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!
So much has changed over the past year, and I'm grateful that I have this blog to document my time at Dartmouth throughout my time here. I encourage you to go back and read my blog posts from last winter to see just how much my mindset has changed. Whether it be explicitly stated in the words that I write or implicit in the content I choose to write about, I'm sure it would be deeply beneficial to see how a college student's mindset has changed through their writing.
I want to refrain from using any form of the cliché that resembles "time sure does fly by when you're having fun," but it's true. Looking back over the past year, it's absolutely astonishing how fast this has all gone by. I start to think of last spring when the snow finally receded in the Upper Valley and I got to go golfing again. I remember the bitter cold wind coming off the Connecticut River when I went ice fishing for the first time. When I think back to these individual moments, it seems like my freshman winter was an eternity ago. Time warp maybe… who knows? I do know that I'm over 1/3 of the way finished with my Dartmouth career, and that's just bonkers to me. Still, there's 2/3 of this Dartmouth journey left, and I've still got much to do. I honestly feel more prepared academically, intellectually, and emotionally this time around, and I think there are a few reasons for that:
For one, I'm living in an off-campus apartment for this winter term, and I think that's going to be a great change of pace from the Greek space I lived in last year. I'm grateful for the experience I had last term living in a Greek (frat) house, but I don't think the environment matched my personality type. In past blog posts I've mentioned that I'm an introverted person, and that's why I think I'm going to benefit from more of a "low-key" and quiet space away from campus. Additionally, I think there will be a good separation of work and leisure once I get to campus and once I leave. There are free shuttles that run once every 30 minutes, so that's going to make life pretty easy!
Here's my view from the off-campus apartment this term. Hope we get some more snow soon!
I also feel that I'm more prepared intellectually and emotionally because my mental health is in a good place. I think that's due to putting myself around the right people / finding the right friends. I mentioned before that the people you surround yourself with in high school will "make or break" your future, and college is no different. When I first started at Dartmouth, I was paranoid about not finding this friend group. I thought so many people had already found theirs, and I was being left in the dust for some reason. That's malarkey. It takes time to sort through the people who are your acquaintances and those who are truly there for you. It's not formulaic, and you can't do it overnight. It will happen, you just have to let it go. It will work itself out.
More generally, I'm happy this term. Last winter, I'd just lost my nana (the woman who raised me), and my mental health took a dive. Since then, I've been able to find the key activities that I absolutely love on campus, navigate toward more attractive academic trajectory, and I've got beautiful people that care about me (more updates soon!). Things are good, and I can't wait to take you on this ride with me for the '23 winter term!
