To the Editor:
Your interesting first article on student-athletes is subtitled "Academic, athletics and social life concerns often prove daunting for student-athletes at an Ivy-League College." You illustrate this theme with Sally Annis '97, "one of the small group of athletes whose excellence in the classroom is repeated in the gym." Not wishing to take any credit away from Sally, I would argue that she is more the norm than the exception.
I have been privileged to know and to work with some outstanding students over the past several years and I find that at least half of them are seriously engaged in athletics. My sample of students hasn't been chosen through a scientific and unbiased sampling technique, but if these students are any indication of what our brightest and best students are like, it is worth noting that they contain a higher proportion of athletes than one finds among the student body as a whole.
And these students aren't geeks -- they don't ignore their social life. Two of the very best academics among my acquaintances I sometimes encourage to attend academic lectures and events that are primarily for faculty and graduate students. Both of them sometimes accept such invitations, but both have declined at times, I'm pleased to say, because of an undergraduate social event that they didn't want to miss, asserting quite rightly that they are undergraduates only once.
It seems to me that Dartmouth's academic athletes have two very important accomplishments to their credit. They have learned to organize their time well, and they have achieved a good balance among their many priorities. I wish I could say the same for myself at their age, or even at my current age. One of your paragraphs sums it up well: "Self-discipline and organization have enabled baseball and football stand-out Jon Aljancic '97 to keep his head above water. 'It teaches you how to prioritize,' he said. 'You have to learn when something has to be done.'"
