Greetings from the woods! My name is Gavin Fry, and I'm a student blogger with the People, Places, and Pines team. I'm a proud first-generation college student, carrying with me the full support of my crazy family. I plan to be involved with undergraduate research, outdoor activities, and club golf here at Dartmouth! You can find me geeking out about the weather, reading novels, and always drinking coffee (at any time of the day). So nice to meet you!
Academic Program
Prospective Environmental Earth Science Major with a Minor in Public Policy
Favorite Thing Right Now
My idea of starting a chapter of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) here at Dartmouth!
Oh. My. Goodness. What a fun class this was! As a certified weather and climate geek, I was totally entrenched in everything we done in this course. From the labs and weather presentations to the "flipped" classroom experience, I thoroughly enjoyed this class. Dr. Osterberg's excitement for the course material made it that much more enjoyable! It was truly an extraordinary first-year course to take.
I’ve loved this class from beginning to end. For one, I enjoyed it because of the people in it, but I also loved it because of the content. Through frequent class discussion, I learned about the health of our democracy and the ways it is compromised. Very enlightening class!
Religion 5 was a quintessential liberal arts course that deepened my knowledge in a subject I thought I had all figured out. As a STEM-oriented student, this class offered the perfect balance to my spring term schedule. As a result of this class, I became more introspective of how I was raised, and I'm more grateful in my ability to be a free-thinker.
SummerOff Campus Internship - Princeton, New Jersey
This summer, I explored my future career plans by participating in a research internship with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. I learned a lot about what I want (and what I don't want) in a future career, and I made so many awesome lifelong connections!
A course rooted in both philosophical theory and real, practical methods of becoming a better public speaker was the highlight of the term. Our class of 16 students grew to be a sort of "mini-family," and I'm so grateful for the connections I made. I completely changed the way I view public speaking and homed in on my own skills as a public speaker!
Once again, a course outside my major found its way into my favorite class list. This sociology course helped me better understand how children are viewed in society, the way sociologists study youth, and the major differences in norms around childhood around the world. Who knew there was so much to learn about youth culture!
I'm going to preface this by saying college is supposed to be a place and a time where you go through rapid stages of growth and maturity. Namely, you begin to understand that you are developing into the person who you are supposed to become. This is not meant to be an easy process. There will be various trials and tribulations, highs and lows, etc., but all of these experiences contribute to your growth as a person. I think I'm just now beginning to truly understand that. This past week has been a busy, rough, and chaotic week. However, there are ways to navigate through these times. It's all a part of the growth and maturity. As long as you see it through that lens, it won't bog you down.
Now, this past week (week 4) has been something of a humdinger for winter term. With multiple midterms, homeworks, projects, and papers due, it's been nothing short of eventful to say the least. In addition to the academic chaos, your personal and family issues never leave you either. It's a lot to try and juggle as you have all of these scenarios buzzing around in your mind about how you are going to cope with it all or what you could have done differently given an unfortunate past event. Now, I know these experiences will differ from person to person, but there have been some ways I've been able to organize my thoughts and calm myself down through one of these weeks.
Journaling is something truly special to me. It's actually a new hobby of mine, but ever since I've started writing my thoughts and concerns onto paper, it's really helped me keep track of my mental health. When you encounter a busy week like this in college (because you will), it's important to have a plan for addressing the crazy times. Writing down your thoughts, how you feel, and what you need to accomplish acts to verbalize what you need to say, allows you to jot it down and open that book (literally) when you need to. For instance, I was rather nervous about my math midterm this week. Instead of allowing those anxious thoughts to take over my mind and impede other things I needed to accomplish, I acknowledged them, wrote them in my journal, and took a realistic perspective on things. Something along the lines of, "Gavin, you put in the appropriate amount of work, you studied the hardest you could for this exam, and you will do your best on it. Given any outcome, you will be okay."
This is a minor example that doesn't even touch on dealing with personal issues, but I think you get the idea. It's easy to get lost in the academic and social life of college and never keep your mental health in check. Journaling is an effective way to remedy this. Give it a shot!
Dartmouth doesn't just care about the intellectual state of student minds but also their health and happiness. Through this week's monastic programming, I have found our commitment to mental health to be loud and clear.
Being a super senior ('23) is like being an incoming freshman ('28) in that you get to make a new set of friends. Luckily, Dartmouth is a small school with many social spaces students can tap into.
