I like Dartmouth. I tend to express my appreciation for the privilege of attending this institution fairly often in my writings, and I am known to get annoyed with those who take for granted the opportunity by complaining about relative trivialities.
But before it was all talk. It was filler. It was gibberish. It might have been true in theory, but, since we're all human, we all tend to torment ourselves over details of our lives that others would find ludicrous. It's easy to say that one should take full advantage of four years at Dartmouth, but what does that mean when you have to trek from a seminar in East Wheelock to Cook Auditorium in 10 minutes through a foot of disgusting slush when you thought Spring term was supposed to be nice? What does it mean when you have to wait in line for 30 minutes at Home Plate only to end up forking over six dollars for a tiny piece of overcooked chicken and a bowl of undercooked broccoli? And what does it mean when you go six or even 12 months without seeing your best friends because of a quarter system created by the devil?
I might not have the answers, but I do have a perspective that actually means something now. I have returned to campus after experiencing a little slice of Life A.D. (After Dartmouth). I spent the winter working in New York. Now, without getting into all the nitty-gritty of my actual job and whether or not I will pursue a similar occupation after I graduate, I noticed some important themes within the work environment. One was how all the recent college graduates with whom I worked -- and there were a lot of them -- wished they could be in my shoes, working a swift 10 weeks before returning to the promised land of higher education for some no-holds-barred, responsibility-free fun. I had a light at the end of the tunnel. All they had ahead of them were mountains of work as far as the eye could see with no sign of respite.
And that leads right into another important theme of the job, which was only an exaggerated form of a theme of everyday life: the constant wish for time to pass until something not even necessarily fun but at least better than the current situation comes along. I say exaggerated because, at a job with 14-hour-plus workdays, the actual opportunities for something better to wedge itself into the daily grind are few and far between. Instead, people motivate themselves with mantras like, "If I work hard and get this project done by 4 a.m. Saturday night, I'll have time to eat a nice breakfast and read the Sunday Times before I come into work again at noon." And they end up working all night just for the sake of one hour on Sunday morning.
When you work all day with the promise of getting to spend 15 minutes of freedom to indulge in whatever endeavor you desire before you have to go to sleep and get up to do it all over again the next day, life tends to become something of a blur. The hours and days start to blend together, and one loses all conception of "early" and "late," "work time" and "free time." When you only live for 15 minutes a day, constantly wishing for the next little window of free time, you end up wishing your life away.
I had a light at the end of the tunnel, something to which I could look forward when things at work got rough. I got to come back to Dartmouth; those who were working in New York for real weren't so lucky. I proclaimed repeatedly that I had gained a new appreciation for school and that I would take advantage of it this time around even more than before my internship. And already I see the same patterns repeating themselves: the wish for a meeting to end so I can go to a party, the wish for a few days to go by and my paper to be over and done with, the wish for the week to pass so I can have a carefree weekend which will undoubtedly be filled with more work and more frustrations motivating me to wish even the weekend to end so I can find refuge in a discussion section for a course.
Especially at Dartmouth where the terms are so short that papers, exams and meetings end up piling one on top of the other until there really is no foreseeable break except the one coming with the end of the term, we frequently end up wishing our life away. And that is an unfortunate rut to fall into. It is a dishonor to the gift of four years at Dartmouth, not to mention the gift of life, to wish it to pass, only to revel in brief flashes of relative enjoyment and repeat the process over again. Four years at Dartmouth can pass in an instant; what's to keep life from doing the same?
One moment which stands out in my mind above all others from my internship experience is the lighting of the two pillars of light which serve as a tribute to the World Trade Center. Almost everyone on my floor at work crammed into a tiny office which looked directly over Ground Zero, providing a bird's-eye perspective as the lights were turned on and shot up into a cloudless sky. It was an amazing spectacle that served to remind me of the fragility of life, how it can inexplicably vanish forever in the matter of a few moments. Five minutes after the lights had been turned on, everyone had returned to his or her cubicle, continuing the day's work well into the night. And while I knew that this was the business world, that this was a job, this was "real life," the utter ignorance to life itself which permeated the floor boggled my mind. Here were people looking over the spot where 3,000 people died only six months ago, and they, still in possession of their lives, and in the face of such a potent reminder of their luck, reacted by whiling away the hours at their desks.
The business world is what it is, and it is something with which many of us will become intimate after college, me included. But I know better than before that we can spend our time at Dartmouth more productively, rather than wishing it by, only to be doing so again once we graduate -- this time to an exaggerated extent. And, now that the new term has started, amidst the hectic moving-in process, buying books and getting fresh new assignments, I again find myself having trouble figuring out what I mean.
Since I now have a tangible basis for appreciating my time at Dartmouth, I should probably find a practical application thereof. Four years can go by in a flash, but that flash would be better utilized in the act of living each day than in being wished away entirely. Life A.D. awaits, and however we choose to use our time here, the prospects it offers are unlikely to be better than the sweet deal we're lucky enough to have gotten ourselves into here. There are plenty of people who would give anything to be in our shoes and, one way or another, I intend to find reasons to make them jealous.
