Arriving here from my hometown of Las Vegas, my first shock came at discovering that the vast majority of Dartmouth students appeared to read "The Official Preppy Handbook" not as anachronistic social satire but as the holy scriptures of fashion -- thou shall pop thy collars and wear four shirts at a time! In my mini-skirts and halter-tops, the only thing I had ever learned about "layering" was when I worked part-time as a cake decorator at Dairy Queen.
My second shock came when a group of boys hiding behind the Sphinx pelted water balloons at my mother. She was crying anyway as she helped me move into my room, but the apple-sized welt on her shoulder urged her to scream, "You boys are so stupid, you are all big jerks," and I was not angry at the boys but embarrassed because of her, mad at her for not just biting her lip. How dare she make me an outsider like her in this terrifyingly foreign place? And at the same time, I was disgusted with myself for being too insecure and petty to stand up to those cruel boys. The first thing Dartmouth did was force me to realize exactly how much I did not like myself, and the next thing I realized was exactly how much I did not fit in.
Most of freshman year was miserable. I hated Dartmouth. I desperately wanted to transfer -- to find an out because I couldn't find an in. I joined the freshman crew team and quit the day after I got P.E. credit. I wasn't a jock anymore; I wasn't prom queen, either. I got a C in Neuroscience; I stopped playing my flute. I fought with my family when I went home and missed them terribly while I was here. Everyone else seemed to be going places, planning their political careers, playing on NPR, staring in theater productions, co-authoring journal articles, winning film awards, and here I was, out of place, lonely, and floundering. I wasn't really failing. I just wasn't succeeding at anything, either. I was discouraged and disappointed in myself.
I came into the arts at Dartmouth by default. I took an animation class as an incentive to get myself to go back to school after winter break. I did an independent study in the spring to finish the project I started in the winter, and to my surprise, people really liked my work. Creativity became a place to bury myself. I started painting and writing, too. Somehow, I became the editor of The Stonefence Review, the campus literary and art magazine.
I learned that the creative arts are about embracing the moment, embracing our fears and working through them. I never thought that my disappointments and shortcomings would become the very causes of my later success, but it goes to show that the future unfolds unexpectedly if we are honest and let ourselves go where we need to. It is the unexplored terrain that carries the greatest risks but also the greatest rewards. And in art, I have been pushed by all my professors to go exactly where I'm most terrified. Failure to live up to myself has become an excellent source of inspiration. Author Grace Paley gave me the stirring advice to "write about what bugs you." No one wants to read a story about someone whose life is going well. Another author once told me, "If you never feel like a failure, you probably won't make a very interesting writer."
So here is my advice to you who are freshly arriving: take your fears and act upon them by accepting them and then working through them. Accept that 99.9 percent of you will not be valedictorians; accept that most of you will gain about 20 pounds from playing pong and eating too much pizza. Accept that you will be disappointed and unhappy, but do not let that be a reason to give up on Dartmouth because you will have fantastic days, too. Everyone told me that college would be an amazing experience (it is!), but don't be discouraged when life doesn't unfold as you expect it to at every moment. College is not only a place to succeed. It is also a place to learn how to fail in our self-expectations.
I'm not anything of what I expected to be. I never fit in to what Dartmouth was when I came here, but I couldn't have asked for a better learning experience than that. I still don't dress like other people. My skirts are still too short for Dartmouth, and I don't even own a shirt with a collar, so popping one is out of the question! But being myself, and accepting the parts of me that deviate from my original preconceptions of what makes a "successful Dartmouth student" is what has actually made my time at Dartmouth worthwhile and enjoyable.
