Pannier!

I have been thinking about building this piece for a while: a bike pannier that can hold any size pack. From hand drawing, to a solidworks sketch, to a looks like prototype, then to this! It still needs some testing and some work to be sure, but I’m pretty happy!

New floors!

After living off campus at the Pebble for over a year with constant New Hampshire humidity and very suspect carpeting, hard to tell what the original color was, I decided that it was time for a Pebble renewal. Long story short, my roomates and I moved out of the house, slept on our neighbors’ floor the last week of summer term, replaced the decrepit old carpet with new linoleum and rigged our beds into murphy beds. Behold the unfolded and folded murphy bed pictures. Double the floor space, Not bad, eh?!

DMBC

Dartmouth does things in a very interesting way. We have been getting a lot of publicity recently about frats, hazing, sexual assault among other unsavory topics, but that is only about 5.8% of the picture, if it deserves that. The other 94.2% of real Dartmouth students’ lives consists of many other aspects that really should be getting more attention. We have outstanding academics, a great relationship with our business school, churning out entrepreneurs left and right. We have great clubs, doing everything from gamlan to circus. We have the only student workshops for jewelry, woodworking and pottery in the Ivies, open to all students and faculty - I met an amazing retired medical school professor who has mentored me in my woodturning - , and we have our amazing setting. Along with that amazing setting comes the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC).

I’m not saying that the DOC is the biggest thing on campus, but it is a highly influential student club and another unique aspect of Dartmouth, differentiating us from the other Ivies. In the DOC, students run the show: organizing, leading, driving, even cooking for all trips. This means that we are responsible for risk management, and in the worst case, getting help in the woods. That said, we have a really amazing safety track record, pointing to our risk management process. For example, for the mountain biking part of Freshman trips, we created our own 2 day mountain biking skills course. Since mountain biking has solid footing within Murphy's Law, perhaps more risky than setting foot in a frat basement, we managed the risk by developing a common biking language, planning, and adapting when conditions changed.
 

We started our "crash" course with some drills. Our goal was to keep everyone safe and having fun, so we didn’t want to skip anything. We had "trippies" get bikes, fit them, then went over getting on and off a mountain bike, which is often different from getting on and off a road bike, especially when you need to do so on a sidehill, or before you go over the front end! After that, we did platform position, which became our favorite word. It is the stance in mountain biking that every biker should get in when they aren’t pedaling. It puts the biker in a great position to break, go over obstacles, and not go over the handlebars. From there we rode around, going through different drills of stopping starting and turning.

Once comfortable on their bikes, we brought the trippies to the skills course that we had built earlier that week. The course had bridges, logs and a teeter totter, everything that we would need to practice looking ahead, getting momentum, using platform position, and making a quick exit off the bike, basic mountain biking skills. And that was just day one.

Day two, we brought our trippies up Oak Hill for a morning ride. We brought them on a singletrack route, consisting of intermediate riding terrain. With our first group, we didn’t really know what to expect. Our biggest concern was safety. We went over getting off the bikes one more time before heading up the trail. We stopped before each stretch, summarizing what would lie ahead, and then rode with leaders stationed intermittently to cheer the trippies along. The trails that we covered were in no way easy.When we got to the bottom after our first full trip with everyone smiling, it was awesome. One of the kids turned to me and said, "This was better training and more fun than a one on one lesson that I had had in Moab" -- not bad for a student run shindig. 

This student run program and many others like it are part of the heart and soul of Dartmouth. The way that the college was established makes the student body a very independent group and this has fostered over time. This summer, as president of the Dartmouth Mountain Biking Club (DMBC), I had the opportunity to work on the budgeting, marketing, and maintenance for the organization. And my story is not unique. Dartmouth has fostered so many amazing programs and projects inside the DOC and out. Colleges have drinking problems; our culture has drinking problems. Dartmouth is one of the only Ivies that still has frats, so we are singled out. I’m not defending frat culture, or blaming it. I’m just wondering why the media thinks that frats are the only thing that Dartmouth is noteworthy for. Because from my experience, there is a lot more.