A little goal of mine this summer is to explore every building on campus I’ve never been in before. Not just poke my head in, but actually be there, setting up camp with my laptop, drinking bad coffee in a forgotten lounge, watching the light move through unfamiliar windows. Dartmouth is tiny but still vast; I want to see how the campus feels when I let it surprise me.
This week, I’ve been working in the Engineering and Computer Science Center. I’ve only been in it twice, briefly, over a year ago. It’s full of glass and hum and a kind of focused silence I don’t usually associate with my own routine. I don’t code. I don’t really understand what half the little notes and diagrams on the walls of each room mean. But I like sitting here, watching people pass, imagining a version of myself who knows how to think like they do. Someone who talks about logic trees and machine learning and neural networks and gets excited about optimizing a problem set. I like the stretch of that imagining.
It reminds me of the years my family spent house hunting. For nearly a decade, we were looking for something new — weekend after weekend of open houses and staged kitchens and awkward small talk with realtors. But for me, it became something else entirely. I’d walk into each house and immediately start assembling a life inside it. Not just decorating it, but inhabiting it, learning the staircase creaks, memorizing the window light, mapping out the quietest places to be alone. Each layout offered a different way to be a person.
That instinct is still alive. I have a class in Reed Hall for the first time this term. My chemistry professor’s office is in a new corner of Burke. I’m trying out new versions of myself — someone who writes longhand notes in the margins of philosophy texts, someone who reads slowly, with purpose. I’ve been wandering into corners I didn’t know existed, letting the architecture nudge me toward some quieter internal state. There’s a rhythm to these buildings that shifts my thinking just by being near them. They tug at different parts of me, parts I forget about during the regular chaos of the term.
Sophomore summer has made room for this kind of wandering. Without the usual noise, I can move differently — less directed, more open. I don’t have to belong in these spaces to let them affect me. I can sit in a new room and borrow its perspective, even if only for an afternoon.
This week in Mirror, we explore the unexplored. Our two returning columnists investigate the merits of letting go of a past romantic prospect.
I’m not trying to reinvent myself. I just want to stay curious, to keep looking for the places that make me feel slightly more awake the way those houses once did — when I’d cross a threshold and, for a brief moment, believe that life could feel entirely different, just because the walls were shaped that way.
Aditi Gupta ’27 is a Mirror editor from Ridgefield, Conn. She is majoring in Biology with minors in Global Health and English. On campus, she spends most of her time working in a cell biology lab. She hopes to pursue a career that integrates her love for scientific research with her broader academic interests in health and literature.
