Little Binky Flees the Nest
*Binky and his parents, Judith and Richard, stand on the front steps of their home. Binky wears a Dartmouth T-shirt and a frame pack. His parents fight back tears.*
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.
60 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
*Binky and his parents, Judith and Richard, stand on the front steps of their home. Binky wears a Dartmouth T-shirt and a frame pack. His parents fight back tears.*
Dear Mary Liza of September 2012,
Enid: So sweet of you to invite us to grandparents weekend, Eliot. Our little Dartmouth kitten!
Late night,
’Twas the very witching hour of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes contagion into the world. No, we are not Prince Hamlet, but his words (and some gentle nudging from our editors) drove us into the Dartmouth College Cemetery like Young Goodman Browns to witness the debauchery of students in this labyrinth of death.
As children we are asked to share all the time. We’re asked to share toys with our friends, clothes with our younger siblings and tents with our fellow campfire scouts. As college students, however, we are rarely asked to share anything but a one-room double. We’ve got our own computers and our own sneakers — everything we need to be completely self-sufficient so that we don’t have to share with anyone unless we want to. This week I’m asking people to do just that, to share a little bit of themselves.
As a kid, every day was career day for me because every day included a trip to the library. Flipping through the pages of my favorite tomes, I felt certain that when I grew up I wanted to fight evil wizards like Harry Potter, follow yellow brick roads like Dorothy or run a chocolate factory like Charlie.
Like the illustrious David Guetta, you may look around this campus and wonder “Where them girls at?” You may also wonder “Where them guys at?” or “Where them people who fall somewhere else on the spectrum of gender at?”
It’s the year 2050 and your mid-life crisis has brought you back to dear old Dartmouth, as you always knew it would. You may not remember all the words to the alma mater, but you’re ready to skate on Occom Pond, build a snowman and tear up the slopes with your bionic post-knee-replacement legs.
Can I meet you,on the Green?We could find some incredible things.Farmers, frisbees, falling leaves,Saw the lines and I thought: Oh my god,Look at those crepes, kettle corn and pink cupcakes.Grab my cash, and stuff my face.
“Dartmouth is a party school.” It’s hard to guess how many times I heard this phrase when I was accepted to Dartmouth, but if I had to make a approximation for the sake of this article, I’d guess it was somewhere in the thousands. I heard it from snarky adults who had never been north of the Mason-Dixon line. I heard it from friends at graduation parties. I heard it from concerned elderly people in the grocery store. Sometimes I even heard it from the small, scared voice inside of my head. Nevertheless, I lugged my straight-laced, sleep-loving, decidedly sober self all the way to New Hampshire and hoped for the best.
Notice your posture. This is the first thing the voice on my computer told me when I searched for guided meditations, found a website and purposefully picked the shortest one — a three-minute mediation called “Body and Sound.” As instructed, I noticed that I was in my typical kitchen table position, one leg tucked under me, one curled around the side of the chair, a tad bit hunched and leaning a little to the right. It was the position I had been in since Thanksgiving, avidly searching the Internet for presents I could give to my extended family. It was, for me, the position of the hunt.
The first time I felt really alone was this past spring, when I spent my off-term in Paris. I went there to write a book, to get away from dregs of Hanover winter and — like any good English major/expat — to find myself. In the first few weeks what I found were chocolate croissants and tulips. I found antique stores and creperies and hundreds of tiny dogs walking the streets that I desperately wanted to pluck off their leashes and carry with me to complete my perfectly Parisian outfits.
When you came to Dartmouth, you probably brought your backpack, notebooks and pillow. Did you know you also brought your tool kit?
Upon entering Dartmouth, students are bombarded with hordes of questions ranging from “What’s your major?” to “Where do you see yourself in five years?” to “How’d you get that wart?” For Joel Ash ’56 Th’58, the real question was “Do you believe in magic?”
“Oh, the classes I’ll take!” you’ll say as you inspect the term’s course list. You picture yourself raising your hand with pride, answering questions even seniors in your class can’t fathom. Emblazoned with A’s and citations, your first report card from Dartmouth will be tacked to your fridge at home. But before you even reach that point, you must brave Banner Student and navigate the murky waters of registering for courses. My advice — take one class you know you’ll love, one that will fulfill a distributive requirement and one that is completely random. Beware the rumored “layup” class, for one man’s layup is another man’s D+. Finally, tell yourself it’s okay if you don’t have a 4.0 in your first term of college. You will get there. Or maybe you won’t, and that’s okay, too. Most importantly, take risks, tear it up and know that you’ll figure it out along the way. Here are some of my picks for top freshman fall classes.
As each sunny summer day slips idly by, you’re probably watching your friends pack their bags and bid their loved ones farewell. You anxiously pour over College Confidential forums and creep through the Facebook group to quell your own excitement about the day when you will arrive in Hanover and begin your own college adventure.
Feeling a shiver of terror creep up your spine? Glimpsing tiny, shadowy figures? You’re not alone. Every few solstices a throng of menacing creatures appears, seemingly overnight, on campus, and we are powerless to stop them. We turn our heads and drop our FoCo to go boxes in fear as we watch these beings take flight, zero in on their targets and descend. Cicadas, you ask. Wasps? Alums? No, friends, I’m talking about your parents.
When I was a young, pimple pelted, cloak clad middle-schooler, I spent three summers in the steamy hills of North Carolina at what can only be called “nerd camp.” I studied writing and psychology with kids just like me, kids who knew words like “capricious” and treasured their vast collections of Harry Potter memorabilia. “Smart kids, a bookstore that sells peanut butter M&M’s and unrestricted access to the library? College is gonna rock,” I thought to myself as I looked around the campus.