When I agreed to write a column for today's D, I already had a great topic in mind -- ripping into corporate recruiting.
The process unofficially began last week with the announcement of internship opportunities at companies such as JP Morgan and Northwestern Mutual, and I was going to make fun of my friends for writing resumes on bond paper and for finding impressive ways to describe their photocopying jobs as "personal assistant to 48 professors." I was then going to wrap it all up by answering the cosmic question: Are we at Dartmouth to learn or to get a high-paying job?
But when I sat down to write it I just wasn't in the mood. I was having a bad day, and I just could not get up the energy to contemplate such an important question.
Instead, I have an announcement to make: the season of bad days has begun. As far as I'm concerned, this season begins with the term's first exam and ends about three days after one gets home.
The obvious reason for my bad day is that this is going to be a bad week. My exams have started, so it is time for me to stop having fun and to take a deep breath and not let it out until late August -- after I finish my last exam.
Unfortunately, that is not an easy thing to do. Something always interrupts that plan. For me, it is getting my feelings hurt.
Feelings are strange things. They tend to assert themselves when you least expect them. Often, they get hurt by little things. Your friend forgets to meet you for dinner and goes to McDonald's with someone else. Someone doesn't blitz you back. Someone bails on plans to go out with you and then goes out with someone else.
Once these feelings are hurt, however, it is hard to bounce back.
Everything looks dismal. When my feelings get hurt, I get pessimistic.
I decide that none of my friends like me and that I'm going to fail all of my classes this termand end up transferring to the University of Washington. I try to tell my friends this, but it doesn't work. They simply refuse to believe the world is coming to an end.
I blitzed one of these friends this morning when I realized that my bad day was going to be a bad two days, and asked him if he thought it was too late to transfer to the University of Washington next fall. He responded, "Go for a canoe ride or a walk in the woods and remember the reasons you came to Dartmouth. Can't you feel the green blood in your veins and the granite in your brain?"
At the time, I thought he was crazy. For one thing, I don't go for canoe rides or hikes. I am not an outdoorsy person, as anyone on my freshmen trip will attest to. And as to green blood and a granite brain, well, my blood might be green but my brain was just tired. I ignored my friend's advice, and spent the day feeling sorry for myself.
This, however, did not solve my problem, so at 11 p.m. I met that friend for coffee. He listened to me complain for an hour, and then said we were going on an adventure. I wanted to go to Kiewit to write my corporate recruiting column, but he was adamant.
So off we went to the Bema. Usually, I do not consider the Bema to be an especially adventurous spot unless you're a weed-smoking '98 or part of an amorous couple -- neither situation applied to me. And nothing terribly exciting happened. We just sat there in the dark and talked about why I was unhappy.
But I realized something as I sat there. I am not the same person I was two years ago when I last sat on the Bema during Freshmen Week. I probably won't be the same person the next time I sit there on Class Day. There will be a lot of bad days enclosed in those four years, but hopefully there will be some good ones too.
If there's any moral to this story, it's that we are still young. Our lives are ahead of us. Our years at Dartmouth can, and should, be some of the best of our lives. We truly are here to study hard and to play hard, but most importantly, we are here to learn about ourselves.
I know it's cheesy, but it's true.
So go sit on the Bema or at the river, or even on the green. Remember why you are here, and hopefully, you will feel a little bit better.
