Once you come to college, you start to realize that everything is relative. While this change in perspective can sometimes be enlightening, intellectual and academic, in other ways, college life can lead to a deterioration of what you view as acceptable.
Dartmouth is a dirty place. And it's dirty in a way that would never be okay in the real world. Being clean isn't encouraged by our culture, and by the time you're through here, you probably will have seen far more instances of grossness that you would ever want to tell your mother about.
Our tradition of dirtiness begins at the very beginning. Even before matriculation, we are sent on DOC Trips, on which we spend days on end becoming one with the wilderness. The amenities of a hot shower, a little bit of soap or even a bathroom are nowhere to be found. And considering that you have to carry everything you need in your backpack, things like clean clothes end up becoming luxuries.
"At Moosilauke, all the guys were shirtless and one girl was like, Oh you're all trying to show off?' [And they said,] Uh no, we all just ran out of clothing.'" Andrew Berson '15 said of his freshman trip. "It was pretty gross."
Other students remembered being especially disgusted during mealtimes on trips.
"The eating just seemed very unsanitary," Molly Pugh '14 said. "You use the same bowl and spoon every meal, and you don't get to clean it. My trip, it rained a lot, so our stuff got so wet and dirty."
Our trick to getting through your bowl of half-cooked Annie's Mac with chunks of suspicious black mixed in? Just think of those little pieces of dirt as "trail spice." We promise it tastes fine.
After completing this sufficiently nasty communion with the environment, students finally return to campus soggy, reeking and ridiculously excited at the prospect of a nice clean shower. But for an unlucky bunch, their excitement quickly fades as they realize that they all of a sudden have more than just their own hygiene habits to worry about. Freshmen often don't know what's in store for them when it comes to the cleanliness of their roommates.
One student said she ended up having to cope with more than she had bargained for during her first term at Dartmouth.
"My roommate didn't shower for two weeks and then didn't do her laundry for a month and a half," a '15 female, who wished to remain anonymous due to the personal nature of the situation said.
She added that after some time, the smell of their room became unbearable.
"I had to Febreeze her clothes every day when she wasn't in the room," she said. "I did six loads of her laundry because I knew she wasn't going to do it, and it smelled worse when it came out. Even the washing machines smelled afterward."
While some of us have to fight the filth of the people we live with, for others, being dirty is just a struggle against ourselves. Many students unabashedly asserted that showering is overrated, especially during our busiest weeks.
"Without my mom around, I shower a maximum of three times a week," Sam High '13 said. "I like to think of it as an effort conserve water."
While some personal hygiene choices might be in the interest of a higher calling, it's hard to spin the Dartmouth social scene that way. Love them or hate them, frat basements are a major part of our culture. And let's face it they're easily some of the grossest places in which you'll spend time while in college.
The inherent nastiness of drinking games aside, sometimes things happen in houses that are just not acceptable. "I was urinating in the trough in the back of Tri-Kap, and someone next to me started walking away, but I don't think they were done," Ryan Lisann '15 said. "They might have peed on my leg."
Even students who claim to be thoroughly grossed out by frat basements still go they just go prepared. You probably have a special pair of shoes reserved for the basement and a "fracket" that you would never even consider wearing to class. And we sincerely hope you've never worn anything that doesn't breathe to a dance party.
"Walking out of the highlighter party at Heorot, I remember taking off my shirt and actually ringing out the sweat," Noah Smith '15 said. "I just threw it away afterward."
Sometimes, disposing of the evidence is the safest option. And when we say "safest," we mean that literally. Rumors of staph infections from basement floors occasionally arise, and you don't even want to think about the rodent and roaches that might be frequenting your favorite social scene.
"There is this creature that lives in the basement of Heorot," Trevor Horan '13, a member of the fraternity, said. He claimed the brothers had to stop cleaning that part of the house for a long time because no one wanted to go near it.
"It was a cricket or a spider," Horan said. "Actually, it was probably a hybrid. I swear, it was about six inches long."
While such incidents are extreme and uncommon, you might be surprised to hear about some of the filthy things that Dartmouth students claim to have witnessed, both at fraternities and beyond.
"Finding someone's fecal matter in someone's closet is probably the grossest thing I've seen here," Emily Uniman '15 said. "The next morning, their room smelled so bad and none of us knew why. We don't know who it was. We investigated and found it and threw it out."
Needless to say, shit happens at Dartmouth sometimes, more literally than we'd like. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we all choose to lead filthy lifestyles, nor do we all lose our sense of cleanliness upon becoming college students.
"I don't think that Dartmouth in general is a dirty institution overall," Pugh said. "The College does a good job of keeping itself clean."
Students especially agreed with this idea when comparing Dartmouth to its peer institutions.
"There are also a lot of hipsters at some schools," Berson said. "One of my friends at Bard knows a guy who only showers on Saturdays. I guess some Saturdays, he doesn't make it, so he just doesn't shower."
Within the Ivy League, some students maintained that Dartmouth is definitely not the dirtiest.
"At Brown, they all have dreadlocks," Horan, who grew up in Providence, said. "That's kind of a sign. That's a pretty dirty place."
But some Dartmouth students don't seem to feel this way about themselves or their peers.
"My perception of what's clean hasn't changed, even if I've seen a lot more dirty things," Smith said. "Your standards don't change just because you see them more often."
The fact that Dartmouth students can still recognize when something is just too gross to be in any way justifiable is proof that we aren't actually that filthy. Yes, we might have a few dirty traditions, our basements aren't exactly pristine and pong should probably have a Surgeon General's Warning associated with it. But that doesn't mean that we view ourselves as dirty people, nor do we seem to have any desire to change these perceptions. We love being green, even if that means we aren't always clean.
So, if it isn't broken, we aren't going to fix it. More importantly, if it isn't dirty, we sure as hell are not going to clean it.
