Editor's Note: Through the Looking Glass is The Mirror's newest feature. We welcome submissions from all members of the community both past and present who wish to write about defining experiences, moments or relationships during their time at Dartmouth. Please submit articles of 800-1,000 words to the.dartmouth@dartmouth.edu.
I never had a freshman year. Rather, I didn't have one here. Coming out of high school, I missed the academic bar for acceptance to my first choice, Dartmouth, and after equivocating between Bowdoin, Amherst and UVA, I decided that Amherst would provide me the best social and academic atmosphere.
In terms of student population, Amherst is about half the size of Dartmouth, but the differences in academics, student mentality and culture are drastic. Social life revolved around three things: friend groups, a capella groups and sports teams, in ascending order of influence. Geographically, the party life centered around five dorms known collectively as The Socials. This group of sterile, gray, 1970s-era buildings sits at the bottom of a steep hill on the west side of campus. The awfulness of alcohol-painted linoleum floors was trumped only by The Socials' tasteless, utterly drab aesthetic.
Pregames preceded room parties preceded the main attraction thrown by either a sports team or the occasional large friend group. Unlike at Dartmouth, alcohol was harder to come by as an Amherst freshman, and I had neither the resources nor the desire to pursue more. My first day of college saw, fittingly, my first drop of alcohol in a strong mixed drink, which I cleverly concealed in an Aquafina bottle. I was a newbie in other ways too I was in a long-distance relationship with a girl at UVA at the time, romantically refusing to give up hope that it could work. Even single and with a drive to hook up, I wouldn't have seen much more of Amherst. The social scene just wasn't compelling.
Though socially lacking, Amherst was a pleasantly intellectual place. If I came to college only for book learning, I would have done well to remain at Amherst. But the student body was too small, and the social system was just not conducive to anything fun. While this had its upsides I studied significantly harder and felt more intellectually engaged at Amherst than I ever have at Dartmouth the downsides were surprisingly upsetting. Not only did I see unblinking academic focus lend itself to pretension and self-important intellectual preening, I resented being robbed of college outside the classroom the extracurriculars and nightlife that tiny Amherst just couldn't support. These factors comprise a massive part of the full college experience. Life education, let's call it.
So I went out periodically, drank when I did, made friends and studied for more hours than I now believe humanly tolerable. By the end of freshman fall, I was involved in the student paper, I was considering law school, I had become pretty good at recreational ping pong and I had a reliable if melancholy friend group. I talked about Nietszche and Hannah Arendt in and out of class like I knew what was going on. In other words, I was becoming a college student.
Yet over winter break, when I realized that my first semester grades were good enough to reasonably transfer to a better school, I jumped at the opportunity to re-apply to Dartmouth. When I went back to Amherst in late January, I was invigorated by my new mission. Amherst was nice and cozy, but that was precisely the issue. I didn't want nice and cozy. I'd come to college to be challenged on an academic and social level. I wanted to be pushed outside of my comfort zone, to shake things up and see what happened.
When I received Dartmouth's acceptance in early May, I felt an unimaginable sense of possibility. I had an option again, and I've never yet met an open door I didn't like. Dartmouth gave me a second chance at one of life's most important crossroads, and I wasn't about to shoot it down.
After arriving and realizing how far behind I was socially, I kicked myself in gear and joined a fraternity within three weeks of stepping on campus. In four weeks, I was trying to drop out of pledge term because I literally didn't know what it was, but in five weeks, I was good again after someone explained it to me.
Although it would have been easier, I don't regret missing freshman year at Dartmouth. From what I've heard from others, learning the ropes here provides a surfeit of mixed-up sexual encounters and bizarre tales of adventures gone horrifically awry. In everyone's description of the apocryphal Time Before Tolerance, freshman year at Dartmouth is chock full of the same anxieties I experienced at Amherst heaped with a heavier focus on hooking up and status jockeying. The early socialization that takes place primarily as an impressionable first-year in the form of frats, facetime, societies, who's cool and who's not, what's cool and what's not I missed all of that, though I won't say I miss it now. At this point, I've been brought up to speed on what's A-side and what's B-side. However, my experience at another school has given me good perspective on what's a general college problem and what's a Dartmouth-specific problem (hint: We're not that special most issues here play out thousands of times across the country in any given year).
I don't have a "D" burned on my chest. I don't love Dartmouth reflexively. I admit I struggle to even say that I love Dartmouth, since it is an institution made up of so many varied experiences among thousands of students and hundreds of organizations. But when I do love Dartmouth, I do so consciously and with firsthand knowledge of what else I could have. I created an opportunity to change the course midstream and followed through on it. In life, things tend to happen, and, in aggregate, small decisions and incidentals determine much of our path. We can make deliberate course corrections along the way but often only with piecemeal information and from an insular vantage point. It's rare that we are afforded a chance to take a whole aerial survey of our situation and make a highly educated decision about our lives. I've missed a lot of opportunities in my life, but this was not one of them.
I will never be a four-year Dartmouth student, but I'm grateful for the perspective and validation of personal agency that transferring has given me.
