After living at home for the past three months, I miss Foco. Not the slow-moving stir-fry line or the scramble for a table at peak meal hours, but the ease of grabbing dinner with friends after a long day in the library or with random classmates. As the only dining hall on campus, Foco guarantees chance encounters. It’s a place for eating, sure, but it’s also a place for unexpected conversations and connections.
From the first day of each term, we immerse ourselves in the chaos of adjusting to new classes, activities and schedules. Then, the never-ending midterm season leads into finals season, and suddenly each day feels exceptionally short. Yet, no matter how packed our schedules get, we still need to eat. So a simple “Want to grab a meal?” is one of my favorite ways to squeeze in getting to know other people on campus.
I made one of my closest friends on campus in a sociology class during my freshman fall. The following winter term, we decided to get dinner together every Monday. Oftentimes, we invited other people to join us. What began as a weekly check-in became an opportunity to expand our social circles. Throughout the winter and spring, we made it a goal to get meals with as many people as possible, reaching out to classmates from our sociology class, mutual connections and even people we ran into at the library.
One of my favorite parts of my freshman year was meeting people with interests and experiences completely different from my own. After growing up in the same town for most of my life, I was thrilled to become friends with people from not only other states, but other countries located as far as Dubai and Singapore. I challenged my typically introverted self to start conversations with new people and take the time to get to know them, often through grabbing lunch at Foco or smoothies at Collis.
Surprisingly, it was frequently the unplanned meals that I appreciated most. After working together in a group interview for a consulting club, a girl who I did not know prior asked, “Have you had lunch?” The invitation led to an hour of debriefing the interview, figuring out our mutual connections and making plans to get another meal in the future. Unlike at home, where meeting friends for a meal requires both picking a restaurant and commuting to said restaurant, all it takes at Dartmouth is a meal swipe.
As I get settled back into campus life, I know fall will bring the usual whirlwind of the 10-week term. While the occasional grab-and-go meal from Novack might be inevitable, I am excited for a fall term of unhurried Foco meals full of conversation and quips, new friends and plenty of Fookies.
