A year ago, I wrote an article in these pages arguing that Greek life at Dartmouth works because it’s exclusive, and that the open housing system fell apart because it wasn’t. Nobody guards a house they got for free. I believed it. I wrote it from the outside, before I’d rushed, and I acknowledged that at the time. I’ve since gone through sophomore fall and am unaffiliated. I think being on this side of the rush process is the only reason anything I have to say is worth saying, and the thing I most want to say is simple: You are going to be perfectly fine, and you should try to enjoy the process while it’s happening.
A bid is not a verdict, and not getting one isn’t either. I know how limp that sounds written down. I didn’t believe it while it was happening to me. But for a minute take a step back and look at how rush operates: a handful of short conversations, a room full of people who might happen to be in a good mood on a Tuesday, chemistry you can’t engineer and, in my case, apparently something I’d written months earlier. I heard through the grapevine that the piece followed me into the rooms where these things get decided. I don’t fully know what it cost me, and at some point I decided to stop trying to find out because I know I never will. Asking the same question over and over was doing me no good: I’d write the piece again anyway. That’s the only part I’m certain of, and I’m putting it here because it’s the thing I most want you to take away: Your worth is not on the table here, no matter its outcome for you.
This is exactly why you should try to enjoy the rush process. I’ll be honest and acknowledge that this is easier said than done. It is going to be stressful, and the stress is ambient. Every conversation around you, for weeks, is going to be about which house someone’s rushing, or who they got a meal with the night before, or what somebody heard. You more or less have to force yourself out of that. Force yourself to stop keeping score and actually be there for it, because the alternative is spending the best few weeks of the term panicking. What surprised me once the fall was over and I had some distance was how little the outcome had to do with the part that was actually good.
The good part was the wandering. For a few weeks the normal rules here are suspended and you can text a near-stranger for a meal and it reads as friendly instead of unhinged. You end up in basements and booths and half-conversations with people with whom you’d never otherwise have said a word. I met more people that fall than in any other stretch of college, and I still talk to almost all of them. That window shuts hard by winter, so use it while it’s open.
With distance, I can also hold the two halves of the rush process that I couldn’t hold a year ago. Rush is bad. It runs on snap judgments, half-information and results that map onto nothing real about a person. The people in it are, mostly, great. Not cruel or conspiring, and most of them going through the same nervous machinery you are. Last year I basically argued that because the system is coherent, it’s fine, and because the people are decent, the outcomes must be roughly deserved. Both of those are wrong, and they’re wrong in a way that only became visible to me from the outside. I don’t have the clean reconciliation. I can’t tell you the process is secretly good, and I won’t tell you the people are secretly bad. It’s both things at once, and knowing that in advance is what lets you take it a little less personally.
One warning that has nothing to do with any of that, and everything to do with who you are when it’s over: It is genuinely possible to spend so many nights reading a room and shaping yourself to fit it that you lose track of which parts were you. Thirty short conversations with people you’re trying to impress and you look up a week later unsure how much was real and how much was just decent improv. I got close. It doesn’t announce itself. Watch for it, and don’t talk yourself out of what you actually believe just because holding it turned out to be inconvenient.
The advice I’d give you if you were sitting across from me right now, worrying about all of this, is short. Prioritize the people over the outcome because they’re what’s left once the result stops mattering, which happens faster than you’d think. It’s a small school. You will see everyone again, and the connections are the only part of this that compounds. Take care of yourself and your friends, which mostly means water and getting home. Stay yourself. And whatever you do, don’t make any of this your whole life. Where you land does not decide what you’re worth, and neither does landing nowhere at all. You’re going to be okay.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
