One term into my Dartmouth journey, I am struck by how the “college experience” has at once stayed extraordinary and, in certain ways, already become ordinary. While it is early enough that some new things I notice still make me feel slightly off-balance, patterns are beginning to take shape.
When I first arrived, campus felt almost unreal: an avalanche of information, emails and new lingo to absorb, the Green buzzing with orientation activities and fairs, outdoor lunches and groups of people who all seemed to know where they were going. When the upperclassmen returned, they moved with a confidence I could not imagine having. Now those scenes feel like old snapshots, replaced by the beginnings of a routine.
The pace of that routine, though, is relentless in a way I did not — and probably could not — expect. The quarter system does not offer a gentle on-ramp; it simply begins, and suddenly the days fill themselves. As an athlete, I thought I understood intensity, but academic fatigue is its own category. It is less acute, more persistent and often harder to shake.
What has surprised me most, though it probably should not have, is how the quieter moments end up mattering the most: a topic in class that suddenly clicks in a way it had not before; needed laughs at dinner with my teammates after a long practice; a walk home at the end of the day that gives me just enough stillness to realize that I am okay and managing more than I thought. Those small moments are beginning to anchor me.
Writing for The Dartmouth has shifted my view as well. Offering an opinion as a first-year can feel, at times, not just presumptive but faintly farcical. Who would care what I think? A question not easily answered. But writing has made me notice things I might otherwise miss — the gap between how the College describes itself and how it is really lived, the quieter stories underneath the loud ones. Dartmouth becomes more complicated, but also more intelligible.
And so, a quarter in, I am left with a sense that Dartmouth is less something to “figure out” and more something to slowly grow into. Of course, I am just a few steps into this journey and some days I feel like the pace is just a bit ahead of me. But I am starting to trust the process, which is a kind of progress. The Woods feel less mysterious now, not because I have solved anything, but because I am learning to inhabit them. I am not quite settled, but I am starting to feel at home in the effort.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
