESSOR AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES

Standing in a sun-dappled classroom in Rabat, Morocco with fifteen Dartmouth students, Tarek El-Ariss felt as much at home as he did stateside in Hanover or in his home country of Lebanon. Perhaps that’s because wherever he is, including traveling with his students on one of Dartmouth’s signature Language Study Abroad (LSA) programs, he focuses on creating a common experience.

A professor of Middle Eastern studies, Professor El-Ariss has devoted nearly his entire career to understanding culture—and answering the question: What is a text? “Growing up speaking Arabic and French and then English, I’m interested in the idea of a multilingual, multi-textual world,” he says. His research has covered subjects like time, memory, and the way that social media and the digital landscape have created new ways of communicating.

Though technically a member of both the Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature Programs, Professor El-Ariss collaborates with artists, scientists, and scholars in too many disciplines to count. He works closely with computer science students, for example, on projects relating to coding as a form of language and believes his classroom is better for it. That’s what’s special about teaching these subjects here at Dartmouth, he says. “I would like my students to see connections between the sciences and the humanities and literature and physics.”

A recipient of the renowned Guggenheim Fellowship, Professor El-Ariss is working on a book project tentatively titled Water on Fire. “The book will allow me to reflect on what it means to be a literary scholar. How do we make meaning of the texts that we read but also of the worlds in which we live?” Growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, he sees the city as trapped between the escape of the Mediterranean Sea and the “fire” of warfare. “The experience really shaped me,” he says. “It’s produced forms of displacement that were painful, but also productive, and opened new ways for me to think about culture and literature.”

So when Professor El-Ariss brings students to Rabat, he teaches them how to turn something disorienting into something productive that forges unbreakable bonds. “I put our students at the center of contemporary debate about culture and politics in Morocco,” he says. “We met with a sociologist writing about women’s sexuality in Morocco, authors who have spent parts of their lives in prison, filmmakers and musicians, and heard their stories.”

Being right at the heart of all the action is where Professor El-Ariss likes to be. That, he says, is how we access memories like the ones integral to his work. “They say we are 95% water, but the other 5% is fiction,” he says. “We are made of stories, and our ability to make sense of stories is special.” —Caroline Cook ’21

Textual

Evidence

PHOTOGRAPH BY WEBB CHAPPELL Pictured: In Boston, MA