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!
This past weekend I was able to take a Dartmouth-sponsored trip to New York City with my housing community. What does "Dartmouth-sponsored" entail you might ask? Everything from transportation and hotels to excursions and food was covered on the college's dime.
Check out the view from my hotel room:
We stayed at the Courtyard by Marriot East Side—my room was on the 25th floor
After settling into my room, later that night I got to go to my first Broadway show—Funny Girl starring Lea Michele!
We had amazing seats!
Following the Broadway show, I got to spend a day exploring the city with my housing community friends as well as experience a 5-course Eataly meal:
You can't tell from this picture, but the restaurant was on the top floor of the building!
I also made time to take a journey through Chinatown and grab a meal from Mei Lai Wah, a classic Chinese bakery spot for traditional buns and rice noodle rolls.
The weather could've been better, but Chinatown was still fantastic
Overall, the trip was amazing and I'm extremely grateful that Dartmouth has the ability to sponsor these kinds of events through the housing community system. If you aren't too familiar with Dartmouth's housing system, basically each first-year student is sorted into a random housing community (out of the six houses I'm in South House) and that ends up being one of your various on-campus community hubs for things like spirit events, dorm location, and in this case off-campus activities. If you're interested in more of the specifics, check out one of my Q&A posts where I delve into more of the nuts and bolts of the system: housing-communities-dartmouth
Housing communities at Dartmouth are a really neat way of fostering close relationships with peers and faculty and are generally pretty underrated in my opinion. It seems like as my time at Dartmouth progresses, I'm introduced to more and more perks of being in the housing community. For instance, fall term I had a lot of great experiences with my UGA (undergraduate advisor) and community dorm dinners, and come spring term I'm now getting fully sponsored trips to NYC as well as other cool things like housing community clothes and discounts to nearby restaurants in downtown Hanover. Not to mention I think housing communities are an incredible resource for participating in otherwise inaccessible, spontaneous trips away from campus! : )
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!
