Cultural Counterpoints
(01/10/18 7:20am)
The first year for college students can bring massive changes to their lives, from making new friends to keeping up with the academic pressures.
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The first year for college students can bring massive changes to their lives, from making new friends to keeping up with the academic pressures.
Coming back to Hanover in the winter is like coming back to a different world: The entire campus is coated in a layer of beautiful snow, making everything glitter. Seeing the college looking this picturesque makes it even more shocking to travel to towns like Lebanon and White River Junction, where the slush has already turned gray, and white buildings with green shutters are replaced with boarded-up storefronts and weather-torn houses. Despite being located less than an hour away from Hanover, these towns are peppered with signs of poverty and neglect that are not often found in Hanover.
Combining her love for fashion and social media, Jamie Ma ’20 created a project last fall with a stated mission to explore “the personal and individual styles of the Dartmouth community.” Her Instagram page @dartmouthflair has since attracted over 800 followers and counting.
The life of an Ivy League athlete is unlike any other. During the season, football player Emory Thompson ’18’s day starts around 6 a.m., when he wakes up to lift weights with his team. He spends the bulk of the day in class, in meetings, at office hours, and then from 2 to 4 p.m. he meets with his team and coaches to watch films and discuss strategy. He has 30 minutes to change into his gear and then from 4:30 to 7 p.m. he has practice, showers and gets dinner with his teammates. From 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., he works on homework, and 5 hours later, he wakes up to do it all again.
At Dartmouth College, which offers more than 60 majors and numerous other minors, the mathematics department is largely an enigma for the hundreds of social science and humanities students who fulfill their single QDS distributive requirement and move on. Contrary to popular belief, mathematics is a much more diverse and dynamic discipline than the introductory calculus and statistics courses that most students take.
The house system brings about familiarity and comfort to some, apprehension and novelty to others. Nonetheless, since the fall of 2016, it has become a key part of the Dartmouth experience. On its base level, the house system is a division of students across six houses: Allen, East Wheelock, North Park, School, South and West. Upon closer inspection, however, the house system is far from merely a division. Rather, its ability to create a sense of community among undergraduate students, graduate students and professors alike is a creation of unity through the process of division.
Jerry Rosembert Moise showcasing his graffiti work in Haiti at Breakfast with the Arts
Welcome back to campus. We all return weary from all the reunions that occurred over break: reunions with our high school friends (or avoiding reunions with our former classmates), reunions with family members and reunions with our home selves — less or more wild versions of the person we are at Dartmouth. The clock strikes midnight. It’s 2018, and we are now facing very different kinds of reunions. In 2018, we reunite with our academic self, our Dartmouth persona, with friends — the members of our family painted in green (or snow). We renunite with the woods, with puffy coats and the snow crunching beneath our feet. With the first day of classes only a few days after New Years, we are forced to shift gears and reunite with our school after six weeks of Netflix-binging and Harry Potter movie marathons. This week, the Mirror will be reuniting with you. We can help you procrastinate on your assigned readings (c’mon, it’s week 1— not a real school week, yet): Enjoy the first issue of 2018!
Before my first Dartmouth winter, I’d seen snow exactly four times. Five if you count the only time it snowed in my lifetime in San Francisco: Dec. 20, 1998, (the day that holds my first memory). I’m two years old at the park with my grandma (Nana to us, although she tried to convince me to call her Aunt Birdy until I was five) and a few glorious snowflakes fall from the sky.
Emma Sklarin '18 (right) stands on a Winter Carnival snow sculpture with friends.
If coming to Dartmouth has taught me anything, it’s that people can quickly change gears to achieve a goal. For some, it calls for a quick flicker of a light switch, but for others the transformation triggers a personality change — an alter ego. These alter egos serve a beneficiary purpose, and once it’s created, it’s here to stay.
Although more than seven decades have passed since the end of World War II, and Dartmouth College has grown in size, prominence and scope over the past nearly three quarters of a century, some things haven’t changed. A few interviews from “The War Years at Dartmouth: An Oral History Project,” a collection of over 100 stories of Dartmouth alumni and relatives, illustrate what has changed and what hasn’t.
Winterim is a beast of a break. At six weeks long, it can feel drawn-out, especially for first-year students coming off of their inaugural 10 week term. It’s also the first chance many of those students get to reunite with family and friends from home after a long term immersed in Dartmouth.
Fresh snow covers the ground as the Dartmouth Coach pulls up in front of the Hanover Inn. I step off the bus, grab my suitcase and trek toward my dorm. It’s hard to imagine, but just six weeks ago the sun was out and the grass on the Green was visible. Now, a blanket of white covers the entire campus. Winter term has arrived.
Leslie Butler is a professor in the history department who recently undertook a year-long writing fellowship funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Butler used this time to work on her current book, which explores the political role of women in the 19th century. Butler will return to teaching classes in American cultural and intellectual history this winter in addition to continuing work on her book.
Every painting has a final brushstroke. Every sculpture has a finishing touch. Even every photograph uploaded on Instagram has a last filter adjustment. Regardless of medium, a piece of artwork will eventually reach a point where its artist decides to stop making any more changes.
Nestled in the stacks of Baker-Berry Library in the company of grand ideas and long, winding histories of Dartmouth College is a book that is in many ways unremarkable, save for the ways it illuminates the quotidian beauty of life as a student here. “Days at Dartmouth,” a collection of letters written by Americo Secondo DeMasi ’35, records his ramblings on the mundane — grades, upcoming exams, fencing practice. DeMasi passed away in the winter of his junior year on Feb. 25, 1934 when a furnace gas leak in Theta Chi filled the house with lethal carbon monoxide fumes, killing him and eight others in their sleep. After his death, DeMasi’s high school teacher Clara Gill compiled the letters he wrote to her, his parents and his girlfriend, Peggy, into the memorial housed on our library shelves. The result is an epistolary memoir that articulates the commonalities of the Dartmouth experience despite the differences that mark the span between our time and his.
The Dartmouth: Through the Ages presents a curated collection of the newspaper's archives from 1900 to the present.