This article is featured in the 2024 Freshman special issue.
Dear Class of 2028,
I know everyone — from that Dartmouth senior who went to your high school, to your family members reading everything online that they can about this school — must be pumping your head full of exciting Dartmouth traditions, but it’s time for someone to be honest with you. You might hate college for a little bit. During freshman fall, expect to feel like crying, at least once. You’ll probably have an awkward FaceTime call with your home friends during orientation week — “Yeah, everything is great here!” — before calling your parents and asking them when they’re booking your ticket home for winterim. You might ask yourself questions like, “Should I have gone to College X, where best friend Y is? It looks like so much more fun. Best friend Y looks so happy…”
This experience may be less relatable to some. And others might even say that they never felt any of these emotions at all during their freshman fall. But that wasn’t my transition to college.
I’m not saying this to scare you, or because I don’t like Dartmouth. Quite the contrary — this school has brought me some great gifts. I’ve found a lovely community and fulfilling lifestyle here. That said, I didn’t always think I would. Frankly, most of my home friends are at various schools and experienced the same thing. At times, freshman year was fantastic for all of us. At others, it was excruciating. For the majority of us, we needed a couple months to find a sense of our place on campus. Feeling like you have it all figured out isn’t linear, either. Sometimes you’ll be up — at 3 a.m., beelining down Main Street toward Domino’s with people you just met — and sometimes (maybe even more often), you’ll be down.
I think it’s important to vocalize all of this because most people won’t. You’ll see Instagram photo dumps from your friends back home, or even from your peers at Dartmouth, and each slide will be with a different group of people. In every image, they’ll be smiling and looking like they’re having the time of their lives. And maybe, at that moment, they are. But regardless of whether they’re showing it, they’ve experienced low moments too.
But that doesn’t mean the highs won’t come, for them and for you. Dartmouth is a great place, in so many ways, but it might not necessarily click at first. I don’t want you to visit your friends at different schools — like I did — and decide that Dartmouth is the wrong school for you. If you must, you can decide that at graduation — although you’ll probably have found your place here by then.
I don’t think you can even reasonably compare Dartmouth to other schools because the specific school matters far less than your initial situation on campus. For example, two of my friends from home ended up at the same small liberal arts college and each had completely different experiences. They were similar people in many ways, but one friend immediately loved it, and the other hated it. The difference: one of them lived on a floor with a bustling common room, and the other didn’t. Yet the moral here remains the same — they both love their school now, and time took care of their concerns.
If you take anything away from this article, I would like that sentiment to be it — have patience. Don’t expect to meet your best friends during O-week, or even in the first few terms.
That said, you will meet them. And you will meet them faster if you continuously put yourself out there. Ask the people you just met to get a meal. You won’t always feel like it, but you really should. Go to club meetings, practices and random social events, even if you don’t have anyone to go with — I promise, you won’t be the only one showing up alone. No one’s going to judge you if you didn’t make a giant gaggle of friends via Snapchat before the term starts. You’ll make far more quality friends the organic way. Initially, you’ll probably be sad or scared — but it will be so worth it.
Dartmouth has opened so many doors for me in more ways than I can explain. It has wonderful gifts to offer, and there is a community here for absolutely everyone. I don’t need to know anything about you to tell you that you have a place at this school.
Be patient, and welcome home.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
