The Last Editors’ Note of the 180th Directorate
Here it is, everyone! Our final Editors’ Note of the year and of the 180th Directorate.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Dartmouth's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query.
36 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
Here it is, everyone! Our final Editors’ Note of the year and of the 180th Directorate.
This Winter Carnival felt like a fever dream, and not in a “crazy, lit, movie!” kind of way. It struck me that, after four years here, I did not truly know what Winter Carnival entailed. I was frustrated that the Polar Bear Swim was canceled, a tradition that my dad participated in during his time at Dartmouth and one that he hypes up and texts me excitedly about all winter. I was grossed out by the pathetic mounds of dirty snow melting tiredly into piles of mud around campus and alarmed by the warm temperatures that contribute to the climate anxiety that starts to worsen every winter. It felt harder to motivate myself to run down frat row in ski goggles with a Beatbox. I struggled to rally, surrounded by unrecognizable younger faces who appeared to be drunkenly having the time of their lives.
It might just be me, but January has truly felt like the longest month ever. And, boy, am I relieved that tomorrow it will be over and the month of Valentines will be among us.
Returning to campus after a hefty six weeks of holiday can be a little jarring. You greet people as though you haven’t seen them in years, yet opening up Canvas takes you right back to the final you bombed last term. Despite being so used to my arduous journey from Heathrow to Hanover, stepping into the frosty January air at Boston Logan to wait for the Coach felt like an assault to my senses.
Over break, I saw a ’28 after she opened her acceptance letter to Dartmouth. I stood in an adjacent room — not knowing her well enough to feel as though I could be there for the actual opening of the letter — and waited to hear a reaction to the seemingly fate-deciding laptop click.
Eeeek. Week 9 is here and we at Mirror are freaking out once again. This past weekend marked our Directorate Cabin Night, which happened at the house of our lovely photo editor Caroline. I woke up on Sunday morning feeling oddly rejuvenated, despite the ongoing exhaustion I felt last week. Daylight savings happened and now the sun brutally sets before our 2As are even over, ominously foreshadowing the darkness the winter is going to bring. I always find myself amazed how quickly time seems to slip between our fingers here in Hanover.
On Saturday, I went to the Dartmouth-Harvard football game. After riding on a cramped bus to Boston for over two hours, standing amidst a packed crowd for an hour and finally wandering to find a bathroom for 15 minutes, I decided to venture outside of Harvard stadium. As I strode across the Charles River, mere blocks from my parents first apartment in Cambridge, I wondered whether their 30-year-old selves had any plans for the future. Did they plan on moving to Washington D.C. soon after? Did they think they would have three kids? How did they know how to figure out their lives?
Something spooky is in the air. And it’s not the scariness of how quickly the time comes around for me to write my biweekly Editors’ Note. The heaviness of the October gloom that is settling in all around us is getting to me slightly. This fine Week 7 has proved, once again, that you can most certainly blink and another Dartmouth term will have passed its midpoint.
Through a friend of a friend, I somehow received an invitation to a neighborhood apple-picking and cider-making event this weekend. As an outsider, I felt nervous to intrude on this community event. Yet, my intrigue won over my anxiety. I decided to tag along with my friend, in the hopes of returning to campus with a delicious jug of hand-pressed cider (pressed by my own hands, of course).
I am writing this from my favorite spot in Sanborn, people-watching and trying to distract myself from the mountain of work that is building on my to-do list. Now feels like an acceptable point in the term to start putting off work and ignoring emails. Just in time for midterms, am I right? This week marks the midpoint in the term, and yet there is still so much to look forward to. Homecoming, Halloween, the Harvard football game, my birthday… Something about turning 22 this week is giving me the Wednesday scaries, just slightly.
Parents’ Weekend has come and left us. The past few days, we watched as scores of ’27s and ’24s, accompanied by family members, strolled around campus. Their feet rustled trodden leaves, and they excitedly pointed out various landmarks around campus.
It’s Week 3, but it’s not quite Red (Taylor’s Version) season yet, and the autumn leaves aren’t quite falling down like “pieces into place.” It feels as though we are on the precipice of the seasons turning from green to gold, or at least that’s how I am feeling about my senior year. Each morning feels just a little bit chillier, and planning for the future looms closer. There are still crowds of new unfamiliar faces in the line at Novack, and it’s hard not to think about people who have recently graduated and moved on and away. They were the ones that once stood in the shoes of the freshmen behind me, and with every week that passes, I am acutely aware that this is my third and final fall in Hanover.
I wrote my first article for The Dartmouth during freshman winter. In a reflection on COVID-19, I assembled a messy concoction of words that required multiple rounds of initial editing before it could even qualify as something that had the “potential to be published.” How cocky I felt before hitting send on the submission email to my editor — how ashamed I felt to receive the “the writer seems to be using this as his own personal diary” comment. It feels odd now to be writing an Editors’ Note for the same section in which I once felt like a failure. But change can happen in the span of a few moments, even ones that appear so distant but feel so close and connected, as if that article with a lengthy chain of red marks stared up at me only yesterday.
August did indeed slip away like a moment in time, as Taylor Swift sings on “folklore,” and a new page turns as fall at Dartmouth arrives. Soft and crisp September days are here, and while the evening is coming earlier, the air is still dewy with the nostalgia of summer. Soon, as the days pass and we reach the familiar midpoint of the term, that nostalgia will stay a while, like an old friend that you have missed seeing on the Green. It will settle in the way you curl up in your favorite old chair in Sanborn.
Here we are. Week 10: The final stretch. Boy, it’s scary. At the end of every term and academic year, we find ourselves wondering how time has managed to just slip away. The unpredictability of spring term weather is a factor. April showers and wintery gusts of wind linger until Week 5, and then suddenly the sun comes out and summer is right around the corner. May is marked by wanting to live in the soreness in your limbs from standing so long at the Green Key concert, to the gentle chill of late night walks home from the library during finals season, and the creamy texture of IC4U ice cream that you’ve drowned in sprinkles. Now, we try to memorize the people whose smiles and laughs have made this year so meaningful.
Now that Green Key has passed, we ask — did “Everybody Talks” provide you with enough musical relief before finals? Did splashing around in puddles on Saturday unlock your inner child? Have you overcome the mountain of work that undoubtedly piled up throughout the weekend? We at Mirror hope your Green Key — whether it was your first or your last — lived up to your expectations.
Rock ‘n’ roll, Dartmouth – welcome to Week 8! Between the building anticipation for Green Key, the ubiquitous sickness around campus and the lead up to finals, it really feels like we’re in the home stretch. Now all we have to do now is make it through this marathon of a weekend. Though there will be very few quiet moments this week, maybe you can flip through some of our articles in between games of meniscus, Block Party and those public DFMOs that people are totally not going to think of every time they see you for the next few years.
With just a few weeks left of the term, time seems to slip through our fingers. Students snap graduation photos outside of Baker, smoothie-drinking sundress wearers dot the Green and the sun’s shimmering rays set later each day. Memories made this year are starting to settle, and we hope that you take some time for yourself this week to reflect on how this term has felt for you.
Week 6 has arrived. A rainy week reaffirmed the muddy misery that April in New Hampshire can bring, but hopefully we will be treated to the promised May flowers. Seniors, I hope you are celebrating the end of your time at Dartmouth while also overcoming the possible existential dread that your last term at Dartmouth may bring. The rest of you, I hope you are still trying to find a way to complete your work while every ’23 you know seems to be doing anything but working.
Is Week 5 getting anyone else down? No? Just us?