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The Dartmouth
July 11, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

One Last Piece of Advice

I have a confession. I have been writing an advice column with Kate Taylor '13 every Friday since September, and we have made up almost all of the questions. I wanted to call our column "Made up Answers to Made up Questions," but Kate wasn't willing to give up hope that people would eventually get the idea and submit questions. They never did. Whoever you are, James Furnary '16, you are literally the only person other than our friends and their mothers who submitted a question, and for that I thank you.

I have a second confession. I have been writing this advice column for eight months twenty-five 1000-word columns and have given almost no substantive advice. I would feel worse if I had been answering questions from real people. The one notable exception is the "Grey's Anatomy" column. I stand by everything said there as law. I've really just been figuring Dartmouth out as I go along and relying on the advice that Kate gives me every Sunday afternoon to get by. I think that I'm like the majority of Dartmouth in that respect. So naturally, after three days of trying to distill all my insights into a melodramatic 900-word column containing lessons about Dartmouth that would make even '16s cry with nostalgia, I admitted defeat and quit. Why rock the boat now?

At some point I realized that Dartmouth is a place filled with pseudo-importance, where a startling amount of people take things too seriously and derive their sense of self-worth largely from things that do not matter at all. I first started to figure this out freshman year when I submitted an article to the Dunyun and either Tom Mandel '11 or Kathleen Mayer '11 responded, "Cool it, we're just tryna make some dick jokes over here." After some clarification, I learned that these jokes did not need to be dick-specific, but were symbolic of a less serious look at Dartmouth. Three years of trying do just that have allowed me to see all the peculiarities that make Dartmouth such a strange and wonderful place.

Since I spent eight months deferring to Kate on all questions in need of real advice, I will dispense the two pieces of advice I've been saving up until now. First, keep in touch with people. I know I said otherwise earlier in the year, but sometimes that lunch date or beer at Murphy's doesn't need to just be a hypothetical. Second, barriers don't keep others out. They fence you in. Life is messy, that's how we're made. So you can waste your life drawing lines or you can live your life crossing them. Okay, that was a Grey's Anatomy quote too, I guess I only have one real piece of advice. No apologies.

Instead of making up more advice that I'm not prepared to give, I'll pass along the best advice I've received about Dartmouth. It came about two hours into my freshman fall when I checked my mail for the first time. Amongst the barrage of colorful flyers, I found a small envelope addressed not to me but to my Hinman Box, with no return address. Somewhat perplexed, I opened it and found a letter written in flowery handwriting that read:

Dearest '13,

I hope you're enjoying my Hinman Box. Congratulations on being accepted to Dartmouth in a year that most '09s, like me, would not have been so lucky. I just wanted to write and tell you how jealous I am of you. You get to spend the next four years in the most amazing place on earth. I would give almost anything to take your place, but, sadly, I had to move on. Four years may seem like forever to you now, but trust me, it's not. One day you'll be sitting in an office far away from Hanover wishing you could go back. So have the time of your life, meet amazing people, do amazing things and fall in love with Dartmouth. But above all remember that you only have four years, so go for it, do it now and don't wait.

**Love,

An '09**##

So using someone else's more than moderately good advice: go for it, do it now and don't wait. Leave the library on a Monday and go to that concert, go to Europe, think about questions that you'll never answer, make it a seven-game series then go the Orient, take that 10A, do your best Jim Halpert casino night impression outside the Panarchy rave, drop that 10A, be jealous of the classes above you, see how many churros you can fit in a FoCo to-go container, go to the river every day over sophomore summer, be jealous of the classes below you, yell at the kid trying to leave through the front door of the 1902 Room after 2 a.m. and fall in love with Dartmouth while you're at it, because we only have four years. Then you can write a letter to your Hinman Box so whoever takes your place will know that it can happen to them too.