Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass"
Over the past few months, I've felt more and more like Alice every day. The question of where I want to go, phrased in the innocuous interrogative "So, what are your plans after Dartmouth?" has been posed to me more times than I can count. My response, usually along the lines of "No clue, but I sure do love my English major and international studies and art history and global health and...and..!" is always met with a Cheshire-like knowing smile. I can see what they're thinking behind the enigmatic nod and the skeptical brow. Oh, the overconfidence bred by the liberal arts degree these days. This girl's got a rough dose of reality coming her way. Instead they patronizingly pat my shoulder and confidently declare, "You'll totally figure it out. You've got plenty of time!"
Despite the terror of these conversations, I can't help but be grateful for the opportunities for personal growth that I've received at this crazy, beautiful, sometimes miserable little corner of New Hampshire. The adventures I've had here so far have taught me more about myself and about the world than I could possibly have expected when I matriculated in the fall of 2010. The following is a timeline of how things fell apart and serendipitously started falling back into place in an unpredictable jumble of intellectual, spiritual and personal discoveries.
In which failure happens:
Since freshman fall, a lot of what I've learned has been mediated through a series of failed experiments. I joined the crew team and realized halfway through winter that I was fighting a losing battle when my coach said, "I'm not telling you to quit, but..." So I did. And I realized that sometimes you can't, and sometimes it's okay to stop beating yourself up against a brick wall, or an erg. Sophomore summer, it took the threat of yet another catastrophic pre-med GPA-bomb to finally work up the courage to visit the health careers advising office. Five minutes later, I decided to take the W and a leave of absence from the hard sciences. And you know what? Since then, Dartmouth has blossomed for me from a series of terrifying weeder lectures into an intellectually nurturing home.
In which I begin finding my passion(s):
One of my most significant intellectual awakenings occurred during my off-term sophomore winter in Orem, Utah. My dear Grandpa Doodlebug, a retired biology professor and current Mormon LGBTQ activist, recruited me to analyze survey results on the experiences of LGBTQ individuals with ties to Mormonism. I coded the heartbreaking stories the respondents shared about their struggles to reconcile the gap between religious doctrine and sexual identity. There's something ineffably beautiful when people share their personal narratives. It is stories that comprise the ether in which people connect with experiences beyond their own, and these are an inestimably powerful force for social change. This attitude cemented itself when I later went on the Project Preservation trip to Poland. After a term of in-depth study of the Holocaust, the program visited the camps at Auschwitz and Belzec before working to restore a Jewish cemetery in a small town called Korczyna that had been abandoned since the Holocaust. Several months later, unable to shake the haunting witness of humanity's dark genocidal edge, I began a sustained research project to condense the oral histories of the town's Jewish survivors, which, though as depressing an undertaking as one might expect, I found fulfilling in its own way.
In which I create my own Dartmouth experience:
At the start of my junior year, I decided to quit my sorority and "took a sabbatical" from the Mormon church, which had been a fundamental part of my identity. Without these institutions, I suddenly found myself feeling alone and lacking a defined community to support me. This period was characterized by a long string of lonely Friday nights, pretending to assuage my FOMO with the holy trifecta of Netflix, pajamas and hot cocoa.
But for the first time, I didn't have any community or ideology placing expectations and responsibilities on me, and I felt more free in my own skin than ever before. I restructured my priorities and values that made sense with what I do know and believe in. One of my guiding principles is a quote by Frederick Buechner: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." To me, this means that life will be fulfilling if you're able to do what makes you happy in a way that brings happiness to other people too. I began to seek out opportunities that combine learning with service, which brought me some of my most fulfilling experiences: learning to cook with Students Fighting Hunger, working in a Haitian batey in the Dominican Republic during last spring's Alternative Spring Break, becoming an undergraduate advisor and, most recently, leading a trip. Another highlight was last winter's global health case competition, which opened the door for me to land an amazing opportunity to do field research in Peru this past summer.
In short, deciding to break the mold and follow my personal interests has allowed me to strike a much healthier balance between self-care, personal development and community involvement.
In which I go abroad:
The past three terms have provided me with some incredible chances not only to see the world, but to interact with places on a deeply personal level. By some miracle, I found myself accepted off of the waitlists for both the art history foreign study program to Rome last spring and the English FSP to Dublin this fall, with an internship to do global health and sustainable development research in Peru in the middle.
Being a nomad for the past seven months has left me feeling more rootless than ever, yet has opened my eyes in lots of important ways, including a newfound appreciation for Dartmouth. Seeing the sculptures of Michelangelo and Bernini in Rome, or the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru or a Samuel Beckett play performed in a Dublin theater are all experiences I will treasure. But so are the little moments that exist in the most unexpected corners of the Dartmouth bubble, a metaphysical unreality that, let's just say, exists on this side of the looking glass. Experiential gems glisten in the crisp crunch of bright red leaves underfoot on a drizzly afternoon run at Mink Brook, in the nutmeggy goodness of any Collis pumpkin baked good, in finding friends who can make you laugh uncontrollably, in disturbed glares on Third Floor Berry or in finally working up the courage to go to office hours only to discover that your professor can be both brilliant and approachable.
In which I (hopefully) pull my act together and figure out my future:
Now, let's return to our poor friend Alice, stuck at a crossroads being offered useless advice. I can't help but recall the guidance offered at another crossroads, a forking path lying in a certain yellow wood, made famous by one of Dartmouth's own. But after reflecting on the multitude of forking roads I've experienced so far, and of the many yet to come, I hear the poem offering a new refrain:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,I forged a path that fit me best.And that has made all the difference.
(Granted, it's not a perfect rhyme, but you get the point).
