Hey y'all, welcome to the woods! My name is Garrett Crouch, and I'm a '26 from Edmond, Oklahoma. Besides blogging, I'm involved in Greek Life and Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department. I enjoy reading sci-fi, listening to 90s rock, and playing video games in my free time. Other than that, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to share a bit of my Dartmouth student experience with you—stay a while and enjoy!
For my first term at Dartmouth, I had a lot of fun exploring different courses/areas of study that piqued my interest—EARS 14 is a perfect example. This course in particular was very friendly to new students. I had a lot of fun analyzing the ways in which Earth's weather system works, everything from the tornado and climate labs to black lightning and supercooled ice. Professor Osterberg made the course extremely fascinating and personable! I'm extremely glad I took this course and recommend it to anyone interested in Earth Science.
I had zero programming experience prior to taking this course, and quite honestly, It was a split decision on my part. Nonetheless, I'm extremely glad I took COSC 1, and as a byproduct, I have a newfound love for computers. I came out of the course with a solid foundation in computer science principles as well as programming skills. More importantly, I made my own fully-functioning video game! ; )
I didn’t anticipate this course being all that different from Latin I, but it ended up being a nice surprise. A typical Latin course at Dartmouth involves small class sizes, group work, and the occasional lecture; however, within Latin II, we had opportunities to take a wide variety of field trips and learn more about the history of the Latin language as well as the many people that spoke it. I thoroughly enjoyed stepping outside the sphere of strictly language work (grammar, vocabulary, etc.) and learning more about the history of Latin in Latin II.
Psych 6 is by far my favorite course I've taken at Dartmouth—this course made me decide to pursue the neuroscience major. Whether it was walking out of the Moore Psychology Building with goosebumps down my spine having just seen a human brain in the flesh, or lying in bed rewatching lectures on the cellular mechanisms of long-term memory storage. This course genuinely made me feel like a kid discovering the world again for the first time, I loved it.
I loved this course—it was a fascinating mix of the neuroscience behind addiction as well as a deep dive into every class of drug. What particularly stood out about this course was the ability to connect my undergraduate research lab experience with the concepts I was learning (I'm currently involved in a neuroscience research lab studying psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, so it was fascinating to see the parallels there).
At first, I was worried Cognitive Psychology was going to be a slight rerun of some of the concepts covered in Psych 6: Introduction to Neuroscience, but this class was actually a pleasant surprise. We covered everything from how babies accurately learn their native language so quickly, to how we uniquely store complex, emotional memories as humans. We even covered a unit on everything psychologists know about the problem of consciousness, which was my personal favorite. There’s something alluring (and undeniably meta) about being conscious while learning about how we know nothing about consciousness—a recurring theme in the Brain Sciences!
With a history of associating the month of May with things like summertime joy and blooming plant life (and now Green Key), May is without a doubt my favorite time of the year. Though I may have a biased view—May is also my birthday month.
All jokes aside, May and springtime in general is objectively a great time of year, and I now know that May is also a great time of year on Dartmouth's campus; this past weekend I experienced my first Green Key! For those who don't know, Green Key is a popular music festival/event on campus that takes place every spring term. The weekend typically starts with an accumulation of various student bands and a campus-wide block party on Dartmouth's famous frat row—here is a picture of me at the block party:
The band playing was "SHARK"
Here is another picture I got during the block party—featuring my favorite unofficial mascot, Keggy the Keg!
After the block party, there's usually a large concert that the college puts on with at least one well-known/large band, this year we had Neon Trees who are famous for their song Everybody Talks (the description and image of this post). On top of the campus block party and large concert, this year, there were other musical events scattered around campus over the course of the weekend as well. Unfortunately, I couldn't make all of the events this year, but I enjoyed my time at the ones I could attend.
Green Key is probably the last major event/tradition I'm going to experience on Dartmouth's campus as a first-year student, and while I'm sad to be almost done with my first year of college, I have a lot to look forward to in the coming years of my time here at Dartmouth. I'm currently in the process of selecting my courses for next fall (info on that soon), and on top of that, I'm starting to think about potentially joining a fraternity!
Overall my Green Key experience was really enjoyable, and it's made me start to reflect pretty hard on all that has happened during my first year of college as well as what it means to be a Dartmouth student. In my next post, I hope to touch on those ideas more, along with a brief update on my summer plans and fall course load. Stay tuned!
In addition to blogging, I work as a Fellow for the Tucker Center, which focuses on promoting spiritual and ethical life on campus. As part of this role, I'm leading the Interfaith Alternative Spring Break Trip. Read on to learn more about my work!
