Deep Cuts: Coming of Age
This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
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This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
Mirror, Mirror, on the wall: it’s Gretchen, writing from one of the mysteriously-stained, slightly-too-squishy couches that lives on the second floor of Robinson Hall — the same couch I’ve sat on for the past four years at Mirror story assignment meetings. To be honest, I’ve been dreading this Editors’ Note — the last of the 181st Directorate — because the end of my time on Directorate is akin to taking the first step on the path that leads to graduation. And that, in turn, feels somewhat like stepping off the edge of a cliff when you don’t know what lies beneath — not to be dramatic or anything. Clearly, our last night of production is filling me with the first twinges of nostalgia for my college experience.
Between “midterm” papers that, for some reason, fall closer to the end of the term than the middle, and the general burnout-induced slump that plagues campus, week eight historically possesses an unforgiving character. There are occasions when we hit the lottery and have perfectly linear schedules in which our assignments and exams space themselves out, but more likely than not, it’s the opposite.
Winter Carnival has crept up on us, and we are once again reminded that gone are the days of the Psi Upsilon keg-jumping contest, Winter Carnival Queen and towering snow sculptures. Though these traditions have since passed us by, I know many students who still carry with them an idealized image of what the weekend should hold, referential and nostalgic for a past they, or even some of their parents who went to Dartmouth, never experienced.
Just after sunset last Friday, I found myself alone on a path bordering the Dartmouth Skiway. On one side of the trail, a house down a steep hill glowed from all sides. Formations of ice covered the cliffside that lined the other and a thin frozen layer coated the ground. As I stood still, I could hear the ice moan and creak; it seemed to come alive when I looked at it for too long, breathing and shifting under my feet. Alone in the dark, it felt like staring a wild animal in the face.
This week, like any week that I am tasked with writing the editor’s note, I’ve been looking for meaning in everything. Every third Tuesday is a game of how fast I can imbue an anecdote with importance, all while keeping one eye on a PDF I’m reading for my government seminar, the other on incoming edits for the week’s articles and my mind anywhere but the second floor of Robinson Hall.
Italian plums, a hole forming in my favorite pair of Levi’s jeans, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” Anthropologie candles, emails that begin with “Thank you for your interest” and end in disappointment, contact-safe eye drops, a warm Pacifico on a Thursday, Imogen Heap’s “Headlock” blasting through my Sony headphones as I do my skin care routine. The first fragments of my senior year.
This term, I arrived on campus early, which is probably — potential employers, please stop reading here — one of only a handful of times I’ve ever been early to anything in my life.
Maybe it’s because I’m writing this on three hours of sleep, but I’ve begun to lose track of the all-nighters I’ve pulled this term.
No matter how much preparation or thought I put into it, every three weeks I find myself in Sanborn between the hours of 12 and 4 p.m., staring at a blank Word document, trying to start my editor’s note. Most of the time, it’s not even staring at a blank screen — it’s writing several opening paragraphs and deleting them, the modern (but much less satisfying) equivalent of scribbling on a piece of paper, crumpling it up and throwing it into an overflowing trash can. It’s calling my mom to see if she has any insights, or re-reading parts of old Lena Dunham essays to see if I can excise their millennial undertones and make them my own. Always, it’s trying to find a seed of meaning in a quirky anecdote that either happened last week or a decade ago. Yes, believe it or not, Mirror — and its editors — are, for the most part, exceedingly self-aware.
Yesterday, I was cleaning my room while listening to “People are People” by Depeche Mode, and I thought of my mother. It may surprise you, reader, that I think of her every time I listen to Depeche Mode — or Talking Heads or Neil Young or Tracy Chapman, for that matter. She not only introduced me to these artists, but I, much like my mother was in the 1980s, am also at college far away from home, listening to the same music she did in her early twenties.
When students want to listen to music or tune in to their favorite podcasts, they might first turn to streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify. But another option for Dartmouth students lies on the third floor of Robinson Hall — the Web Dartmouth College Radio station, a hidden gem from which students host radio talk shows and stream their curated playlists. According to the organization’s website, WebDCR is Dartmouth’s freeform, online and student-run radio station. The organization, which occupies a unique niche in Dartmouth’s media landscape, has undergone numerous changes throughout its history — most notably, the College sold its FM station to WFRD, a commercial radio station in Hanover, in 2021. Since then, WebDCR transitioned to exclusively online broadcasting.
Happy Week One, Mirror, and happy 24S! Gretchen here.
After watching “Saltburn,” my first reaction was not one of shock or disgust, but rather disappointment. I remember thinking what a shame it was that from now on, the film would be mentioned in tandem with the likes of “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” when “Saltburn” is but a glitter-covered, uninspiring imitation of such stories.
For most of my college career, Dartmouth and home represented two ends of one spectrum.
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.
A passage in the fourth chapter of the Book of John tells the story of Jesus approaching a Samaritan woman at a well. During their exchange, Jesus reveals himself to the woman — who is meant to represent the lowest class in society — as the son of God and offers her everlasting life. Standing at the well, he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give will never thirst.”
In the third song off Dominic Fike’s newest album, “Sunburn,” he sings, “If it’s not a puzzle, it must be nonsense.” Ironically enough, those lyrics do a pretty good job at summing up my thoughts on the artist’s sophomore endeavor.
If Dartmouth was a movie, sophomore summer would be the cliche to end all cliches. But there’s no doubt that this term means many things to rising Dartmouth juniors. For some, it marks their first term taking a break from a sport they’ve played their whole time at Dartmouth; others take two classes and split their time between the river and Webster Avenue. For me, it means finally getting back to writing after a term as an editor for the Mirror. But I won’t lie to you, the other day, when I was researching films to write about, I thought to myself, “Why am I even doing this?”