This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
Twelve months ago, I was exactly where you are, carrying around a dense New Student Orientation guidebook.
Orientation comes with schedules to follow, traditions to learn, acronyms to decipher and advice about how to make the most of Dartmouth. I read it all and set about trying to figure out what college — and Dartmouth, in particular — was all about.
Ten weeks later, naturally, I wrote a column explaining what I had learned. Six months after that, I wrote another one explaining why I had not quite gotten it right the first time.
I am barely ahead of you. I have been a Dartmouth student for one year — enough time to learn a few things and, more importantly, to realize how much of what I thought I had learned was provisional.
You are about to spend four years at a place that is very good at teaching you stuff. You will read new books, learn things you do not yet understand and meet people who know far more than you do about subjects you may not even know exist.
If all goes according to plan, you will leave Dartmouth knowing considerably more than you do today. But I have started to wonder whether knowing more is really the most important part of an education. What about knowing when you are wrong? Or realizing how much you still don’t know?
There is a word I keep coming back to: wisdom. I am beginning to realize how much harder it is to acquire than knowledge.
Many of us arrived at Dartmouth accustomed to being right. We got answers right on tests, made convincing arguments and figured out what teachers wanted from us. Being right helped get us here.
But being good at getting the right answer is not the same thing as exercising good judgment. Intelligence, however useful, does not protect you from being spectacularly wrong. Sometimes it takes an extreme example to see a familiar pattern clearly.
This summer, I read David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” his 1972 account of how Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and other accomplished men helped lead the country ever deeper into the Vietnam War. It’s also a case study in how being accustomed to being right can leave you spectacularly wrong when it matters most.
McNamara had taught at Harvard Business School before President John F. Kennedy appointed him secretary of defense in 1961. Bundy had been dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences before Kennedy made him national security adviser that same year.
Within months, both men were involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, a botched U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro that Kennedy would later call “a colossal mistake.” But learning from one mistake does not inoculate us against the next.
Both men remained in their positions under President Lyndon Johnson and spent the next several years helping lead the country ever deeper into Vietnam. Bundy left the White House in 1966; McNamara remained at the Pentagon until 1968.
They were the “best and the brightest.” Halberstam did not mean it as a compliment.
These men did not lack intelligence, education or access to information. McNamara, in particular, brought an innovative quantitative approach to the Pentagon, and an extraordinary faith in what analysis and measurement could reveal. Yet the ability to analyze an enormously complicated problem did not mean he understood it. Nor did surrounding the president with brilliant people guarantee good decisions.
The distinction between intelligence and judgment was not academic. More than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. The average American soldier serving there was 19. Many who lived — and died — with the consequences were essentially our age.
Our mistakes at Dartmouth will, mercifully, have much lower stakes. Don’t be afraid to make some. Much more importantly, don’t be afraid to admit when you have. For those of us accustomed to being right, being wrong can feel like failure. But it isn’t; the failure is being unable to reconsider what we thought we knew.
In the column I wrote last fall, I tried to make sense of Dartmouth after my first term. Six months later, I revisited it. I don’t think the first column was wrong. It described Dartmouth as I understood it then. I had simply mistaken an answer for the end of the question.
Writing for this newspaper has reinforced that lesson. I tend to ask more questions than I answer. Putting an argument on the page forces me to work out what I think while reminding me how much remains unsettled. I believe an education should do the same.
Freshman year will give you plenty of opportunities to discover that not every question has a right answer. You will receive plenty of advice: Say yes to everything. Don’t overcommit. Take difficult classes. Remember that college is about more than classes. Find your people. Meet people unlike yourself. Have a plan. Keep your options open. Most of it is good advice; taken together, it is impossible to follow.
The orientation guidebook can tell you how Dartmouth works. What it cannot tell you is what college will mean to you. Neither can your professors, orientation leaders, upperclassmen or, certainly, an opinion columnist.
There is a temptation to treat uncertainty as a problem to solve. What will I major in? Who will my friends be? What should I join? What will I do after Dartmouth? Am I doing college right? Some of those questions require answers eventually. Very few do this week.
Perhaps one purpose of the next four years is not to eliminate uncertainty but to become better at living with it: to learn which questions demand an answer, which deserve more thought and which you may spend a lifetime asking. Perhaps that, too, is part of wisdom.
Twelve months from now, you will know considerably more about Dartmouth. I hope you will also be a little less certain that knowing more means having all the answers. You may even be tempted to write an opinion column explaining what you have learned.
If you do, leave room for the sequel.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
