It was a funny, spontaneous and surprisingly informative experience but more than that, the tour was my first and most profound exposure to the unapologetic, incomprehensible, over-the-top love students often have for the College. It sounds a little too scripted and nostalgic now, but I remember how right before these soon-to-be graduates left to go to their African drumming class, they all looked at us for a minute.
"You guys just don't know how jealous we are of you," one of them said.
It's been over two years since those '11s left the College, and I think it's fair to say that we've finally started to get a sense of what they meant about being envious of the classes below us. But consider all the lessons, progress and changes we've experienced over our past five to seven terms here if you could go back and start freshman year from the beginning, would you really want to?
With half our time at Dartmouth under our belts, much about the way we act has changed. As freshmen trying to find a place in a social scene we didn't fully understand, we might have tried too hard to become best friends with everyone we met. We interacted with the Greek scene based not on the perceived image of the houses but on how much fun we had at them. We hung out with our floormates and roommates because they were there, and if we were lucky, they ended up becoming our first close friends.
But as we continued through the terms, we also learned some things about peers that we might not have foreseen during orientation. Acquaintances, classes and clubs introduced us to people who surprised, challenged and supported us in ways we didn't expect. Superficiality faded quickly; our best friends stopped being the people who were the loudest and most fun, and started being the people who delivered us caffeine during all-nighters and could tell when we were having a rough day.
As freshmen, we were also so much more afraid of being judged. We studied in large groups, refused to walk to places alone and worried about looking awkward while getting dinner to-go. Spending a few terms on this campus teaches you that no one cares that much we all have busy schedules and go about our days however we can. That's not to say people stop judgingthe parameters just change. How you choose to assess people is reflected in who you surround yourself with and the choices you make. Without the anonymity of freshman year, people are more likely to notice.
Since we are technically here for school, we've hopefully undergone some changes in the realm of academics. We've gone from being pre-med engineers with passions for economics to reasonable human beings with slightly more realistic expectations. We've had our first experiences in the 1902 Room at 4 a.m. after not leaving enough time for a paper, and our grade might have shown us that office hours matter. We've learned that lay-ups are seldom lay-ups, and sometimes it's just better to take something we're actually interested in.
We've become painfully aware of the D-Plan, a system that seemed only tangentially relevant freshman year. It has both blessed us with opportunities to do awesome things and visit new places and cursed us with estranged friendships and trying periods away from the campus we love. At the beginning of the term, we saw some of our closest friends for the first time in months, knowing we'll have to say goodbye again come the end of the summer. Learning that every term will be different has taught us we always have something to look forward to, and counting down the days until the next big thing is no way to go through college. More than that, it's no way to go through life.
My own first half of Dartmouth was colored with its fair share of ups and downs I had one roommate transfer while the other became one of my closest friends. By rushing twice, I saw a lot of the negative and positive aspects of the Greek system and am still unsure of my final opinion. The majors I declared on my Common Application are still the ones I plan to graduate with thanks to classes that have genuinely fascinated and inspired me, as well as a few that haven't. Watching my school be celebrated for some things and criticized for others, I've come to understand that Dartmouth isn't perfect and that attempting to claim otherwise directly hinders progress. Seven terms later, I haven't always been happy, and it hasn't always been easy, yet I feel even luckier to be here than the day I set foot on campus.
It's hard to say if all the lessons we've acquired over the course of the past two years are because of Dartmouth. Maybe they're just a normal part of living away from home and growing up. Either way, there's one good thing about us being halfway done with the college we've come to call home we still have two more years.
