There is an alternative to I-banking For stressed-out seniors looking for a release to idealists in search of a culminating experience, travel presents an opportunity to avoid the nine-to-five grind and apply four years of books to the world outside the great green bubble.
Bicycles and Building
"To be completely honest, I'm just trying to avoid looking for a job in the real world," admitted David Yin '03.
Yin is co-leading the Habitat for Humanity Bike & Build trip with Derek Senft '03, which involves cycling across America and stopping off in hundreds of locales along the way in order to build homes and give lectures.
The Bike & Build trip is not only a means to delay the inevitable. For Senft and Yin, this project is more important than the impending job hunt. Senft chose to travel with Bike & Build despite the fact that date conflicts forced him to decline a job offer.
Senft saw Bike & Build as a way to combine community service with travel, an irresistible opportunity for his post-graduate summer.
For Yin, one gets the impression that the bike trip is a realization of a life-long goal. For both, senior summer is their opportunity to experience America.
"Doing [the trip] right after graduation makes it feel like one last hurrah for Dartmouth.," Senft told The Dartmouth. "I like that."
The Spontaneous Approach
At a time when other members of his class were worried about employment, Clayton McClintock '02 and Josh Griffin '03 decided to travel.
McClintock and Griffin mapped out their cross-country road trip last summer, documenting the details in a journal.
"Griff and I aren't the internship, recruiting type of people. We wanted to see the country."
While on his road trip, McClintock "got a better sense of ... what people are like. For better or worse, most people aren't like Dartmouth students. One of the coolest things was learning to be open, to be comfortable with strangers.
"The hospitality was a real treat," McClintock said. "We were just lavished."
One of McClintock's favorite experiences on the trip was speaking to a man named Putch, "this guy we met in Montgomery, Alabama. He was telling us what it was like growing up as a black boy ... everything about the fire hoses aimed at the black [civil rights] protesters to meeting Martin Luther King at his aunt's diner."
Many students like McClintock view travel as an educational experience that provides a welcome counterpart to college. If you're getting burnt out, Yin said, travel is reviving.
Fun and Funding
For students weary of the academic grind, post-graduate fellowships offer motivated individuals the opportunity to use a Dartmouth education -- whether in government, drama or computer science -- to benefit a community.
The Lewin Fellowship offered by the Tucker Foundation is designed to support those who wish to engage in a six to 12 month-long service project after graduation. Students have the opportunity to work in the United States or abroad, and their projects usually focus on health, youth or education, according to Tucker Foundation Dean Stuart Lord.
The Lombard Fellowship, sponsored by the Dickey Center for International Understanding also offers graduating seniors and recent alumni the opportunity to utilize their Dartmouth education outside of the classroom or the office.
Lord estimated that slightly more Dartmouth students choose to go abroad instead of volunteering domestically. Dartmouth students do service domestically all the time, Lord explained. "They're looking for a new experience.
"If you leave the States, your world view is larger; you break out of your comfort zone," Lord said. A higher proportion of students who volunteer internationally have what Lord called a "transformational experience."
Institutional Travel
Dartmouth students are exceptionally passionate about their commitment to service, said Margot de l'Etoile, the assistant director of the Dickey Center. "Hopefully, [this trend] is a phenomenon among all college students," she said. "At Dartmouth, this kind of activity has been given incentive. We encourage international service ... all the way through we support students."
Persistent students do take advantage of these opportunities. "I want to experience everything I've seen and read in the pages of National Geographic," said Alex Monopolis '03. "Dartmouth has been overly supportive."
For Monopolis, these experiences began with his First Year Summer Research Project, continued with a Dickey Center internship and culminated in a Senior Fellowship on environmental diplomacy in the Balkans.
Trav-el is "unquantifiably important," Monopolis said. "There are no drawbacks, as far as I'm concerned, ever in regards to travel. I have learned more about life, about world and about myself through travel than I ever will in any books."
For many seniors, the summer after graduation is a portal between their youth and the rest of their life. Travel can be a logical link. Scrawled into the road trip log of Griffin and McClintock are the words, "Everyone we met all over the country said, 'Man, I wish we could be doing what you're doing.' And you know what we said? 'You can..'"
