With one week left in the term, I find myself ready for a familiar ritual: packing my life into Xerox boxes, locating homes for my fridge and futon and bidding farewell to a room I have known for only ten short weeks. And, though I've cut down on how much I will take with me, the task of packing remains bittersweet.
About to embark on my second off-campus program, I look forward to the chance to put some distance between myself and Dartmouth. This can be a stressful place, and it sometimes takes leaving for a while to see beyond that stress and appreciate the beauty that exists here in both the people and the landscape.
I am eager to live in an international city and maintain a sustained focus on my major, to cliff-walk in Britain and write amidst the rolling hills of the Scottish countryside.
Still, I, like so many of us, am pained by the prospect of saying good-bye to friends I will not see again until senior fall.
As students turned nomads by the D-Plan, each of us has the unique opportunity to create and recreate ourselves with every passing term-- to study abroad, meet new people and participate in internships that would be unavailable to those working within the confines of the semester system.
In many ways, we are free to choose our own Dartmouth adventures, to find ourselves, be it far or near from the College Green. Yet, this freedom does not come without its price and, often times individual adventure must be traded for a sense of community and continuity.
Ever wondered what happened to friends from your UGA group who disappeared on FSPs and LSAs? Met someone you're interested in only to discover that it's week seven of the term and his D-plan is just the opposite of yours? Or, thought that your junior year pattern of OLRL was beginning to sound like Morse code for the eternally damned?
Then, you know what it means to experience the D-Plan in a way that admissions officers never explained to you as a prospective. You know that your voice crying out in the wilderness will often be a solo one.
The deeper problems with the D-Plan go beyond social relationships, though. As long as the system exists, this College will always consist of a student body which, though unified by common institutional ties, will be separated by time and distance.
With whole thirds or halves of classes off campus at any given time, it becomes nearly impossible for student activists to maintain momentum from term to term. Methods must be taught anew each time one group moves out and another moves in, making it difficult to go beyond planning stages to implementation.
How, for example, can groups begin to address the issues of racism and sexism on campus without understanding the events of Winter term?
Reading about the controversy only tells you so much, and what it cannot convey are the individual and collective feelings that seemed to float over campus in a kind of mid-February gloom. It cannot express the fear, guilt, concern and anger that pervaded campus and left its mark on the trimester.
And, without an understanding for these feelings, it is difficult to muster a sense of the indignation that leads to powerful and decisive action. Still, there are ways to affect change without having a complete feel of the pulse of this campus.
In sharing our off campus experiences, we can offer others another world view, a different approach to the same problem and an alternate set of solutions. We can attack campus issues from a multitude of angles if we can only articulate what we have learned.
While the D-Plan continues to exist, it will remain an obstacle and an enabler for this community. It will allow us to enrich ourselves and our education as well as force us to be flexible individuals focusing on regeneration and maintaining energy and passion for the issues that concern us.
Our success as students will be measured not by the places we have been or the people we have met, but by our ability to translate our experiences outside of campus to affect positive change and make meaningful contributions to Dartmouth and the world beyond.
There is much to be learned from our individual voyages, for ourselves and for others, and our responsibility as members of this intellectual community is to integrate new with old, foreign with domestic, work with school in a way that will benefit someone besides ourselves.
Though our voyages may be essential for our personal development, it is not enough to journey for ourselves alone. The short-comings of the D-Plan can be overcome only if our adventure becomes a collective as well as individual one.
In the end, the challenge lies, for each of us as adventurers, in connecting on-campus and off-campus worlds to find real continuity and connections during this four year adventure.