We, as juniors, feel ourselves settled. We have a place: we are engineering or computer science or anthropology majors, we play soccer or we run track, we are involved in the DSO or we work for The D, we have a specific circle of friends. These are our roles. This is what we do.
If you are satisfied with what you have, I salute you. But I, having come to Dartmouth to take risks, now have no desire to limit myself. I love my friends, I like my activities and I even like my major. But here is no reason why I can't have more, why I can't expand beyond the closed, comfortable and now stifling container I have created for myself. No reason to waste the opportunities that Dartmouth has in abundance. No reason, except fear.
Should I continue in my present course of action, I shall have many regrets when senior spring finally roles around. There will be many people I shall regret that I never sought out to have a conversation, to eat dinner, to see a movie. But I am a junior, I talk to my circle of friends. It is no longer freshman fall when you could strike up a conversation in Food Court with someone you only met once, when you could hang out on a Friday night with someone you just ran into yesterday. Standing in Thayer lobby, I notice a friend which whom I would like to speak, and yet I make to move to say hello. Passing on the Green, I wait to be spoken to before recognizing the passerby's presence. Sitting in my room, I wish someone new would stop by to chat, and yet I never go to visit.
I have always had the irrational expectation that if someone wanted to talk to me they would do so, and I need make no move of my own. And then, sitting by myself in the library, I would wonder why I had no one to talk to. But in the past six months I have made a startling discovery. If you talk to someone, they talk back! If, instead of waiting, I search people out, I say hi first, I invite someone to dinner, I knock on their door to visit, people respond. People like to talk. They like to have friends. They probably want to talk to you. All it takes is a little risk, stepping forward first and speaking. Talking. Not talking about classes, the weather, or the party last night, but about yourselves. Giving a little bit of yourself. And the more I give, the more I get in return.
As sophomore summer draws to a close I realize that I am, in fact, a junior. And with the recognition that half of my college career has passed I find myself overburdened with regrets: classes I have never taken that my schedule will not allow; activities I have never participated in that I wish I had; and people I would like to get to know with whom the chance of friendship is eventually to be lost. The regrets threaten, at times, to overpower me. And the list of things I wish to do before college ends piles up on a page-long stickie note that dominates the screen of my blueberry iMac. Staring at it, I regret that I had not bought a laptop freshman year.
But I refuse to limit myself to my decisions of freshman year. Those decisions were the best ones I could have made and were the right decisions for me at that time. Now, however, my inability to take risks prohibits me from going further. iBooks cost money, and I think that I may not buy one.
But fortunately, I would rather have a new friend than an iBook. And friends are free. So the next time I see a could-be friend on the Green I shall say hi without first waiting to see if they were going to say hi to me. I shall sit down with a new person in Food Court; I will ask an acquaintance from class to dinner. I shall write an article for The D, an organization with which I have never been involved. It's not too late. We are juniors, but we are not trapped. We can be whomever we choose, not only the person who emerged freshman year.
