The summer before I came to Dartmouth, I got a book describing all the College’s academic departments and possible course options. I flipped through it, impressed with the wide variety of offerings, but I did not pay much attention to it or seriously consider what path I wanted to pursue during my four years at the College.
This is not an example to follow.
If you don’t give some thought to what academic areas you may want to explore, your start to college will disappoint.
I spent part of Orientation poring over the timetable of class meetings and covering my computer screen with tabs from the Course Picker website to ensure I was making the right class choices. But I ended up “wasting” that first term on courses I did not particularly enjoy.
So what exactly went wrong?
Well, I definitely shouldn’t have ignored that book. I had more than enough free time to read it, and if I had thought about the options I would have in the fall in advance, perhaps I wouldn’t have had to scramble to figure out my course load.
When picking classes, it’s important to remember what made you excited in high school. Instead of considering what I was curious about — or even what subjects I excelled at — I prematurely declared that I had to be a government major. I had also decided that this precluded me from being a math or science person, so I was going to take a “layup” technology course as a way to tiptoe around those pesky graduation requirements. Of course, I thought I was being quite clever. But in the process, I lost sight of the fact that I had enjoyed math in high school and that I had always wanted to try out a computer science class. Coming into college, you should not limit yourself to some preconceived set of strengths and weaknesses. Your potential major does not need to have such a strong influence on your course selection, especially in freshman fall.
Instead of learning from my initial mistakes, I was stubborn. Not only did I continue to think I should major in government, but I also added in economics to the mix. I became fixated on balancing out harder classes with easier ones. Such a calculated approach to freshman year is a recipe for disaster. In the back of my mind, I really knew I wanted to do something other than government and economics, and I ignored that. It took me far too long to realize that I was not going to receive a prize for being a martyr in my major choice. It is hardly noble to major in a department because of its supposed prestige if your interests actually lie somewhere else. If you’re in classes you don’t find engaging, think twice before committing yourself to the idea of majoring in that department.
A common piece of advice I heard as a freshman was that I would have “plenty of time” to take a wide variety of courses. And it is true that in my sophomore year I had few problems redirecting my interest to history, which I find much more rewarding. But I won’t have the same freedom to try out all the courses that caught my eye but that I steered clear of for fears of difficulty or irrelevance. If there’s a time to test-drive any academic subject that interests you, it is freshman year. If it isn’t what you had expected, then you don’t have to major in it.
If you’re looking for the “right way” to do academics at Dartmouth, you’re always going to come up short. While I now recognize that I should have made different choices in freshman year, I see no point in obsessing over what might have been.
I doubt that many Dartmouth students have chartered the perfect academic path since day one. As long as you’ve thought about what it is you want to learn in college and you keep an open mind, then you’re on the right track. Dartmouth offers a world-class education, but ultimately it’s up to each of us to decide whether we fully take advantage of that.
