Halfway There: An Upperclassman’s Advice to Incoming Freshmen

This article is featured in the 2025 Freshman Special Issue. 

It happened sometime last week. I was rushing off to my shift after class with only five minutes to spare, blasting music through my Airpods. My playlist is over 25 hours long with 200+ songs, so there are always a few songs I can go a long time without hearing until they randomly bless my airs through the shuffle. The random song pull of that day just so happened to be “Life is Good” by Drake and Future. A song that I had completely forgotten existed, buried down in the deep crevices of my mind, hasn’t been played in at least three years.

I slow down my walking pace, dissociating as the song transported me back to late January of 2020. It was freshman year of high school, first period gym class. At 8 a.m. sharp we started every morning with a ten minute run. My gym teacher would connect the speaker system to his Spotify and play the weekly top hits playlist. For almost a month straight every morning of mine began with a light “run” to a medley of “Life is Good,” “No Idea,” “Roxanne,” “The Box,” etc. 

And then COVID-19 happened. And I came to realize it is no longer 2020, it is 2025, half a decade later. I will never be a fourteen year old girl running laps with her friends in a cold gym again. I also will never again have the privilege of my only worry being a 9 a.m. quiz in AP Human Geography, and if I should go off campus to Chipotle or McDonald’s for lunch. Now I’m 20, an exhausted junior in college who cannot seem to stop worrying about securing an internship and thus a job. I have not been to the gym in weeks. 

Nowadays I cannot even remember applying to Dartmouth or the process it took to get here. I only remember logging in to the application portal and opening the letter, prepared for disappointment upon the sight of no virtual confetti, until I read the first word on the first line of text, “Congratulations…”. 

I arrived on campus a few weeks later for Dimensions with other prospective students, some of whom are still my friends to this day. We explored this campus together with bright, fresh eyes, just excited to have made it, to be accepted to a prestigious college. At that moment, I simply couldn’t believe that I was going to attend Dartmouth. Then I blinked, and it has been two years. 

The ’26s who hosted us in their dorms, performed for us, and took us under their wings that weekend are no longer freshmen but now seniors prepping for the next stages of their life. As the rest of my cohort and I step into our junior year of college, soon we will be faced with the same dilemma. I am excited to be a junior, as I do feel like it is time to step into a more mature phase of my life. However, I am nervous about what the future holds. I imagine junior year of college to be much like junior year of high school, fun but with an added level of stress. Not a ‘final exam worth 30% of my grade is next Friday’ type of stress, but rather a ‘what am I going to do with my life,’ level of stress. It is crazy to think about how as I go into my off-term next week that I will not see some of my friends for practically the next six to nine months, or even until senior fall. 

However, I hope this time away from each other brings a lot of personal growth for all of us. Junior year should not be about mourning being away from campus or slowly coming to the latter half of our college journey, but rather it is an opportunity for all of us to find ourselves away from school. It is hard to not get so caught up in the chaos of Dartmouth. 

If I were to impart advice on a younger version of myself, it would be this: I wish I would have fully seized the opportunity to be the most ridiculous version of myself. Try out a new identity, embrace my alter ego, take a term full of classes in the arts, get into marathon running, join an acapella group, become a member of Model U.N. There are so many things I wish I had the courage to do freshman year that I missed because I only ever explored campus and myself at a comfortable level. I do not regret how my freshman year turned out but I do always wonder if I had tried everything I truly wanted to experience, would my Dartmouth experience have turned out quite differently. 

Sophomore summer offered me a second chance at being a crazy freshman again. A summer with the opportunity to do whatever the hell we want for ten weeks straight. 

I started going to the gym more, writing every day, taking trips off campus, and making new friends. I did what I wanted to do and lived on my own terms. It’s just sad that it took me until the last real week of summer to realize how much has changed in the past two years. 

The first half of college will be the craziest, most trippy and at-times frustrating years of your life. The emotional and mental growth from ages 18 to 20 completely transforms a person. In some ways I am still that naive and optimistic 17-year-old who stepped foot on campus in April of 2023. However, in many ways, I am not — and that is for the better. 

I’ve learned, for one,  to stop giving a crap. Being able to not care about all the social pressures to be perfect and to maintain this successful ‘I am thriving’ image in a high-pressure environment like Dartmouth will save someone so much in the long run. When I became able to separate my true self and what I needed to thrive as a person, away from this image of perfection I was trying to achieve, I became happier.

I hope every incoming student takes their status as a freshman in stride and lives freshman and sophomore year to the fullest. The advice freshmen receive to seize the moment and try something new often comes off sounding cliche. But truly, do whatever you must do in the next two years to discover who you are, to actually grow as a person. Embrace every lesson that the first half of college can teach you — you will carry those lessons not only for the second half of college but for the rest of your life.

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