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!
Flashback to the start of freshman fall, my dad and I road-tripped from Edmond, Oklahoma (my hometown) all the way up to Hanover as a sort of penultimate goodbye before my transition into a post-high school world. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun—so much so that we decided to regroup and go bigger this time around with my grandparents' RV. It was a long trip, and I'm glad to be back in Hanover finally, but it was definitely worthwhile. We spent 8 days on the road, stopping at various national parks along our route. We even made a pit stop in Canada for Niagara Falls! Our final stop was Storrs Pond right here in Hanover.
Here's a picture of our campsite:
Storrs Pond!
Apart from my journey back to campus, In my previous post, I briefly mentioned being uncertain of my course schedule for this fall—I'm excited to say that isn't at all the case anymore. I was able to enroll in a wide variety of particularly interesting courses. Admittedly, my language course was an obligatory selection, but the others were out of pure curiosity (the Dartmouth way)!
Here's a quick rundown:
To start, I'm takingLatin III which is the final chapter in the introductory Latin course sequence at Dartmouth. This course is different from Latin I & II in the sense that I'm now able to (somewhat) read actual Latin literature, and as a class, we're beginning to dissect unadapted selections from Pliny, Catullus, Ovid, and other Roman authors. It's been neat seeing my translation abilities increase from Latin I & II, and I'm excited to get to read some authentic Latin literature.
On that same note of Humanities-esque courses, I'm also taking my first ever History course at Dartmouth—History 8.03: Happiness: a History. This course piqued my interest because of its interdisciplinary approach to a seemingly odd concept. I've never really thought about the origins of "happiness" or even the fact that so many different cultures have drastically different ideas of what actually quantifies such a thing. Analyzing and learning about these ideas through so many different disciplines—philosophy, religion, contemporary psychology, economics—is the bread and butter of a liberal arts education, and I'm more than excited to get invested.
For my final course, I decided to take Psych 6: Introduction to Neuroscience. At the start of my Dartmouth career, I thought I was going to be a Neuroscience major, but I ended up wanting to take some other courses and explored other interests of mine instead. After a year of exploring, I thought to myself "Well, I still haven't taken a Neuroscience course yet, why not see if I'm still interested'?" And thanks to the liberal arts, I have plenty of exploration room left to do so ;)
For my first assignment in Psych 6, I'm working on building a small-scale model of the human brain out of Play-Doh. I don't currently have any pictures, but just know that it's going to be a masterpeice.
All that to say, I have a lot of enthusiasm for my courses this term and campus life in general, so 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!
