Bob Dylan said this many years ago and although I once thought otherwise, I am now convinced he was referring to college. Specifically to Dartmouth. Even more specifically, to me and my friends and the past two years we've spent here. I remember my first year here, when '02 meant senior and '05 meant freshman, and had you told me then that one day there would be '07s roaming the Green I would have burned you for witchcraft. Now, of course, '05 means junior and while I struggle to accept the grim reality of that fact, I am forced to look back on the two years I've spent here and how things have changed.
For many reasons, I am jealous of you freshmen. You own the campus. You get to start clean, make new first choices, experience cool Dartmouth stuff for the first time. Homecoming this year will be one of your favorite days of the fall. When the temperature drops to below freezing, approximately three weeks into the term, you'll be gleeful and run outside to go sledding or ice skating or some such nonsense. The first time you see the words "Blunt Alumni Center" you will laugh and laugh (shameful, of course). Your first free cup of Keystone Light will taste like nectar and pong will seem like the brainchild of geniuses. You will bumble your way through the entirety of your first year here in a typical freshman stupor and when people ask you later how it was, you'll say something like "good ... I think." But the most important reason I am jealous of you all is that you get to screw up, guilt-free, with the knowledge that you have nearly four more years to make up for it. My biggest fear is that my window of opportunity to screw around is rapidly closing. I urge you '07s: revel in your immunity.
But freshman year, like all things, must come to an end. And after you appropriately mourn its demise, you turn around and sophomore year is upon you. I didn't have the appropriate warning on this point, so I'm going to lay it out for you here and now: sophomore year is a total 180 from freshman year. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what causes this colossal change. Maybe you just know your stuff better -- you have a more stable group of friends, you've gotten used to college classes, you know and recognize more people, you know which building is Thornton (the one next to Dartmouth Hall). Or maybe it's just that you have more confidence because you think you know all of these things (in actuality you probably don't and, because I can't tell a lie, I just had to look up which building was Thornton on the online campus map). But, in spite of some minor setbacks, sophomore year makes you feel as though you know what's up (until major cards, that is. But that's a whole other story). You've gotten into a groove and you, once again, feel like you own the campus. Sophomore year, incidentally, is also when you'll get your first taste of the D-plan. Maybe your best friend will be in Brazil in the fall, or that guy from that class that time, the funny one, will be gone in the winter. Maybe you yourself will decide to go away in the spring.
However it happens, someone you know will be off one of these terms and you will hate it and talk smack and realize what people were talking about last year when they said they hated the D-plan, back when you could afford to laugh. Sophomore fall is also when juniors will look at you wistfully and wax poetic about sophomore summer (which, I must say, is actually as good as everyone tells you it's going to be).
And then, before you know it, you're a junior. Junior year brings with it wisdom and honesty; a healthy knowledge of one's future combined with a wry nostalgia for the past. Juniors not only know what's up, they tell you what's up. Juniors are the future poet laureates, the leaders of our generation. We're well, we're rock stars, really. So don't hesitate to ask us questions, or voice concerns. And know that one day, after freshman and sophomore years have taken their leave of you, you too will be an illustrious junior. And at that point, I guarantee you, you will look back on the past two years and wonder what the hell happened and why you still don't know where the hell Thornton is.
