Leading with Purpose through the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center with Harper ’27
December 2025 edition of the DCF student-produced vlog
Welcome to the December 2025 edition of the Dartmouth College Fund’s student-produced vlog! In this video, Harper ’27 a women, gender, and sexuality studies major dives into their involvement with the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth.
As a public policy minor, Harper cares about law, activism, and civic duty and expresses how Dartmouth has nurtured those passions. With several D.C. internship experiences completed and an exciting new experience in Tokyo coming up, Harper is truly taking advantage of all the College has to offer.
Watch the full video to hear Harper’s story.
Full Video Transcript
Hi, I'm Harper. I'm a ’27 from Peach Street Corners, Georgia. Coming to Dartmouth, I knew that I had a really big passion for women's rights and LGBTQ rights and I thought it would be a really cool way to kind of meld those interests by doing a major in women, gender, and sexuality studies, and then the minor in public policy.
I think my biggest community at Dartmouth is here at Rocky. I am taking the public policy minor and I'm also a public programming assistant, so I help out with all the events that we have here whenever we have speakers coming to campus in the political world.
And then I'm also the president of our Civics Association, so I work with Rocky to get students registered to vote and just help students become more civically engaged and learn how they can get involved in that civic process. A lot of students come to Dartmouth not really knowing what the voting process looks like. When you come to Dartmouth, you might be newly 18 and you haven't voted before. So it's really nice that we get to provide students with this sort of information. And they're always super open and receptive to learning about this big process and getting more engaged.
Outside of my academic communities, I'm also the captain of one of our dance teams here at Dartmouth, which is Street Soul. I've made a lot of my best friends through this community, and it's a great way to get in touch with my more artistic side as well.
I think something that I've overcome at Dartmouth has been just allowing myself to follow my own path and discover new interests and not feeling as shoved down this one academic lane that everybody else around me is going down. I've gotten to take new classes that I might not have considered before and that's been a really fun experience.
Something that I'm most proud of have been all of my successes in my internships here at Rocky. My freshman year I got to do the First Year Fellows program where I went to D.C. and interned at the Human Rights Campaign along with a cohort of other ’27s. And then my sophomore year, I was able to intern on the Hill with the House of Representatives, the oversight committee, and that was such an amazing experience and really opened my eyes to what I might want to do after graduation. I'd love to go back to the Hill if possible. And then I'm also gonna be going to Tokyo next summer to intern at a law firm, which I am incredibly excited for because I've never gotten to study abroad. So this is going to be a new opportunity for me.
I'm honestly really sad that I'm already halfway done with my Dartmouth experience. I have loved it here so much. I think this has been the perfect college for me.