Flash back to your senior year of high school. You were the president of a bunch of organizations. You had already taken every AP or IB course your school had to offer. And of course, all that work finally paid off when you were accepted to Dartmouth.
You were probably feeling pretty good about yourself when you got here, right? You arrived on campus for your DOC trip and had such a great time! You became best friends with your cabin camping trippees, you learned how to blame it on the boogie and after four years of eating in fancy dining halls in your New England boarding school, you finally got around to trying a PB&J.
And then you got to Orientation. A cappella groups were performing for you on Collis porch, enticing you to audition for them with ice cream sundaes. That sweet hip-hop dance troupe taught you a few moves in an open practice. And those ski patrollers were even grilling up burgers under the Rocky overhang! You couldn't wait to join all these great organizations. But wait there's an app for that! And an audition! And an interview! And even a silly questionnaire asking you to draw your perfect robot soul mate! How relevant!
No problem, right? After all, you had never gotten rejected from anything before. So you filled out all those forms and applications, auditioned your heart out and put on your Sunday best to impress your interviewer.
And then the sobering reality hit you like a poorly-aimed slam save: Dartmouth is an Ivy League school with a 9 percent acceptance rate. Welcome to Rejection-ville. Population: You. No matter how elite your high school was, things are different here at Dartmouth. You were valedictorian? Forty percent of your classmates here at Dartmouth were too. You were MVP of your football team? One of your peers just won a gold medal at the Olympics. You did lots of community service? The guy next to you harnessed the wind to power his African village. And the list goes on.
And then comes the brutal reality check that even when Orientation ends, it all continues with your first set of classes. Remember in high school when you didn't have to pay attention in AP Statistics and still got by with a good grade? Don't even think about trying that in the intro stats class you just joined for an "easy A." Only at a school like Dartmouth can you get a 95 on an exam and end up with a B after the curve.
And it doesn't stop after freshman year: Tour guides, Dimensions and organizations that call themselves "societies" offer plenty more opportunities for you to feel incredibly inferior to the rest of your peers #sunshinerainbows.
Above all, it doesn't take long to realize that the bar is simply higher at Dartmouth. Pretty much everyone who got in here is extremely talented in some way. When you audition for that musical because singing has always been a hobby of yours, you are inevitably going to be competing with the guy who wrote his college essay about his first appearance on Broadway.
But does that mean you are always guaranteed to lose out when you dare to face the competition and try something new? Not at all. It often takes a few of those rejections to figure out what you actually want to make of your Dartmouth experience. Sometimes you find it the first week of Orientation and sometimes you don't get it right until junior Spring, but you will find it eventually.
So you have a choice. You can either embrace the rejections or spend your days quaking in fear and intimidated by your classmates' successes while hiding in your cramped single in the River. So which is it going to be?
