This article is featured in the 2025 Freshman Special Issue.
Dear members of the Class of 2029,
Welcome to Dartmouth. You’ve arrived at a campus in the midst of a nasty hangover. Sophomore summer, a term characterized for many by easier classes and an emphasis on Greek spaces, is over. It’s starting to get colder. Let’s check in with the students who have been here for a while now, the upperclassmen, to see how they’ve spent their summers.
Many rising seniors are coming back from intense investment banking and consulting internships. If you’re talking to a lucky one, they’re around $10,000-15,000 richer and have a full time job set up after graduation. Many of them frequently worked somewhere between 80-90 hours a week, mostly doing grueling and repetitive math or preparing slide decks. They expect to work even more intense hours after graduation, an inevitability of “cutting one's teeth.”
Many of the sophomores are coming off a term where they drank three to four nights a week, sometimes more, and took easy classes so they could hang out with their friends. It’s easy to block out the problems of the world during summer in Hanover, but there’s a creeping sense of emptiness and dread about the inexorable passage of time after it all fades away. It’s already junior year? Some have internships lined up for next summer, while others are scrambling. Some are leaving campus for abroad, and many are still unsure of what they want to do with their lives.
In this summary, I present to you what many consider the dream Dartmouth career. A well respected and lavish internship, and membership in a Greek space. This article isn’t meant to judge anyone who wants this life – I agree that investment bankers make a lot of money, and that going to parties is very fun. I simply come to you freshmen humbly asking you to consider very carefully: is this what you want? And furthermore imploring: if it isn’t, don’t let yourself be forced into it.
Dartmouth is a magical place. This means that being a student here comes with blessings and curses. Among the blessings: stunning surroundings, unimaginable resources, relationships that will last a lifetime. The curses? Dartmouth has a peculiar way of making people want things they previously might not have.
If you’re not careful, campus can be like a funhouse of values, completely transforming your conception of what’s important, frequently causing people to care a monumental amount about some of the most miniscule things. Linkedin followers, which sorority is “top house,” which frat has the worst pledge term, that second round McKinsey interview the vague acquaintance you don’t like got over you (seriously, they suck!). A flurry of tiny little things like this can take over your life, and make you chase what to an outside observer are funny, bizarre rewards that someone of your intelligence and potential shouldn’t think twice about. But that’s Dartmouth. Some of the smartest people you’ve ever met doing some of the dumbest stuff ever. In the woods.
It can be extremely hard to know what you want. That’s what many of the systems at Dartmouth take advantage of, intentionally or not. They give many high achievers who are unsure of their path clear steps to “highly achieve” again, whether this is by getting a “great” job or winning a heedless game of social capital.
All I’m saying is this: Achieving highly at Dartmouth might not necessarily be what many people tell you it is. It’s true – straying from the norm can be hard, and sometimes lonely, especially at a place like this. But to live a truly great life, you have to find a calling in life that you truly love, not one that is repeatedly affirmed by others as desirable.
Every so often when you’re here, I encourage you to pause. Reflect, and be honest with yourself. Are you pursuing things that you really want? Or is Dartmouth getting the best of you? Don’t touch the fire, and have a great term.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
