As elucidated in Monday's edition of The Dartmouth ("D-Plan solves some problems, causes other dilemmas," Jan. 31), the D-Plan and namely its keystone, sophomore summer, has always been hard to swallow for anyone gearing up for four years at Dartmouth. No matter how much we age, some part of us is very stingy when it comes to summer vacations: one of the final bastions of fading youth. While our initial grounding in the D-Plan's apparently far-sighted and visionary approach to schooling was swallowed down for the simple fact that we had no experience with it and thus no counter-argument, learning of the historical reasons for its development make that visionary approach burn in the stomach lining which so naively accepted it. I could dwell on whether this "vision" just happened to strike the college's administrators at the moment when they didn't want to cut the check on housing for that 800-student increase in 1970s, but I think that we, as Dartmouth students, are able to read in between these very clear lines. The D-Plan was created out of necessity and not because the then-administrators decided that a summer at school and the ensuing implications was truly a better system.
Having said that, let me make my case against the D-Plan, foregoing its history of necessity and lack of vision. First, the "flexibility" of the plan is lauded from all sides, and I bought into it too, because the presentation comes across well. But in retrospect, college is that last moment in our lives where we truly are in a place of structure. Of course, this structure is contrived, but so are school and summer camp and living at home with your parents. Our lives up to this point have been an interwoven series of structures. Conversely, this structure vanishes and our lives' "flexibility" takes on epic proportions after college. I caught a fleeting, exciting and terrifying glimpse of this on a gap year I took. This is our last moment to enjoy that uniform (or nearly) feeling of solidarity by means of a team (IM to Varsity), a house, a dorm, a group, etc. Our lives here are one great series of structures. Of course, if we go out into the world expecting this to continue, we're in for quite a jolt. One could say that this is a sound case for the D-plan: it rattles us and, perhaps, gives us a glimpse of the real world. But college is not about the real world. We have the rest of our lives to discover the pitfalls and giddy triumphs of the real world. College is the last moment where that sense of belonging, which I dearly feel here, exists in such a wonderful strain. The D-plan hinders that.
Some might counter that sophomore summer serves this purpose, that it sates this desire to get that binding sense of community. But isn't there a hidden fatalism to that one-shot-deal approach? It always depresses me to know that my sophomore summer will be an incredible ten weeks soured slightly because I know, before it even started, that it will be a, if not the, highlight of my time at Dartmouth. Wouldn't it be nice to arrive here not knowing when your best times were to be had? Risking the label of "romantic," sophomore summer is one high surrounded by one big come down.
Inherent in the D-Plan ethos is the idea that it fosters new friendships when we arrive for a term to find our best friends out in the wider world. In reality, any new friendships would be made out of necessity, not out of desire. Moreover, being on-campus when close friends are off would lead us to cling more vehemently to the friends which are here. In this way, the D-Plan actually stifles any voluntary "branching out" we might wish to pursue comfortably with the backdrop of close friends, while making us grasp more wildly at those friends we have here. For those of us in any sort of house it serves as one of the few strains of order in our overall Dartmouth experience, subduing and drowning out alternatives, which, at another time, might have held the same structuring clout, be it an IM sports team which played every spring, or simply the knowledge that all your closest friends would always be around.
The D-Plan does seem to provide opportunities for internships where they otherwise might be more competitive or unavailable. But as a friend of mine recently discovered, this situation is not the case across the board. When applying to the main publishing houses in hopes of getting an internship for the spring term she got a rude awakening. They all had summer internship programs so entrenched that the human resources didn't have the authority or the where-with-all to handle any rogue applications for the spring.
But what does this all really matter? To that, I say the broad problems we might isolate in Dartmouth as a whole, few (if any) of them would ever be solved before our own graduation. Perhaps we can aspire to that vision which is so clearly lacking in the Dartmouth calendar.
