I came to Dartmouth College in the fall of 1999 as a prospective engineering major. My entire college search was based around two needs: a robust engineering department and the mere existence of a jazz ensemble. For whatever reason, it took only about two or three days on campus for me to have abandoned the idea of majoring in engineering. Perhaps the prospect of taking physics and multivariable calculus in my first term at college finally became an unacceptable reality for me. Much to the shock of my parents, I decided fairly early on that I would be a government major despite not having taken any real government courses in high school. Such is life in college. Given infinite choices and seemingly unlimited freedom to do what I wanted, I changed my mind on a whim and basically altered the course of my life.
Our four years at Dartmouth were different from all of the years before and all of the years after. Our task in college was fairly similar to our tasks during the previous 12 years, namely to go to school and learn enough to allow us to advance to the next level of education, whatever that may be. After the 12th grade, the powers that be decided that we could handle this task while also living independently on a day-to-day basis if not a financial one. We are given the responsibility not only to maintain our own academic integrity, but also the freedom to make decisions, such as what to eat and when to go out, that may have been constricted by our caregivers in previous years. This allows us to engage in the kind of socially deviant behavior that gives college students such a wonderful reputation nationwide. It has allowed me personally to engage in rapid, sometimes rash, decision-making, the kind of whimsy that allowed me to preemptively change majors without even having had a good reason for doing so.
It is this freedom, to basically do what we want whenever we feel like doing it, that I believe we will miss most of all when we leave college. For whatever reason, the people who hire us right out of college expect us to immediately move our entire sleep schedule back about four or five hours. For me, this means a dreary 5:30 a.m. commute into Manhattan each day, something that will likely require me to consume two cups of coffee in comparison to the one cup I currently need to function at 9:30 a.m. Already I can see my choices being restricted, but I suppose that is the price you pay for accepting a salary as opposed to hemorrhaging tens of thousands of dollars every year for the right to hone your intellectual prowess at Dartmouth.
It is the bizarre amount of freedom that sets these past four years apart from any other. As much as all of us may have complained about the workload and the time pressures at Dartmouth, we will probably never be freer to shape our own work schedules than we were here. The normal work day and commute might not be as intellectually taxing as an eight page paper on Shakespeare's "Richard III," but in its own way it might be more stressful and time-consuming. Certainly our personal lives will become more complicated. Living independently brings with it mortgage or rent payments, utility bills and other inescapable unpleasantness.
The college experience brought with it a myriad of personal choices, most of which could be amended at the drop of a hat. A prospective economics major who could not wrap his or her mind around the long run average cost curves in Econ 1 need only have looked to government or history as less quantitative alternatives. In this job market, such choices probably do not exist for us, nor would we be so flippant about abandoning our current station without being sure that viable alternatives existed. The scars made by any mistake we make from here on in will be far deeper and last far longer than virtually any we could have made at Dartmouth. At the same time, success in life is more dependent on risk-taking than success at college.
I am foolish enough to think that I have a pretty good idea of what life has in store for me. I picture a happy life, but one that involves having to make difficult tradeoffs, balancing work with family, ambition with leisure, money with true personal fulfillment. These choices are yet before every one of us, and all we can hope for is that our experiences up to this point have given us the ability to recognize which choices are the right ones to make. Our time here at Dartmouth College has been quite a ride, but we have miles to go. I look forward to seeing you all on the open road ahead.
