Here I am, Dartmouth. I am your future; an '06, a 'shmen. I don't know where I'm going half the time -- unless I follow the ever-present 'shmob. Hailing from the South, I'm already freezing here. I am gratuitously frightened of any sort of "croo." I have not yet mastered the artful technique of pong. Although I don't have an "HTH" (home-town honey), my roommate does, and spends a good amount of time on the phone with him reassuring him of her undying faithfulness. I am told that, "Apathy is Acquiescence," to claim Dartmouth as my school, my new home, all while feeling inherently separated from the upper-class students on campus simply because of the extensive terminology employed to label first-year students. Sometimes, I think I should have gone to Georgetown.
Dartmouth's not what I expected. I spent countless hours in the application process, visited many schools and agonized over which to choose. Although I was inundated with college mailings, I knew that the cheerful faces and picturesque campus photos in the brochures did not accurately represent my chances for acceptance. Armed with a healthy skepticism, I warily subjected myself to the random selection that is college admissions. I offered my soul on a platter for admissions officers to dissect, judge and place in one of two categories --"accepted" or the euphemistic "not accepted." Having endured this rigorous process, I looked forward to starting college all summer. I couldn't wait to meet new and interesting people, take challenging classes, and, most of all, to have the "freedom" of life in the college bubble.
Coming to Dartmouth, I expected everyone to be intellectual. I had a picture in my head of the average Dartmouth student: bright-faced, environmentally-conscious, all-American, Gap-wearing and ready to engage in a conversation about Plato's Republic in between rounds of ultimate frisbee. No doubt, some students at Dartmouth fit this description -- I just haven't met them. I've been consistently shocked at the diversity of students that attend Dartmouth (hmmm, maybe the admissions officers didn't choose our class arbitrarily). I don't mean physical diversity; I've read the statistics. I know that Dartmouth students come from many varied cultural backgrounds. What surprises me is diversity of personality, the many different social groups of people, the stereotypes that I thought ended in high school. Contrary to all probability, there are airheads who attend Dartmouth. We have jocks and band geeks and even the cooler-than-thou popular ones. Particularly during freshman orientation, as cliques formed that acted as if they had known each other for years, it became apparent that not every new student is open-minded; not everyone goes to school planning to expand their ways of thinking. A little disappointing, but after all, as the old adage goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Our class has four years to befriend new types of people, try new things and gradually tiptoe or cartwheel our way outside of the comfort zone.
My mistake was expecting everyone at Dartmouth to be like me. In a sense, I fell prey to exactly what I dislike about the cliques that I just mentioned -- the preconception that I can only befriend the people who think the same way that I do. I thought that since I was going to a selective school, it automatically meant that everyone would be eager to learn, interested in trying new things and enthusiastic about the opportunities for students here. Perhaps they are, and some people just choose to show their academic enthusiasm by passing out in frat houses and then bragging about their "UPI's" (unidentified party injuries) the next day. I don't have anything against Greek life at Dartmouth; my point in using that example is merely that people have very different priorities here than I expected. It's not all about the academics, but since life isn't all about academics either, that's okay with me.
During the next four years, my goal is to befriend the frat boy, band geek and airhead. The labels aren't important; once everyone realizes that they don't have to remain part of the same social crowd with whom they've always associated, those labels will gradually fall away. I don't know if it will be the Dartmouth that each of us envisioned before coming here, but undoubtedly we'll make it our own by forging connections with the different people who make up the spirit and structure of Dartmouth. Or if that doesn't work out, I could always transfer.
