There are a number of privileges that we freshmen get to enjoy for just three terms: We can suck at pong, be unabashedly promiscuous and go frat hopping in obnoxious groups of 15, just to name a few.
By the time we come back next fall as sophomores, it's expected that we'll have grown out of all this. And for the most part, I think that is a good thing. We'll hang out in more intimate circles, we'll begin to make smart comments in class, we'll mature. But there's one quality in particular that I hope we don't have to adopt: bitterness.
Don't pretend you haven't noticed it. When they're not putting on their best face for their job interview, Collis Commonground presentations or the Dimensions activity fair, many of our upperclassmen are whining about life in Hanover.
In all fairness, there's plenty to complain about; I wouldn't have written my last five columns recommending various campus reforms if I thought Dartmouth was a Shangri-La. Whether it's the Dartmouth Plan, the bloated bureaucracy or the rampant displays of sexism on a Friday night at the frats, we've certainly got our fair share of issues. I'd love to sugarcoat it all by exclaiming that our world-class professors, top-notch facilities and brilliant students make up for everything that's wrong, but simplifying our experience down to the glossy pages of the Dartmouth view book would do a major disservice to the students expressing very legitimate frustrations.
The problem is that as we grow older, we don't only begin to see what's wrong at Dartmouth -- we inch ever closer to graduation. So we become increasingly less interested in fixing anything. After all, four years is an incredibly short amount of time, and an academic calendar that requires us to make all of our accomplishments in 10 weeks leaves us no room to change anything, right?
Wrong. Bitterness is the easy way out. It allows students to give up on creating their own reality -- to simply find their social niche and burrow into a hole of apathy.
Sure, we might feel shortchanged when we think that the Dartmouth we idealized during our senior year of high school doesn't live up to all of our expectations. But we're not the only Ivy League university with students that feel that way. In fact, I'd venture to say that the post-matriculation college letdown is pandemic. It's a product of the mythology of the "college experience," the stories that are peddled by guidance counselors and the Princeton Review about eternal happiness and endless intellectual stimulation.
The solution, of course, is not to settle. The solution is to direct our frustration into productive mechanisms for change. Dartmouth is defined by the students that shape it. In the late 1960s, Dartmouth established itself as an anti-war community when over 1,000 students rallied on the Green against the Vietnam War. In 2005, Dartmouth affirmed its commitment to social justice when students successfully pressured the administration to divest from Darfur.
As freshmen, we might not have a very deep intellectual understanding of Dartmouth's problems or even an awareness of what all the issues are at hand. For the most part, we're still too wide-eyed and idealistic to consider that Dartmouth is a fundamentally flawed institution. Our challenge, then, is to maintain our idealism in spite of the frustrations that are to come; to continue finding and enjoying the things we love about our College while constantly fighting to change the things we hate.
My thesaurus tells me that the antonym of "jaded" is "fresh." Maybe the simple semantic conclusion to draw from this is that the ability to maintain optimism truly is a characteristic unique to freshmen. But I think we should add a little complexity to that interpretation. Perhaps the implication is that as we transition from one year to the next, we should strive to remember the feeling of freshness and excitement that we had when we first arrived on campus. Combining that sensation with the many and varied experiences we will have as upperclassmen is our best line of defense against jadedness.
Though we've only got two weeks left until we're officially declared sophomores, there are obviously a number of milestones we'll need to have reached come Fall term. Personally, I don't know if I'll make the cut. For one, my pong skills haven't improved much since orientation (though I quit the 'shmob thing after Homecoming, thank God). But if bitterness and apathy become the litmus test for advanced standing at Dartmouth, then dip me in honey and throw me to the '12s!
