Sitting on the steps of Robinson Hall during this year's DOC Trips, I heard yet another dean invoke the idea of the "blank slate" while speaking to a group of enthusiastic incoming freshmen.
What he described was the chance for all students to hit the reset button, start over and begin anew. He assured these students that whatever baggage they held onto from high school an emotional break up, shaky family life, etc. could be dropped and forgotten upon their entrance to college.
Going even further, this dean then insisted that it should be dropped. College is a time for all of us to start a new life, he said, and a time for all of us to figure out who exactly we want to become over the next four years.
This same exciting promise was made to me just about one year ago.
I sat there, starry-eyed and confused myself, among about one hundred of my classmates, none of whom knew anything about me. The lecture was given, and I, just like everyone else, ate it up. After all, no one here knew who I was, and the prospect of starting a new life, one that I could create on my own terms, was very appealing. A blank slate.
Well, I thought, none of my classmates knew me in high school, so I could be whoever or whatever I wanted to be. No one had read my application, no one had seen my resume no one knew the truth but me.
Sadly though, over the course of my freshman year, I came to discover that the dean's inspiring promise, truthful and telling as it sounded, was nothing more than a myth.
Does the blank slate, promised by administrators, parents and upperclassmen alike, really mean that we can start over? Can we just erase the slate whenever we want to or need to? Can we really be whoever we want to be?
It pains me to answer "No" to that last question, and so I won't, but I will say that the path to becoming the "new" you in college does not demand that you erase what you've become during the first eighteen years of your life. Rather, it demands that you embrace your history, and learn from it.
We may think that we can extinguish our habits and our past, but we cannot.
In fact, we should not. Some of us may be proud of who we have become thus far. But even for those of us who aren't the target audience of the dean's speech wiping away the past means denying any valuable work that has been done. Creating a new you out of nowhere erasing that slate means not learning any lessons. There is thus no growth in the blank slate. When we enter college, we shouldn't just scrap what we've become. Doing so, I've learned, is an exercise in futility.
Throughout my first year at Dartmouth, I attempted to scrap who I was in high school for the "new" me in college. I tried new things, met new people and, for a while, convinced myself that I was a new person.
But this only got me so far.
I soon began looking back to my high school days for guidance. I talked to old friends for advice. I recounted old situations, struggles I have been through in the past, that helped me with the problems I faced later.
My own experience yielded some understanding. The message from the dean, I believe, should have been as follows: College is certainly a time for reorientation. It is a time for embracing parts of our lives that we don't necessarily like, accepting them, and then finding the support to change what doesn't work.
College is a time to be hopeful but not overly hopeful, adventurous but not too adventurous. There is no use in believing that happiness will come with a complete overhaul.
A better metaphor the dean might consider the next time around is to edit, rather than erase, what's on one's slate.
