Sometimes I marvel at the sheer intensity of being at Dartmouth. The overwhelming exhilaration that comes from living, working and studying in a community of over 4000 people, all here with goals of learning and forming friendships. Yes, we are more different than alike, but there is something enduringly impressive about the shared energy coursing through this place. I remember noticing this energy when I came for DOC First-Year Trips, and that feeling of an intensely place-specific admiration for this school defined my first fall here. I felt giddy with the newness of Dartmouth. Everything seemed exciting and unknown, bursting with opportunity. I remember trying to pause every night at six when I heard the Baker Tower bells ring.
Over time, however, I viewed this initial enthusiasm as naivete. I looked back on my early opinions of Dartmouth and wondered how I could have been so wrong about some of the traditions and ideas I had first seen as indicators of school enthusiasm. I had initially seen our institutional energy in traditions like Trips, Homecoming and the flurry of chaos that precedes exams. In some ways, there is an immense collective energy that goes into these events. But when I realized I could not disentangle Dartmouth from the buildings and routines in Hanover, I grew frustrated.
It took terms away from Dartmouth to help me realize the source of the school's energy. Immersed in Dartmouth, I had failed to see that our energy came from the concentrated intensity of sharing a small space with your friend, mentors and teachers. For many of us Dartmouth is the most densely connected community in which we will ever participate. We are in a place where friends are scattered minutes rather than miles away and where professors keep office doors open, waiting to talk with students. We are in a place where spontaneous run-ins with friends are guaranteed, where meeting new people is a frequent occurrence and where random conversations can yield as many insights as any class. These characteristics are inextricably linked to the physical makeup of Dartmouth; the fact that we are here together in Hanover at this specific time.
As we make our way through this place, we accrue hard-won knowledge, close friendships, well-intended advice and fragmented insights about who we are and who we want to be. This process is both challenging and invigorating; it couldn't happen without the people and the place that create Dartmouth. But as I begin to think about graduation, I wonder what happens beyond the boundaries of the College when we are gone for far longer than a term or two. What happens when we lose the comfort of closeness and the sense of intense energy that our physical proximity creates?
When we leave here we will disperse across the country and the globe many of us will find ourselves utterly alone for the first time in years. The departure from Dartmouth is quite abrupt: a hurried set of exams, a final week to reminisce with friends, a morning of ceremony and we're off, four years summed up far too succinctly on a single piece of paper. Faced with that rapid break from the community we have come to know, we must take care to identify the relationships that have nurtured and sustained us during our time here. The resiliency of these relationships and the knowledge we have developed in Hanover will be tested as we leave Dartmouth. The people and work that seem so critical right now could be pushed aside in a flurry of energy similar to the one that first captivated us at Dartmouth.
Dartmouth was, for many of us, a beginning the first time that we left people and places we knew well and went to a school that, at its best, challenged us to learn and grow and, at its worst, made us feel unwelcome and unsafe. Until now, our relationship with Dartmouth has been mediated by Hanover, by the classrooms, the river and the dorms that comprise this place. As we depart, we must identify and strengthen the Dartmouth that exists outside of Hanover. This is the moment where we take the insights, the advice, the knowledge and the friendships we've created here and set out into the unknown, fingers crossed, hoping it will all work out. And it will, I think
