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!
Dartmouth offers unprecedented opportunities to conduct your own research and to connect with faculty who are masters in their field of study. Before I even stepped foot on Dartmouth's campus, I was eager to get involved with research in the Earth Science department, and it was very easy for me to do so. I connected with my now faculty advisor, and we worked together to help me figure out what research I was interested in and what funding would be the best for me. "Research" can be a fairly vague term, so I'd like to clear up some confusion and offer you some resources below:
What is Research?
Research at any institution can mean a lot of different things, and it's especially unique at Dartmouth. It can range anywhere from wearing a lab coat in a scientific lab using pipets to working on a computer screen with numbers and code. I've participated in research on both sides of the spectrum; I've worked on melting ice cores in an earth science laboratory to exploring my own research by reading relevant journal articles.
Here's the Ice Core Lab that I worked in during my second term on campus!
How do I Get Paid?
Just as there are different ways to do research, there are certainly different ways of getting paid to do the research. Some research positions (like mine in the ice core lab) are hourly positions – just like many other jobs out there. However, some research positions offer stipends for your research. A stipend is a sort of lump-sum payment that the department disburses to you prior to the research and then another stipend after the research (to confirm you conducted it).
How do I Get Involved in Research?
There are plenty of ways to get involved in research at Dartmouth, and it's tremendously easy to do so. If you're interested in investigating the kind of research that you would like to do, I would highly suggest looking into different faculty profiles at Dartmouth to see what research professors are doing. That's how I got in contact with my faculty mentor! You should reach out to said professors and schedule a meeting with them to see if you'd be a good fit for the research. If not, then no worries; there's no harm done. If it's a match, then congrats! You're on another journey!
A Case Study – My Involvement in Research
The very first independent research project I undertook was under the supervision of my faculty mentor through the Irving Institute's (the energy institute at Dartmouth) program to support research centered around energy. This opportunity gave me $1,000 to conduct my independent research throughout the 10-week term. I also got involved in Dartmouth's Ice Core Laboratory where I helped melt the ice cores and perform data analysis to analyze their composition. From there, I worked with my faculty mentor again to perform independent research under the "Undergraduate Research Assistantships at Dartmouth" (URAD) program. This program allows students to secure funding for all kinds of independent research they might want to take on under a faculty mentor. These are all programs to support research during a term that you are on campus and taking courses, but there are plenty of funding resources for you to pursue research during your off term as well! There are so many opportunities for research anywhere from public policy to energy to your own niche research interests!
Unlike some other universities, many of the STEM lecture classes at Dartmouth require concurrent enrollment in a laboratory section. What is it like navigating that time as a student?
