As a sophomore at Dartmouth College, and an English major whose youthful idealism had never stretched beyond the confines of the theoretical, I decided, in the summer of 1996, to make myself useful to the world at large.
Immediately faced with the immensity of my task, I bided my time, opting to sit in front of my BlitzMail and wait for an opportunity to appear. Like many Dartmouth students, I subscribe to the Career Services bulletin, which advertises "exciting opportunities" and "incredible internships" from here to Alaska. And like most students, I ignore these messages and tell myself that opportunity favors the idle man and the non-moving target.
Well, in the middle of my sophomore summer I decided that things were going to change. For the first time in my life I actually read a Career Services blitz, and I started looking for opportunities which were, in fact, both "exciting" and "incredible." After several weeks of disappointment, I received a blitz with the words "FREE MONEY" prominently displayed in the header. Eagerly opening up the blitz--I'm an idealist, sure, but I'm not an idiot--I found a detailed description of the Tucker Foundation and its many services.
I had always believed in charity and sensitivity, and in the boundless power of the individual, but Tucker's program seemed to take these intangible values to a higher level, the level of actual application--as Tucker Fellows, Dartmouth students not only have the opportunity to impact the world around them, but also to be immersed in strange and sometimes frightening environments. And into one such environment I was about to venture.
After a few minutes spent poring through Tucker's files, I stumbled across a pamphlet describing an internship opportunity so fascinating, so alluring, so absolutely captivating that two words immediately leapt into my mind: desk job. Indeed, I almost succeeded in convincing myself that the pamphlet was fictitious. The duties and responsibilities it described were too demanding, the environment too dangerous and the clientele too fabulously unpopular.
Nevertheless, the small, worn pamphlet in my hands cheerfully assured me that "only a few people" had been shot or otherwise injured while working as a criminal investigator for the Georgetown Criminal Justice Clinic (GCJC), a public defender organization in our nation's capital. While I found this assurance somewhat less than comforting, it certainly managed to pique my interest, and within two weeks I had applied for and been accepted to the Clinic.
Over the next three months, I walked and drove the most dangerous streets of D.C. for an average of six hours a day. I spoke to and interacted with prison guards, public defenders, government prosecutors, police officers, homicide detectives, homeless individuals, AIDS patients, single mothers on welfare, drug dealers, drug addicts, gang members, victims of police brutality, convicted murderers, small business owners, blue-collar workers, clergymen, recent immigrants and law students, not to mention countless residents of D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods, many of whom had either witnessed or been subject to the ravages of crime, poverty, and drugs. It was the most incredible experience of my life, and it effectively shattered my middle-class idealism.
At the same time, it spurred me to seek change in the world around me, and to make the most of my abilities and my education. I now hope to spend several years as a public defender after law school; far from being the "underachievers of the legal world," the public defenders I met were intelligent, articulate, courageous, and well-educated individuals. Many hailed from top law schools, and all worked for under $30,000 a year on behalf of people no one else cared about. While we at Dartmouth argue about fraternities and intellectualism, back in the real world the homeless die of hypothermia, the poor of despair, the hopeless of addiction and the unlucky of crime. The world goes on, and for all our seeming importance we are mere witnesses to the society we propose to lead.
Last summer, when I told a friend what I would be doing for the fall, he said "Well, I can't afford to sit on my [expletive] all day; I need to make money during my leave term. A corporate internship is fine with me." Are all Dartmouth students this crass and self-serving? Absolutely not. At the same time, the attitude my friend expressed is all too common on our campus.
Even as The Dartmouth was writing articles about Dartmouth fashion, President Freedman's administrative intern and cooks at various Dartmouth eating establishments, I was told by higher-ups at the paper that "millions of people have interesting off-term experiences," and thus my own experience likely did not warrant publication. Similarly, when I went to the Student Employment Office in an attempt to set up a criminal investigation internship with the New Hampshire Public Defender (the internship would have provided an incredible work-study experience for pre-law Dartmouth students) I was told that "new work-study contracts take too long to set up...and Dartmouth doesn't like to spend any money off-campus." When my contact at the NHPD called the SEO herself, she was told not to pursue the issue any further. Meanwhile, the SEO encouraged me to abandon my efforts, and firmly instructed me not to contact anyone in the Financial Aid Office (as I had hoped to).
Currently, the campus is in the midst of a discussion over fraternities and "creative loners." President Freedman's words have been purposely misconstrued, just as benefits of the fraternity system have been exaggerated and (in some cases) fabricated--often by those who, when speaking with friends, admit that the system is full of serious problems.
President Freedman has described for us the activities a creative loner might pursue -- and Dartmouth students have taken him at his word, though I believe he was attempting to provide the college with a metaphor. Quite simply, the creative loner, far from a nerd or dork or socially-inept robot, is someone who does difficult and daring things which go unseen and unappreciated by the general public. Sometimes they are unpopular, and sometimes they are frowned upon by mainstream society, but nevertheless they are valuable activities which serve to strengthen the heart and mind of the individual in question. The creative loner attempts that which is difficult, rather than that which is easy -- he or she travels the country and seeks to help those in need, or stays at home and tries to make the world a better place bit by bit, even as classmates engage in useless resume-building internships and the hardly enigmatic process of "fraternity socialization."
And so, to the creative loners at Dartmouth--and there are many here who fit that description, despite other students' increasing McCarthyism--I can only say this: my friends, no one cares. No one cares at all.
