Class of 2020: Senior Survey
(06/14/20 6:40am)
This article is featured in the 2020 Commencement special issue.
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This article is featured in the 2020 Commencement special issue.
Last week, Dartmouth announced that it would suspend the standardized testing requirement for applicants to the Class of 2025, joining Columbia University, Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania in eliminating the requirement for the upcoming college application cycle.
I first heard about Dartmouth as a high school sophomore. I was sitting in my honors English class when I overheard a junior say that Dartmouth was her dream school. At that point, I was still well over a year away from spending mental energy on college applications. I had always envisioned myself attending the University of Texas at Austin. Regardless, the idea of Dartmouth must have clattered around in my subconscious for a while because when it came time to apply to some dream schools, Dartmouth made the cut along with Harvard, Stanford and Yale.
One hallmark of the Dartmouth term is that it’s doled out in portion-controlled weeks, one after the next. Week one is for adjustment; week two is for “catching up” with once-per-term friends; week three begins the long and terrible blur of midterms that never end; week six is the termly weekend extravaganza; week eight is for formals; week nine is for wishing you were somewhere else.
The end of a term calls for relief. The end of a school year calls for reflection. The end of one’s time at Dartmouth calls for something harder to identify — for pride and gratitude, but also sorrow for all of the friends, places and traditions that graduating seniors must leave behind. This year, the end of spring brings a new kind of grief. Amid one of the most turbulent times our generation has ever seen, the Class of 2020 must seek a sense of closure for their college years, despite losing their last chance to be together on campus.
When I first came to Dartmouth, I was aware of several aspects of my identity. I was a lover of books. I wanted to study English and creative writing so that I could write stories that helped other people the way the stories I had read had helped me. I was white. I was a woman. I was middle-class. I was from Colorado, and I loved the mountains.
Over the last two weeks, as I’ve logged on to Zoom to watch some of my closest friends wrap up their Dartmouth careers with thesis presentations (and one sweet radio play), my brain has had ample opportunity to play evil comparison games. I often feel like I didn’t get the things out of my Dartmouth career that I wanted going into it, and it’s hard for me to remind myself to treasure what I did get out of the past four years. But when I truly take the time to give myself credit where credit is due, I’m able to notice that for each bullet point I missed, I gained my own experience of friendship, care and perseverance.
Salt Hill Pub’s Hanover location has permanently closed, according to a June 2 announcement from the restaurant and bar. It will join The Skinny Pancake, Morano Gelato and several other Hanover eateries as one of the latest in a series of downtown Hanover closures tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Skinny Pancake, a popular Vermont creperie, has permanently closed the doors of its Hanover location, the restaurant announced via Facebook this afternoon.
Since joining the Big Green ahead of the 2017 season, Lauren Jortberg ’20 has been one of the best collegiate Nordic skiers in the nation. The Nordic skiing co-captain earned spots on the All-East First Team and All-America Second Team in each of her first three years at Dartmouth. After an injury-plagued senior season, Jortberg is looking forward to getting back on her feet and achieving her childhood dream of skiing professionally.
As one of Dartmouth’s most successful club sports, the men’s rugby team is no stranger to victory. The Dartmouth Rugby Football Club increased its consecutive streak of Ivy League XV Championship wins to 12 this past November. The team also competes outside the Ivy League, traveling across the U.S. to take on some of the country’s top teams in both fifteens and sevens competition. The DRFC took home back-to-back USA Sevens Collegiate Rugby Championships in 2011 and 2012. The Class of 2020 has only added to this long tradition of excellence in rugby over its four years competing for the DRFC.
Reid Cashman, a former all-conference player and assistant coach at Quinnipiac University and a two-year assistant coach for the NHL’s Washington Capitals, will take over as head coach of the men’s hockey team. Athletics director Harry Sheehy announced the hiring on Monday, just over one month after the retirement of Bob Gaudet ’81.
Sal Khan, who will speak at this year’s remote commencement ceremony, is no stranger to connecting with others from behind a computer screen. As the founder of Khan Academy, he pioneered a widely popular online platform that offers free educational videos and exercises in topics ranging from math to chemistry to SAT prep. During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools around the world have shifted to remote learning, which has caused a spike in traffic on Khan Academy.
Seniors were surprised to hear that the speaker at this years’ commencement ceremony will be none other than Sal Khan — founder of the free online learning platform Khan Academy. Though the graduation speaker was chosen before the pandemic, many have called Khan a fitting choice, given that COVID-19 has rapidly pushed higher education toward online learning this spring.
At the end of each academic year, The Dartmouth’s sports section selects players and moments to be voted upon by the student body as the best of the best. In this year’s The D Sports Awards, six of the top rookies, six of the top moments, five of the top female athletes and five of the top male athletes at Dartmouth were pitted against each other. After three separate rounds of voting, The Dartmouth is excited to announce Makenzie Arent ’23, the Big Green football team, Katie Spanos ’20 and Drew O’Connor ’22 as the winners of this year’s awards.
As graduation nears, members of the Class of 2020 are struggling to get and keep jobs amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding financial downturn.
Police brutality against the Black community has spiked in visibility over the past week. In reaction to these events, many people I follow on social media have been expressing their horror at the blatant transgressions of basic civil rights. All over social media, one finds reposts of Instagram stories, words of solidarity, the #BLM hashtag and links to donations for organizations such as the Minnesota Freedom Fund. The topic has taken online platforms by storm, and people are rightfully angry. We want to educate each other, and we want to spread the word that Black lives matter because the world has missed that message by a huge mark, time and time again.
In preparing to write this column, I considered many different topics related to the LGBTQ community: from the prejudice within the LGBTQ community, how certain identities are considered more acceptable than others, how one’s level of queerness alters one’s experience both within and outside of the community, the lack of intersectionality within most portrayals of queer characters or corporations’ profiting off of Pride. Even then, some part of me felt that all of these topics were too niche and too specific to the queer community for readers unfamiliar with these debates to find worthy of their time.
Throughout the spring term, professors weathered unexpected changes to their courses, technological challenges, research setbacks and other obstacles to maintaining the quality of their work amid remote instruction. As the second remote term approaches, faculty have advocated for the College to prioritize the arts and sciences budget.
Over 300 Upper Valley residents, Dartmouth faculty and students gathered on the Green Saturday evening, many holding banners that read “Black Lives Matter,” to rally against the recent deaths of George Floyd and other victims of police brutality. Following Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police last week, a series of protests and riots have erupted across the country.
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