At the end of fall term, my editors asked me to write a reflection on my first term at Dartmouth. I wrote a column called “Learning the Shape of a Place.” Reading it again now, at the end of freshman year, I can see exactly where I was standing when I wrote it: Only a few months into Dartmouth, still trying to orient myself inside a place that felt larger, faster and more established than I was. I wrote about feeling slightly off-balance, about the relentlessness of the quarter system and about trying to trust a process I did not yet fully understand.
Six months later, I think that piece captured something real. But I also misunderstood what it actually means to begin belonging to a place like Dartmouth.
Back then, I imagined “settling in” as a future condition, a point at which the College would suddenly begin to feel natural and coherent. Freshman year has taught me that Dartmouth does not really work that way. The place keeps changing, and so do the students moving through it. What settles, in the end, is not the College but your relationship to it.
In the fall, Dartmouth still felt almost cinematic to me. Everything seemed heightened: The Green was a hive of social activity; upperclassmen moved across campus with impossible confidence; traditions and terminology seemed to be the key to a world that had existed long before I arrived. I spent much of that first term observing Dartmouth.
By spring, I feel as though I have become more fully caught up in it.
That contrast matters more than I expected. Over the course of freshman year, Dartmouth stopped feeling primarily like an institution I attended and began feeling like a community whose rhythms increasingly structured my life. Being part of a team accelerated that process. The ski teammates I sit with at dinner have become people I rely on without thinking about it. Going to and from practice carries familiarity rather than novelty. Entire weeks become anchored around recurring conversations, meetings, deadlines and meals with people who were complete strangers when I arrived on campus.
I think that gradual accumulation is what actually produces belonging.
Part of what eased that transition, I suspect, was that I did not arrive entirely unanchored. I experienced freshman year alongside my sister, and even when our schedules diverged completely, there was reassurance in knowing someone nearby understood both where I came from and the strange intensity of adjusting to Dartmouth life. Freshman year asks you to build a new version of daily life almost immediately; doing that with family already woven into it gave me one familiar thread running through a place where almost everything else was new.
Writing for The Dartmouth changed my understanding of the College as well. As a freshman columnist, there is always an awareness that many readers know Dartmouth much better than you do. But writing forced me to move beyond first impressions. It made Dartmouth feel less monolithic and more human: a place shaped not only by official messaging and longstanding traditions, but by thousands of ordinary interactions, disagreements, friendships and small acts of continuity that students create every day.
What I understand now, more clearly than I did in November, is that Dartmouth is not a place that ever fully resolves itself. Already, the College means something different to me than it did during orientation. I suspect it will feel different again by sophomore year, and different again by senior spring. Watching seniors prepare to graduate this month made that especially clear. People who once seemed entirely established here are suddenly leaving it behind, carrying away versions of Dartmouth that are probably impossible for freshmen to fully comprehend.
That may be the most important thing this year taught me: Dartmouth is not one experience that students simply “have.” It changes according to who you are within it and where you stand in time.
In November, I wrote that I was beginning to trust the process. I still am. The difference now is that I no longer think the process leads toward a final understanding. It just keeps changing the shape of the place and the shape of who I am inside it.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
