The Dartmouth Mirror 5/24/13

MIR ROR

MAY 24, 2013

THE SENIOR ISSUE

VICTORIA LI // THE DARTMOUTH

2// MIRROR

EDITOR’S NOTE It is incredibly difficult to be self-reflective. To do so requires a certain level of self-awareness that many people, especially college students, tend to lack, as well as a willingness to examine your own flaws and weaknesses. Part of the mission of the Mirror, and journalism, is to encourage its readership to be critically reflective of their surroundings and the groups, practices and cultures they participate in. This is a fairly lofty goal, and not always one that this magazine accomplishes, but we hope that over the last two terms and throughout its history, the Mirror has facilitated conversation that allows Dartmouth to reflect on its greatest achievements and its most problematic issues. In this week’s Mirror, the last of the term and the school year, we look back and celebrate our predecessors, those people to whom we owe an enormous debt.

Members of The Dartmouth’s 2013 Directorate try their hands at personal reflection, and what they have to say is crucial reading for anyone who’s ever felt happy, sad, proud, angry, disappointed, joyous or uncertain at this school. It is through the stories of others that we realize the most obscured parts of ourselves. Spring tends to bring reflection unlike any other term, but this is never something to shy away from.

An enormous thanks to graduating seniors, from the Mirror, The Dartmouth and across campus — we’ll miss you when you go, but you helped teach us the things we need to be our own people once you’re gone.

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MIR ROR MIRROR EDITORS AMELIA ACOSTA TYLER BRADFORD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JENNY CHE PUBLISHER GARDINER KREGLOW EXECUTIVE EDITORS DIANA MING FELICIA SCHWARTZ GRAPHICS EDITOR ALLISON WANG

OVER HEARDS

FINDING THE GEMS

BY REESE RAMPONI Overall, Dartmouth’s pretty messed up. I’ve spent the past few years trying to highlight some of these problems in my articles and have spoken publicly about the devastating effects of sexual assault, homophobia and mental illness on our campus. After reflecting on my writing career, I realized I haven’t written a singe article that’s not either jaded, cynical or just plain depressing. I’ve voiced the issues but never acknowledged those that helped me overcome my own obstacles. So this is my last article, and I want to say that, just for the record, there are some wonderful things about Dartmouth. There are some gems out there, and I want to thank them.

These gems are my professors. We often say that learning happens as much outside the classroom as inside it, but we forget to mention that sometimes learning does happen inside the classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I have taken countless mind-numbing psychology classes with 200 students and not every class or every professor is perfect. But I’ve been lucky to find professors and mentors who have supported me, challenged me and made me question my assumptions, critique my privilege and push me to new levels of understanding.

I love learning, and I am proud to say that I cannot count the times that I left “Kierkegaard and Existentialism” with religion professor Ronald Green, “Telling Stories for Social Change” with women’s and gender studies professor Pati Hernandez and my psychology seminars with professors Peter Tse and Siobhan Robinson feel-

’15 Girl: The only way I know how to make friends is to walk into a basement with pizza.

Blitz overheards to mirror@thedartmouth.com

ing invigorated and rejuvenated. These courses reminded me why I came here, reminded me why I want to spend my life in a context where I can keep learning (I hesitate to use the word ‘academia’) and reassured me that no matter how dark life may seem, there is a book, an idea or a conversation that can be illuminated. If this makes me sound like a privileged, bourgeois intellectual tool, so be it. I prefer to think that I just sound like a nerd. We all are at heart.

Former College President Jim Yong Kim often spoke to the student body about our potential, telling us to make the problems of the world our own, to be the leaders of tomorrow.

I’ll refrain from commenting on the undercurrents of a pervasive white savior complex in many of Kim’s speeches. These issues aside, I always felt uncomfortable with Kim’s treatment of Dartmouth students as those who must change the world. Whenever I feel guilty about not “taking advantage of Dartmouth’s opportunities” through corporate recruiting or aggressive networking (undoubtedly the fastest route to becoming a “leader of tomorrow”), I refer back to a quotation written by my thesis advisor in an op-ed last year, in which Green noted that perhaps changing the world should not be our goal, or at least not at first.

“Some students will go on to become significant leaders who will change the world for the better, and that is certainly good. But some will just be better people — more thoughtful, more critical of careless assumptions, more compassionate, more complete in themselves, better

ANTI-FEMINISM ’14 Girl 1: How is the guy situation this term? ’14 Girl 2: Well, in the beginning of the spring I planted a lot of seeds. But then there was a frost.

‘14 Girl: I would be in a threesome, but only as the guest star.

citizens, better friends and better parents — and that must be our first goal,” Green wrote.

So, this article is a thank you note. Thank you, Ron, for reminding me and every student who has had the good fortune to take a course with you to not lose sight of our center. Thank you Siobhan, for noticing that I was having a rough time last fall, for asking how you could help and for sending me job opportunities and checking in months after class ended. Thank you Pati, for teaching me to stop talking and start listening, to think before raising a point or posing an argument, to respect the backgrounds and unique experience of those you interact with before making assumptions. Beyond all, thank you for offering up your home to me this summer while I figured out the rest of my life.

If there’s one piece of advice I could give to underclassmen, It would be to take advantage of getting to know your professors. They’re a lot more real than we think at first, and they understand a lot more about us than we think they do. After all, they were students once too.

In addition, we constantly disregard the value of their institutional memory. We are here for four years. Some of them have been here for 40.

Green was here when Parkhurst was stormed during the anti-Vietnman protests in the 1970s, when a group of students destroyed the shanties set up on the green to protest the College’s investment in South African apartheid.

Instead of critiquing and demonizing professors who have supported the Real Talk Dartmouth movement over past weeks, perhaps we should engage in conversation with them, ask them why they choose to support the causes they do. I guarantee they will have answers that will shed new light on our assumptions.

Campus issues do not only affect students — systems of power that disenfranchise students are mirrored in the faculty, and we would be daft to assume that the “isms” exist only in regard to our peers. Whether it is the power dynamic between different departments or interactions between individuals, professors are not immune to these dynamics of privilege. While students cannot fully understand the specific ways that faculty are oppressed and faculty cannot fully understand students’ experiences, we can still look to them for insight and perspective.

In his op-ed, Green wrote that “a commitment to changing the world and practical skills for doing so can be harmful” without a sense of personal identity and a moral basis to guide those skills. I agree. I came to Dartmouth confident, excited and disturbingly naive. I will leave humbled, weary and hopefully a little bit more informed. I know that I won’t remember everything I learned at Dartmouth, but I only hope that I have found some sort of moral ground or sense of identity that will make me continue questioning my assumptions, choices and actions in the “real world.”

So if I give any advice as I say goodbye, it is to find these gems. Sign up for “Telling Stories for Social Change” (it’s a CI and ART distrib!) this fall with Hernandez. Take “Kierkegaard and Existentialism” (it’s a W and TMV!) with Green this winter. I promise it’s worth it.

’16 Girl: Texting is boring now. It’s so mainstream.

’15 Boy: I got so many pictures of me taken at Block Party, it was awesome.

’14 Girl: I want to remove from my Facebook any pictures that could be construed as me pointing and standing on something.

MIRROR //3

REBRANDING REGRET

BY ELIZA RELMAN I often catch myself wishing there was a way to turn back time, sit myself down and teach myself some things. Like to not take that class, try harder in that other class, find that person I met too late here earlier, laugh more. It’s normal to regret. College is like one long test, of our patience, morals, endurance and sense of humor. It’s inevitable, and probably necessary, that we fail, make dumb decisions and then pick ourselves up, change course, realize important things about ourselves.

So when I do catch myself staring out a window wishing myself back to last night or last year to change that little thing, know that big thing, save myself some trivial awkwardness or some significant sadness, I stop myself. Next time, I think. Next time I’ll know better, I’ll be better.

But I haven’t always regretted, or appreciated regretting, the way I do now. When I arrived at college, I was a strange mixture of overly confident and comically insecure. While I still think of myself as a pretty even blend of that contradiction, my freshman self was largely unwilling to admit, even to myself, regret, failure or error. I was stubborn and idealistic, readily critical but rarely self-critical.

I was also scared to admit some truths, or possible truths: that I may have picked the wrong school, the wrong class or the wrong friends.

Self-knowledge to me was knowing that I believed in progressive tax rates and gun control. I prided myself on having a clear sense of right and wrong, morally and politically, in a sort of detached way. I was my values, my ideas, my ambitions.

It took some freshman year discomfort — the panicky feeling of loneliness, the disappointment of unfulfilled expectations — for me to realize that I might need to reconsider what gives me comfort in the first place. It was that question, “So, how much do you LOVE Dartmouth?!” tossed at me incessantly over freshman winter break that backed me into the corner of my well-crafted box of self-denial.

There’s something about speaking an untruth aloud that effortlessly erases all doubt of its untruthfulness.

So with the growing recognition that I might lack people and places at Dartmouth that fit me, I hesitantly set out to figure out what “fitting me” meant.

I soon realized that everyone needs friends. Not just people to fill the space in your physical Rolodex.

To be whole, to find meaning in a place and to fit you have to have real friends. But you don’t accumulate these relationships passively. My little sister said it best during her first weeks of college two years later, when she told me that she wished all the people who would make great friends had signs pinned to their

shirts. But passive selection, allowing markers to initiate friendship, doesn’t lead to real friends. Instead, it’s our individual task to sift through the sea of smiles, acquaintances, freshman floormates and Collis lunch dates to find the people that fit us.

And that was where self-knowledge came in. How do you find human beings to complement you, challenge you, make you laugh, excite you and sometimes hold your hand when you don’t know who you are? To anyone but my freshman self, that would seem like an obvious question. To me, this was the question. And the answer, I was realizing, was that you can’t, you don’t. The logical conclusion to this insight was that I needed to know myself, not only the kinds of people and places I fit, but how to make decisions that fit me.

My freshman spring I decided to go on a run. My history with running had been bleak. Basically I didn’t do it, except when forced – when attempting to catch a train or playing tennis. I didn’t run to run because it was painful, hard and boring. My jogging habits had changed for the better that term when a group of running-enthusiast friends repeatedly peer-pressured me into group runs on sunny days and my guilty conscience weakened me enough to give in. But that spring day I decided I wanted to go it alone. So off I went, just me and my iPod. I decided to try a new route and soon enough I found myself vaguely lost on some steep side street in Norwich. Tired and stomach-cramped, I needed a break. So I lay down. In a field under a tree by myself I realized I was alone, and at peace. I realized I was happy to be alone, for the first time in a while.

Because my revelations are largely unoriginal, I’ve realized that it’s not what you learn but how well you learn it. You can know something, about yourself, the world, or you can know something. Moreover, there’s a way of knowing yourself and learning about yourself that makes regret feel good, like turning a new page in the surprisingly riveting book of self-knowledge. What’s exciting about that regret is the knowledge that we’ve changed, we’ve learned and we have this new potential to act differently in the future.

I’ve decided to give my gut more of a say. It constantly reminds me that my instincts are almost never wrong. Or at least that there’s something about them, some part of what they’re saying, that’s very right. So if I dare to dream that I’ve changed for the better over the past three-anda-half years, I hope it’s because I’ve become a little more honest and, as a result, have grasped a little more of that ever-elusive self-knowledge.

THIS DARTMOUTH

BY JACK BOGER

Part of the advice I received for this piece was to write the article you’ve always wanted to write, but a column in the senior issue has never been something I have looked forward to. Like most things happening to me as my college years wind to a close, this has a distinct air of surrealism. Final articles have always been something for the older, other kids at Dartmouth, the ones on the way out. I can’t quite believe that now I am one of those older, other kids. I only hope that I seem as cool to the underclassmen as the 10s, 11s, and 12s did to me.

However, what little coolness and street cred I have are likely to be lost after reading this article, because this is going to be as sappy as it gets. But please allow this washed-up senior his due, and let me spill some ink about how I feel about this place, even if no one reads this except my mom.

Dear old Dartmouth: how I love you so. When Dwight D. Eisenhower said this is what a college should look like, he was so right.

When I die I hope they bur y my heart in Hanover, so that it can be returned it to its rightful owner. The majestic tower of Baker Librar y gets me every time. I can’t walk past Webster Hall without admiring the artistr y of its Corinthian columns, or pass through Sanborn Librar y without pausing to gaze at Eleazar Wheelock’s old Italian wallpaper in the Poetr y Room.

In these final days at Dartmouth I have fallen more deeply in love with this place than ever. Now I find beauty in the details, the smell of spring coming from the crab apple blossoms, glorious in their ivor y bloom, the Vermont hills rising above the river, the gorgeous stonework on McNutt Hall. I am tr ying to soak it all in, painfully aware that in a few short weeks this will all be taken away from me.

For what is a college but a transitor y way station, an ephemeral experience that can only be had once? The beauty of this time in our lives is that it is so fleeting and precious, but we don’t usually appreciate it that way. In carelessness is joy, in ignorance bliss. I’d like to believe that these will not be the greatest years of my life, and that the best is yet to come, but I don’t know how I could possibly have more fun.

I’ve watched meteors bur n across the universe on the golf course, shivering in a blanket with friends. I’ve basked in the waters of the Connecticut at sunset, and watched the remains of the day bleed out into the treetops. I’ve gotten lost on the trails along the Connecticut River, wandering deep into the streambeds beneath the

whispering pines. I’ve seen black moose gallop through the snow up north and watched deer walk silent as ghosts across Rip Road late at night.

I’ve star ted to notice things about you, Dartmouth. How quiet you are in the early mornings before dawn has painted you with the colors of the day. How eerie you are on weekday nights during the witching hour, when mist wreathes your streets and magic seems to walk abroad. How serene the campus seems in the dark of a winter’s afternoon, buildings and grounds all draped in snow, woodsmoke perfuming the sky. I love how cozy this place feels, all tucked in, safe and sound and warm, even though the wolf-wind maybe be wailing at the door ways, and the snow drifts deep along the road, I’ll miss Observatory Hill, where Robert Frost sits, forever composing, watched over by Bartlett Tower and the Lone Pine stump. I’ll miss the sign placed up there on a piece of New Hampshire granite by the Class of 1923 on the eve of their 50th reunion, which reads “Who doth not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rock.” I’ll miss Nathan’s Garden and how verdant and vibrant it is in the summertime.

I’ll miss Mount Moosilauke and its rugged peak, up in alpine zone where forests star ve. I’ll miss the little path through the graveyard to Thayer, a stark but beautiful memento mori before my 10A. In closing, I’d like to share a poem written by Edwin Frost ’30 that captured, at least in his mind, what his four years at Dartmouth meant. A friend introduced it to me after writing a paper on Bruce Nickerson ’64, the first son of Dartmouth to give his life in Vietnam. Bruce closed his speech on Dartmouth Night in October 1963 with this poem, and I can think of no better ending than its beautiful and haunting words.

“This highland plain of snows, these hills This garden of winter, these arctic stars, This spring of knowing, bound in peace, This granite purpose raised in men for use Around the girdled earth is wisdom, End of smallness, this deepening horizon This jewel of all the northern lights Which leaves no darkened sea uncharted Or hope against the future dead; An anchor for the misty dream of living, This hour, this standard, this religion, This Dartmouth.

TRENDING @ Dartmouth

FORMAL BRUISES Otherwise known as Green Key tattoos.

VINE

The mobile app that allows you to make short, choppy videos whenever you want.

It’s addicting, and maybe one day we’ll actually be good at it.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT We know this one’s a repeat but since the glorious weekend has finally arrived, we thought it was worth mentioning. Netflix has been teasing us mercilessly but we know the question on everyone’s mind is...her?

ENDINGS

It’s time for our last P.E. class, our final a capella shows and our last Mirror of the term. When spring ends, it’s a big deal, but don’t forget that no matter how corny it sounds, every ending is a new beginning.

THUNDERSTORMS

Some of you were lucky enough to be up for Tuesday’s 5 a.m beauty. We’ll take anything to break the humidity.

FRO-YO

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PRIYA KRISHNA JON GAULT

EMILY FLETCHER

DARTM

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ve done sake of the computer Weird things with all of its eated those

MIRROR //5

by variety. Each term has had a completely different feel, but I’ve learned to welcome it. During my freshman year, I was heavily involved in the music department, whereas by my junior year, my life was completely consumed by working for The D. Now, it involves a lot more pong and a lot more crying about graduation and my life being over soon. Pity me.

JAY WEBSTER At the beginning of my senior winter, someone asked me if I had found my passion at Dartmouth. I hadn’t, and six months later, I still haven’t. My Dartmouth has been a path of self-discovery (it’s college!), unimaginable happiness and anguishing loss. I can’t pinpoint the

MOUTH?

wspaper, my were to say

purest, richthan friends lk about life.

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have changed

everyone I ound that ell. If I just can probI will never he profeso have taken

Because this really isn’t just my Dartmouth. It’s everyone else’s too. And lunch upstairs always helps me remember that.

STEPHEN KIRKPATRICK

before I leave Hanover, or any time soon for that matter,

dence that it isn’t where I’ve found my singular, ultimate passion, if I even have one. Please don’t read this as pejorative — it’s a good thing. I don’t know where

is to not die alone and to own no cats — but that’s okay. Over the past four years, I’ve found what I need to keep going, to keep searching for my ever-elusive passion, whatever that word means.

I’ve learned most about myself in my time here, which sounds cliché and selfish and lame, but is nonetheless true. I know what I need to be happy — good friends and, sometimes, a long nap, among other things — and I’ve been fortunate enough to be happy for most of my time here. I’m going to stop myself before I begin to wax nostalgic. I’ll end with this: my Dartmouth experience has been rich with laughter and con-

ago. passion at this time, I don’t think I have

CASEY AYLWARD Dartmouth. Ask me again in six months.

ANGIE YANG

the time to teach me the truly valuable lessons in life — you have defined my Dartmouth.

DONG ZHAO

ALLISON WANG // THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF

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NOSTALGIA TO THE VERY END B Y KATE TAYLOR

I am a dangerously nostalgic person. My freshman fall, I spent half an hour before the Homecoming bonfire talking with my freshman floormate and trippee about how fondly we would look at the night. I have a vivid memory of my friend, sitting next to me on her bed wearing her Dartmouth ’13 shirt, saying, “We’re going to miss this so much when we graduate.” At that point, we had been at Dartmouth for a month and a half.

Almost four years later, I’m embarrassed by how melodramatic I can be, even when I’m right. In distributing moderately good advice, Gardner Davis ’13 and I frequently made fun of freshmen. However, I’m pretty jealous of my freshman self, despite her terrible bangs. I have never felt as immersed in the “Dartmouth community” as I did my freshman year. I was in awe of the Dartmouth that was filled with talented, humble, brilliant students. The 100-year-old buildings, a freshman floor that served as an incredibly incestuous family and legendary traditions let me build up nostalgia for a place that became larger than life in my mind. I understood that the College had issues, but was confident in my classmates’ and my ability to solve them. Sometimes while sitting in the second floor hall of Rauner with my floormates or listening to the alma mater when walking to Collis for pasta, I would randomly get an ache in my chest from fortune to be at Dartmouth. When my mom came to pick me up for freshman summer, I sobbed.

Sophomore year was different, mostly because I had a half dozen random identity crises.

They stemmed from a number of issues that aren’t particularly revolutionary — running the gambit of rush, figuring out my sexuality, spending the winter living at home and making terrible decisions in my love life. My freshman year, I saw myself as one of the students

frolicking on the Green in glossy images in Dartmouth calendars. I was already nostalgic for parts of Dartmouth I hadn’t experienced yet, like sophomore summer, and for things I had never experienced, like when people actually built Winter Carnival sculptures. As a history major, I like to look at the past and try to puzzle what it means, piecing together a wider story. My sophomore year, I wasn’t really sure where I fit into Dartmouth’s story anymore.

I wasn’t, and still am not, very good at “doing Dartmouth.” I’m terrible at applying for things, and I hate rejection. I didn’t apply to write for The Dartmouth until my senior year because I found the application intimidating and assumed I wouldn’t get in. I don’t really enjoy meeting new people, small talk or big groups and have made most of my friends by lurking in their general vicinity for weeks to months. I’m not good at dating, worse at maintaining a hook up and have been single for my entire Dartmouth career. Most damningly, I’m really bad at pong.

Despite this, my Dartmouth nostalgia has only grown during my senior year. My previously mentioned freshman floormate and trippee and I made a pact that we’d move out of our luxurious sorority housing to live together, surrounded by sophomores in South Fay, our senior spring. We regularly get slammed with bouts of pre-post-Dartmouth nostalgia. However, the parts of Dartmouth I now place unreasonable value on don’t fit the image of Dartmouth that existed in my head freshman fall. They are things that remind me of snippets of the last four years that I’ve spent with people I love completely and have changed who I am as a person. It’s not the shiny packaged image of Dartmouth I loved freshman year, but it is tangible and

LEARNING TO DEFINE ONE’S INDIVIDUALITY B Y PRIYA KRISHNA

Last Sunday, I sat down to send an email out to my friends about my thesis presentation. Among others, I invited some of my freshman floormates, my fellow directorate members of The Dartmouth, my boss at Dartmouth Dining Ser vices, my government major advisor and the executive chef of Murphy’s. It was typing each of these names in the BCC column of the Blitz that made me realize I have an extremely random and discordant mix of friendships. At Dartmouth, where students are encouraged right at the start of orientation to find their niche or their organization, it may seem counter-intuitive to say that my Dartmouth experience has been defined by my absence of feeling connected to a single group. But this has not only defined my Dartmouth experience — it has enriched it.

When I came to Dartmouth, all I wanted was to feel accepted and validated by having my own group of friends. My sister, an ’11, had found this amazing community in her a cappella group while she was here. I wanted that — be it by joining an organization or finding a group of people

I could be bonded for life with. I joined organizations, and I made friends. But I never got that feeling of my identity being intimately linked to one of those organizations, and I realized that I had formed friendships in a lot of different ways, and there was no way I was going to be able to create one group from such a diverse array.

As I went through Dartmouth, I started to explore my passion for food through a lot of individual endeavors. I started a column in the Mirror where I designed meals that could be made out of only DDS ingredients, I was a student consultant for Dartmouth Dining Services and I worked as an assistant cook at Murphy’s — all very fun, but highly individualized activities.

I distinctly remember feeling incredibly lonely and unfulfilled, that I had never found that organization or group here with which I could form a really strong connection. Ever yone else seemed to have collective songs, bequests and pong tournaments — things you can’t really do when your colleagues are at least 20 years older than you. I felt like I was missing out,

real and makes me truly grateful to have had the opportunity to come here.

Next year, if I come back for Homecoming, I’m sure I’ll tear up at the bonfire. However, it will be the hardest to leave the random signs on my running route in Norwich. Sitting in King Arthur Flour for twelve hours every Sunday. Being the proud pledge mama in a sorority that I did not want to join my sophomore fall. Drinking wine and eating Fage yogurt on a couch in London.

Doing a circuit in a hurricane. Closing Tri-Kap basement dancing alone to “Call Me Maybe.”

I’ll miss Molly’s margs on Mondays, people

accepting the weird noises I make in lieu of words and the picture of the naked Asian man holding a cat that’s hung on the wall in every room I’ve lived in since freshman year.

Since I technically wrote an advice column this year, I’ll end with a few pieces of advice.

Find people, groups and activities that make you feel lucky to be at Dartmouth. Don’t take this place or yourself too seriously. Even as you grow increasingly convinced everyone is terrible, keep making new friends. Carve out a little section of Dartmouth for yourself, and remember it fondly when you leave.

like I was doing all of this stuff by myself on the side while everyone else was forming friendships through their insular groups.

My inability to form strong group ties has bothered me for my entire Dartmouth career and probably will for my entire life. I tend to blame all of my failures on this trait.

But as I glanced around the room at the various sub-sections of campus represented

group because I wanted to be in a friend group. But here, I have accepted and embraced the fact that I have always forged ties that are uniquely my own.

At Dartmouth, I drove a van full of DDS employees to a dining hall convention in Springfield, Mass., and got inspired to write a cookbook. At Dartmouth, I go out ever y Friday with a lingering French fr y smell on my clothes from my shift at Murphy’s. At Dartmouth, almost ever y month I become close to a new person that inspires and amazes me.

One of my dad’s all-time favorite shows is “Sex and the City,” and one of the wisest things he (read: Carrie Bradshaw) has ever told me is that out of all the relationships you can have in life, the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. In the midst of worr ying about tr ying to define myself by a larger group, I tried to run away from what makes me, well, me. I forgot about my relationship with myself. College is, in the end, all about doing you. There is no right or wrong way to “do” Dartmouth, but I really think that the key to finding happiness here is to always be doing nothing but that which nourishes your relationship with yourself in the most fulfilling and uncompromising way. And if you can surround yourself with people and activities that fit, as Carrie says, the you that you love, then there’s really nothing more you can ask for from a college experience.

I really think that the key to finding happiness here is to always be doing nothing but that which nourishes your r elationship with yourself in the most fulfilling and uncompromising way. in my friends at my thesis presentation on Tuesday, I was, for the first time, content with my approach to life. I have an amazing set of friends, each of whom plays a unique role in my life. Not all of my friends get along. In fact, some of my closest friends are literally enemies with each other — but that’s okay. Similarly, through my activities, I have paved a path that has never been paved before. That path has been shaped by my own unique needs and interests, and it has taken me all the way until the end of my senior spring to be proud of this.

In high school, I did activities because I thought I should, and I was in a friend

MIRROR //7

ONE LAST PIECE OF ADVICE

FOREVER AN OPTIMIST

Taking Hope From the Good B Y LAUREN VESPOLI

B Y GARDNER DAVIS

I have a confession. I have been writing an advice column with Kate Taylor ’13 ever y Friday since September, and we have made up almost all of the questions. I wanted to call our column “Made up Answers to Made up Questions,” but Kate wasn’t willing to give up hope that people would eventually get the idea and submit questions. They never did.

Whoever you are, James Furnar y ’16, you are literally the only person other than our friends and their mothers who submitted a question, and for that I thank you.

I have a second confession. I have been writing this advice column for eight months — twenty-five 1000-word columns — and have given almost no substantive advice. I would feel worse if I had been answering questions from real people. The one notable exception is the “Grey’s Anatomy” column. I stand by ever ything said there as law. I’ve really just been figuring Dartmouth out as I go along and relying on the advice that Kate gives me ever y Sunday afternoon to get by. I think that I’m like the majority of Dartmouth in that respect. So naturally, after three days of tr ying to distill all my insights into a melodramatic 900word column containing lessons about Dartmouth that would make even ’16s cr y with nostalgia, I admitted defeat and quit. Why rock the boat now?

At some point I realized that Dartmouth is a place filled with pseudoimportance, where a startling amount of people take things too seriously and derive their sense of self-worth largely from things that do not matter at all. I first started to figure this out freshman year when I submitted an article to the Dunyun and either Tom Mandel ’11 or Kathleen Mayer ’11 responded, “Cool it, we’re just tr yna make some dick jokes over here.” After some clarification, I learned that these jokes did not need to be dick-specific, but were symbolic of a less serious look at Dartmouth. Three years of tr ying do just that have allowed me to see all the peculiarities that make Dartmouth such a strange and wonderful place.

Since I spent eight months deferring to Kate on all questions in need of real advice, I will dispense the two pieces of advice I’ve been saving up until now. First, keep in touch with people. I know I said other wise earlier in the year, but sometimes that lunch date or beer at Murphy’s doesn’t need to just be a hypothetical.

Second, barriers don’t keep others out.

They fence you in. Life is messy, that’s how we’re made. So you can waste your

life drawing lines or you can live your life crossing them. Okay, that was a Grey’s Anatomy quote too, I guess I only have one real piece of advice. No apologies.

Instead of making up more advice that I’m not prepared to give, I’ll pass along the best advice I’ve received about Dartmouth. It came about two hours into my freshman fall when I checked my mail for the first time. Amongst the barrage of colorful flyers, I found a small envelope addressed not to me but to my Hinman Box, with no return address. Somewhat perplexed, I opened it and found a letter written in flower y handwriting that read:

Dearest ’13, I hope you’re enjoying my Hinman Box. Congratulations on being accepted to Dartmouth in a year that most ’09s, like me, would not have been so lucky. I just wanted to write and tell you how jealous I am of you. You get to spend the next four years in the most amazing place on earth. I would give almost anything to take your place, but, sadly, I had to move on. Four years may seem like forever to you now, but trust me, it’s not. One day you’ll be sitting in an office far away from Hanover wishing you could go back. So have the time of your life, meet amazing people, do amazing things and fall in love with Dartmouth.

But above all remember that you only have four years, so go for it, do it now and don’t wait.

Love, An ’09 So using someone else’s more than moderately good advice: go for it, do it now and don’t wait. Leave the librar y on a Monday and go to that concert, go to Europe, think about questions that you’ll never answer, make it a seven-game series then go the Orient, take that 10A, do your best Jim Halpert casino night impression outside the Panarchy rave, drop that 10A, be jealous of the classes above you, see how many churros you can fit in a FoCo to-go container, go to the river ever y day over sophomore summer, be jealous of the classes below you, yell at the kid tr ying to leave through the front door of the 1902 Room after 2 a.m. and fall in love with Dartmouth while you’re at it, because we only have four years. Then you can write a letter to your Hinman Box so whoever takes your place will know that it can happen to them too.

For some reason, I distinctly remember my father teaching me the word “optimist” after a family vacation mishap. I was young, it was winter and my parents and I got bumped off of our flight to somewhere warm. There was another flight due to leave the next hour, and I kept repeating how I thought we would get on that one. My dad laughed and told me I was an optimist. I didn’t know what that meant, and he explained that an optimist is someone who expects the best outcome. We ended up spending that night in the airport hotel.

Now, over a decade later, on the cusp of finishing my academic career for the foreseeable future, I still call myself an optimist. If you know me well, you’ll know that I can be pretty sarcastic.

It’s not negative or mean-spirited, but just my sense of humor. However, you might not know that I’m also somewhat paranoid. As a young child, I was so terrified of being struck by lightning that whenever there were thunderstorms, I would take a sleeping bag into a closet or our basement to spend the night somewhere without windows. As recently as two years ago, when someone took a late-night wrong turn into my driveway at home, I stayed awake for two hours afraid that they were burglars about to case the place, and I would have to wake my parents. I then spent a while longer googling crime rates in my town.

But despite my outward sarcasm and occasional inner paranoia, most of the time, it’s pretty sunny inside my head.

Perhaps this is a result of some naivete that comes from being fortunate enough to have a pretty great life. Still, after the bleakness of my humanities-based liberal arts education, I pride myself on still looking for the best.

During these past four years, I’ve read Nietzsche and “Paradise Lost.” I took my senior histor y seminar on the ways Europeans cheated Native Americans out of their land, and have studied the American Civil War, the Holocaust and Joseph Stalin. I’ve received a C+ in Econ 1 and have a W on my transcript from tr ying An Introduction to Neuroscience. And that’s just the academics.

Freshman year, I received rejections from: the Mirror, Ski Patrol, Dimensions, OLE and Trips. At one point during winter term, I cried on the phone to my mom, asking why Dartmouth accepted me if they clearly didn’t want me to do anything else besides go to class and watch Hulu in my room. She told me to keep tr ying. Sophomore fall, I reapplied for the Mirror and was hired.

In the spring, I applied for an internship at the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and am about to finish my second year of work there.

Outside my own little slice of experience, Dartmouth itself has given me many reasons to doubt it. Yet despite the hazing exposes, protests and reactions to them, I still believe that most of us care about each other and are intelligent people who are going to be okay.

Where does the Bucket List play into this journey of optimism? What have I learned about myself throughout this process of writing roughly 15,000 words in a public forum over the course of senior year? Well, looking back at the bucket list I made for myself before the year started, there are a significant number of things I still have not done.

I haven’t gone to the ceramics studio, apple picking or salsa dancing, and I haven’t visited Montreal (senior week, anyone?). Some might view this as a failure: I did not complete ever ything on my list. I, however, see the unexpected experiences that weren’t included on my list: the greenhouse, ice fishing, the meditation garden. I don’t even think this project was really about what I did.

I mean, the Great Vermont Corn Maze was still a highlight of the year (two words: baby goats), but to me the list was more about the exercise of writing through my thoughts and the feedback I received from peers, administrators, my parents, their friends and even you, anonymous online commenter who once wrote, “What is the point of this article.”

I loved hearing when something I wrote resonated with someone. To me, much of writing is putting into words all the subtleties and complexities of felt experiences, so that the people who read them feel a little less alone.

That’s how I felt reading these lines from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay, “The Crack-Up”: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them other wise.”

Sometimes I wonder how one can read the news and still manage to go about her day, or how Stalin could exist on the same earth as baby goats, or how the school where I attend classes and study in the librar y by day can be the same place on Webster Avenue at night. I guess I take my hope from the good things.

8 // MIRROR

PROFILE

NUSHY GOLRIZ // THE DARTMOUTH STAFF

THE MANY REALITIES OF JONATHAN GAULT

FORGETTING WHAT I THOUGHT I WANTED

In “Men in Black 3,” a character named Griffin sees all possible realities simultaneously. Yes, I just referenced “Men in Black 3.” 13S, don’t care.

I believe the way Griffin experiences life is a pretty good way to think about how all of us experience college.

I will graduate in a couple weeks after a wonderful four years in Hanover. I will leave not only with an Ivy League degree but a great group of friends and hundreds of memories, good and bad. Yet I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I chose to go to Columbia, which was a close second to Dartmouth as my top choice. And really, I would have left with the same three things: an Ivy League degree, a great group of friends and hundreds of memories, good and bad.

And sure, there are a lot of things unique to Dartmouth that I would have missed out on, but as a school, we may not be quite as unique as we like to think we are. When I first discovered Late Night Collis, I thought it was the best thing ever. Then I remembered that, on my visit to Columbia, they had a place that offered the exact same laid-back atmosphere and late night dining.

I would have missed out on things like the Homecoming bonfire, running the scenic trails that surround our campus and pong. But there are amazing things in New York City that I missed out on by coming here.

I don’t even have to limit it to Dartmouth and Columbia. I probably could have gone to a hundred different schools and been happy. In all of those realities, I would have had essentially the same things, even if the details of each reality aren’t quite the same. Though never playing pong would have sucked.

But, just as Voldemort made Harry Potter special by choosing to pursue him upon hearing Sybill Trelawney’s prophecy, I made Dartmouth special to me by choosing to matriculate here. Every one of us is united by that one fact: out of everywhere else we could have possibly gone, we all chose, for one reason or another, to come here. That’s pretty cool.

It goes further than that though. Those alternate realities also extend to every choice I made in Hanover since I arrived in September 2009, and to

I’ve always subscribed to the fatalistic idea that I’m not able to shape my future, or even fully control my actions and behaviors. I was born with a set of attributes, and these attributes are shaped by the circumstances I was born into. So I’m basically helpless — we’re all helpless, and we’re careening toward some endgame that we can’t quite predict.

Obviously, this is an oversimplification of reality. I know I’m responsible for myself and accountable for my actions (no need to panic!). However, looking at my four years at Dartmouth, I can’t help but think that I’ve been pushed and pulled by countless forces I haven’t been in control of at all, and this has led me somewhere that I wasn’t exactly expecting. As a freshman, I happened to be placed in the River cluster, where I happened to live down the hall from two people who became my best friends. I happened to make a friend in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra who invited me to her birthday party, where I happened to meet a guy who, in many ways, changed my life, for better and for worse. He convinced me to join this newspaper, and I eventually became an editor. That singular experience has informed my future plans more than any other — I came into Dartmouth thinking I would be a doctor, and now I’m not sure what I’m going to be. The chain of events that brought me here was entirely unexpected and shaped more by luck and chance than by my own agency. My four years in college weren’t what I thought I wanted when I was in high school, but they were better.

I can’t pretend that I deserve anything that I’ve experienced. With the recent cultural upheaval at the College, I’ve become acutely aware of my luck and privilege. I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no universal “Dartmouth experience,” and despite all the mythology, this school alone is not capable of generating happiness. I

BY JONATHAN GAULT

some things that I had no control over whatsoever.

I could have been born in 1990, instead of 1991.

But I wasn’t, and for that reason, the ’13s will always be closer to me than any other class.

I could have chosen not to run cross country here. But I did, and that’s why my closest friends are all runners, not members of some other campus organization.

I could have chosen to rush a fraternity. But I didn’t, and that’s why my pong game is mediocre at best.

Every other Dartmouth student faces choices like these, and how we respond has a massive impact on our lives. It’s akin to reading a book versus hearing a one-sentence summary. The quick and dirty version of my college experience, the stuff relegated to a book’s dust jacket, was probably going to be the same no matter where I went for school: make friends, try to become a sports writer.

But the everyday choices I made here determined the details of that book: the major characters, the recurring themes, the conflicts and resolutions.

I knew the ending before coming to Dartmouth.

Now that I’ve read the pages, that book means a lot more.

So when I walk across the stage to receive my diploma next month, I’ll spend a moment thinking about everything that could have been. But I’ll spend a lot longer thinking about what actually was: multiple treks to LNC every week, countless workouts on the golf course, Leverone and Memorial Field and long nights at The Dartmouth waiting for final edits on stories.

I’m guessing that, within these pages, my fellow seniors will spend many words on what Dartmouth meant to them, what they loved, what they hated, what they learned. And over the next month, a whole lot more people — other seniors, professors, alums — are going to be talking about what makes this place so special and great.

Just remember that this is but one reality among many. Most of us would probably have had a great time no matter where we went to college. Dartmouth is awesome because we chose to make it so.

Hold on, I just realized that there exists a reality where I go to Brown and end up marrying Emma Watson. Can I get a do over?

BY JAY WEBSTER

just got lucky. Frankly, I wouldn’t even be here if I didn’t have a father who was an alumnus. I wouldn’t have gotten in, and I was intimidated by this school’s conservative reputation. As an awkward gay high school student who felt pretty out of place, nothing about going to Dartmouth made sense in 2009.

But that was four years ago, and fortunately my time here has since been validated. The random series of events that has led me to this stage in my life has been just that: random. No matter what year you are, think back on your own experiences at Dartmouth. Think about the coincidences, the misfortunes, the chance encounters, the accidents, everything that led to where you are today. Even if your time at Dartmouth didn’t live up to your expectations, you are undoubtedly not where you thought you would be. Your life has been molded by the arbitrary crosssection of people you were exposed to and the myriad experiences that you couldn’t necessarily predict.

I definitely wouldn’t say that my coming here and my experiences at Dartmouth could be attributed to fate or destiny. Fate is a silly idea, and I don’t believe that there is any larger plan. If there is, I definitely don’t think I fit into it. My life at Dartmouth has been four swirling years of entropy, but it would be inaccurate to say that I have had no constants. I want to end by thanking the two people that have shaped my time here the most, and I can’t believe it’s been nearly four years since we met in the basement of French. Caroline and Reese, you have been there for me since the beginning, and I love you both. You two have been there by my side amidst all the chaos and change — from Hanover to Europe to New York, beyond pledging and choosing majors and relationships and coming out.

For the rest of you soon-to-be graduates, I only hope you’ve been as lucky as me. I’ll see you on the other side.