It snowed on Monday, which was also Dimensions — Dartmouth’s admitted students day. Snow isn’t ideal on any spring day, but it’s particularly devastating on the one day meant to showcase all the fun and beauty campus has to offer. I was halfway across the Green, head down, getting whipped around by the icy wind as I made my way toward the Life Sciences Center. The snow came down in quick, stinging bursts, more like ice pellets than anything you could romanticize. Around me, prospective students and their parents moved more slowly, pausing to look up at buildings, to take pictures, to imagine.
Whenever I pass a campus tour, I always wonder how I am being perceived. Do I look like someone who has it all together, someone composed and quietly impressive, on her way to do something important? It feels plausible from a distance. I am usually walking quickly. I seem like I know where I am going.
But I look at the visiting students and what I feel is a flicker of homesickness, paired with a kind of disorientation. It’s an awareness that I do not have a clear story for these past three years, nothing I can neatly package or explain. I just have a series of days like Monday. Walking somewhere, slightly late, slightly cold, unsure how it all adds up.
I did not bring a winter coat to campus this term. It is my third spring term here and I have never brought one. Every year I convince myself I will not need one and every year I am proven wrong in the same familiar way. Instead I pile on layers, which leaves me looking and feeling disheveled, a little frumpy, like I am wearing all my miscalculations at once.
I think about my own Dimensions day. It was raining then, steady and gray, soaking through everything. And still, I remember finding something to love. A small feeling, easy to miss if I had not been looking for it.
This week in Mirror, we take a walk around Hanover. One writer explores the best place to go on a first date. Another writer observes the day-to-day of a student band. Finally, our relationships columnists tackle what to do when you’re a washed-up, single upperclassman.
I try to hold onto that magic now, when the wind cuts through and the frustration builds. Something quiet and steady, even in the middle of all this motion. Enough to keep walking.
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.
