College Confidential Clarified
Note: All of the following questions were adapted from CollegeConfidential.com. The answers are our own.
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Note: All of the following questions were adapted from CollegeConfidential.com. The answers are our own.
During high school, some of us came straight home from school and collapsed into ourselves away from the gaze of our teachers. Others went to the gym for a workout. But for some, every waking hour after school was dedicated to playing a sport. Some of these people were recruited to play their sport at Dartmouth, while others were not but that doesn't mean they've given up on their sport in college.
This past Monday, I stepped onto an Advance Transit bus, the Upper Valley's free shuttle service, for my maiden voyage. Young and unseasoned, I fidgeted neurotically with my hands in my coat pockets as I stood at the bus stop in front of the Hopkins Center. The wind whipped up swirling dust clouds around the Hanover Inn construction site, but I felt none of it under the protection of the overhang. Four of us huddled together at the bus stop, periodically glancing at the conveniently placed LED screen that flashed approximate bus arrival times.
I never had a freshman year. Rather, I didn't have one here. Coming out of high school, I missed the academic bar for acceptance to my first choice, Dartmouth, and after equivocating between Bowdoin, Amherst and UVA, I decided that Amherst would provide me the best social and academic atmosphere.
At Dartmouth, we all encounter the polite conversations in which we are perfectly content with treading permanently at the surface level. I'm sure there are times when someone has asked you how you're doing, and you wanted to spill our guts on what's really going on in your life, but instead you chose to say, "Fine," and continue on your way to class. Here are a few other imagined, impolitic responses by a hypothetical individual fed up with empty questions.
Over a period of more than two centuries, Greek letter organizations and their literary society predecessors have become intricately intertwined with Dartmouth's culture. In 1783, taking cues from existing societies at other American and British schools, a group of Dartmouth men founded the predecessor to fraternities by way of the Society of Social Friends. Three years later, a rival society called United Fraternity was formed. Respectively known as "Socials" and "Fraters," the primary aim of these first societies was to foster literary culture, which they accomplished by collecting books in private libraries to complement the meager collection of College texts then available to students.
I'll admit it. I feel vilified.
On the one hand, students residing in the Still North are faced with a conundrum. Dartmouth is little known in certain (read: most) circles. Confusions with similar state schools (read: UMass Dartmouth) frustrate us all the more because of our desire for recognition of our Ivy pedigree. Pride dictates that after the years of hard work that we put in to arrive here, we figure we may as well be able to drop a D-bomb and get some recognition. After all, Harvard's name landing in a quiet room can have a strongly gravitational effect centered on the speaker, a casual Princeton mention forces a mental elevation of the speaker's status and at the very least, Brown's name immediately indicates to the listener the speaker's zaniness, creative urges and eventual career as a Starbucks barista. Dartmouth should clearly be allowed similar rights.
Competition? Please. Pause for a second and take a look at my life this term.
Sean: YO, MAN you gotta chill out sometime. Cut that heavy-handed writing, take a deep breath and kick it like I do. I get just as much shit done as you do, with half the stress.
As spring unfolds and the '15s storm campus, my paternalistic impulse is kicking in. The prospies are venturing into what is likely one of their first collegiate experiences, particularly the seedy underbelly of Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights at the College. Students strike a delicate balance between what we do in the dark and how we conduct ourselves in the light. It's hard to find the right balance, and some of the more messed up mistakes have the potential to trouble us for years.
It's not often that a person goes around trying to acquire a bad habit. Bad habits are what we break ourselves of. They're the things we love to bitch about our great personal flaws that stick around with us mimicking recurring childhood nightmares: scary and unwanted yet oddly comforting in their familiarity. Like bad dreams, bad habits come from something unresolved deep within us our internal issues can have physical manifestations.
New Hampshire is a very white state and I'm not referring to the snow that covers the ground in the winter. As of 2009, Vermont, Maine, West Virginia and New Hampshire (in that order) had the highest percentages of white non-Hispanics in the nation, all hovering at or above 90 percent of the state population. Even in Hanover, the racial breakdown isn't remarkably more diverse than the state average the town of Hanover is about 80 percent white, according to the latest Census Bureau data. But if you stroll from Dirt Cowboy to Collis, crossing the subtle but very real divide between the town and the College, you've entered a new demographic realm. At 49 percent white, 14 percent Asian, 8 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Native American, according to the Common Data Set, the College's undergraduate population is notably more diverse.
At once a leading academic institution and a party school of mythical proportions, Dartmouth is truly the Animal House Ivy. Our college toes the line between the best that higher learning has to offer and the worst acts that college students can perpetrate. The soaring feeling you have when you see the Green for the first time meshes with the drunken haze of a basement and the pounding headache the day after. We juggle these two identities on a weekendly (or daily) basis in our personal lives.