"Study Hard! Play Hard!"
Is this a valid guideline to live a meaningful and enjoyable college life at Dartmouth? Many students at Dartmouth tend to follow it. We want it all: straight A's, a killer body, involvement in campus activities, and yeah, we want to party. Yet, with the fast moving D-plan, we know that accomplishing all this can be both difficult and stressful.
Perfectionism reflects the desire for flawlessness. Those who take it to the extreme are people who want to be perfect in all aspects of their lives. Perfectionism tends to run in families and probably has a genetic component. Parents who practice an authoritarian style combined with conditional love may contribute to perfectionism in their children as well.
Sierra E. Steele '10 said that her parents influenced her perfectionist tendencies.
"I grew up in the atmosphere that demanded straight A's," she said. "If my parents had not been so demanding, I know that I would not have cared so much."
This desire to achieve can range from small pressures we use to motivate ourselves on a daily basis to the more quirky things like being a huge neat freak. Taken to the extreme, striving for existence in the realm of the perfect can lead to more serious consequences such as depression, disordered eating patterns and drug use, whether to reach those goals or just to cope with the stress.
So, the ultimate question is: why are we constantly trying to be perfect if perfectionism itself stresses us out and ultimately can destroy our entire college life?
Perfection: friend or foe?
It is that very same double-sided perfectionist demon that got us to Dartmouth -- one of the most selective colleges in the world. Most people are smart and know how to manage their time; most of us were once in leadership positions, tried to do something significant to impress colleges, played sports and took as many AP and IB exams as possible. Some of us even started building our rsums in high school with summer internships or programs abroad.
Admission into the top colleges became the end game, something that we were told would ensure our future happiness. Following the advice of school guidance counselors, college admissions consultants and parents, we worked relentlessly to amass all the right academic and extracurricular credentials. We all came to Dartmouth as the newest freshman class of academic superstars, prize-winning scientists, professional-caliber musicians, athletes and leaders. Each class is greeted as the most competitive, the highest scoring, the most diverse -- the best.
Yet now that we are here, realizing that all-encompassing goal of an Ivy League education, we are forced to ask ourselves, what's next?
We are no longer in high school being told what our focus should be. We seek something new and want to try out different things. Although there will always be those who continue along the narrow but rewarding path of all academics, all the time, many Dartmouth students want to experience something new -- from skiing to drinking themselves into oblivion, from dancing to getting a B for the first time.
Even after just one term at Dartmouth, I realize such relaxation from high school pressures and fun challenges are only a small sliver of what it means to be fulfilled and successful here. Since I live in East Wheelock, it is possible that I have met some "extremely" career-oriented people, but honestly some are really insane, even in a positive way. Many freshmen have planned out their entire D-plans, down to specific courses. Some are even planning what future internships they should get, attending all the job recruiting information sessions and even running businesses of their own.
In some ways, college life is not much different from that of high school. I still need to be involved in activities to fill the empty space in my rsum, to find good internships, to take care of the GPA, to watch out for the "freshmen 15" and to build good relationships with professors. The dilemma is that now I, along with everybody else, have more opportunities, more people to meet and fewer regulations.
Professor John Pfister, a senior lecturer in psychological and brain sciences and an assistant dean of the College, explained that the type of student drawn to the College contributes to the overall culture of perfectionism.
"Our students are top-flight students with a passion for learning and doing well," he said. "Back home they excelled in doing better than many of their peers in the classroom. But now we place them in a situation where everyone is like that, and they still want to go one step beyond their peers. However, since their peers are so accelerated, it is just that much more difficult to do. The only goal, then, is to be perfect."
Many Dartmouth students are dominated by various kinds of perfectionism, the most obvious of which is academic: grades, papers, midterms and finals!
In ten short weeks, Dartmouth students have to learn and grasp knowledge at an incredible rate. In order to survive the rigors of each term, some students even become addicted to "study aids" like Red Bull, caffeine. Even various "study drugs" like Adderall, perscribed for Attention Deficit Disorder, are abused to pound out a 20-page paper in one night in the 1902 room.
Besides the academic perfectionism, there is also another lurking beast -- the consuming desire to be involved and well-rounded to the extreme. At Dartmouth, we don't just want the grades, we want to ski, hike, be on the ultimate Frisbee team and volunteer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. This feeling that we need to be involved in everything, be everywhere at once and fill a resume with great personal achievements can come to dominate all aspects of the Dartmouth life.
The yearning for physical perfection and athletic grace is apparent as well. Many female students are scared of gaining weight. It is abundantly clear that Dartmouth does not have many overweight students, and this constant stress leads some girls to have eating disorders and an obsession with exercise. Guys aren't immune, either; the pressure is equally strong for them to look "ripped," which requires hours and hours at the gym. There are people who come to the gym all the time, even more than once a day, striving not just for health but for the perfect body.
Nationally, colleges are feeling the need to be hypercompetitive also. They are worried about the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and about sending their students on to top graduate schools and promising jobs. In The New York Times, Steven E. Hyman, the provost at Harvard and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, recently said, ''By the time we get these young people, what they bring with them are often very high levels of perfectionism and a kind of fear that blocks the joyful intellectual exploration that college ought to be about."
What Can We Do?
A good night's rest is often one of the first casualties in the Dartmouth student's quest to do it all.
"There is a mystique of the 'late-night' at Dartmouth," said Pfister. "Many students get mislead into thinking that they need to [pull all-nighters] to get ahead, but this is far, far from the truth."
Other health precautions and even common sense habits can follow. In order to shield us from the potential harmful effects of such perfectionism, Dartmouth regularly blankets the campus with bulletin board postings and pamphlets, which bring awareness to issues such as stress, sleep disorders, extreme anxiety and altered mood states. Though the "Stall Street Journal," one such publication from Health Services, has a laughable name, the issues it raises and the advice it gives are quite serious.
Dartmouth also has several programs to more actively inform the students about health-related issues and to promote a healthy community. Health Services runs Peer Education Action Corps, a program for about 30 students who attend two hour-long sessions, twice a week, about general health issues at Dartmouth. Its emphases are on how much it is important getting enough sleep and eating well; for more severe health-related topics, there are more specialized student organizations, in addition to professional help.
One such program is Eating Disorders Peer Advisors (EDPA), an integral component of Dartmouth's on-campus peer outreach. Two terms a year, 25 students participate in a ten-week training covering such varied topics as the physical and psychological impacts, and the roles media and socialization play regarding eating disorders. With such training, EDPAs are then available to talk to concerned students or their friends -- whoever contacts them -- and offer advice and resources.
Anna Meyerrose, a staff counselor at Counseling and Human Development (CHD), said that there are no general methods of curing perfectionism. She noted that it is not a clinical illness, but rather a symptom for anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other mental illnesses. She recommends that students who suffer from the more extreme and harmful manifestations of perfectionism come to Dick's House and talk to the counselors in order to cope with the issues behind this over-arching need for control and success.
Carl Thum, the director at Academic Skills Center, suggests that Dartmouth students to do three things. First, the students should think about what they want and set up appropriate goals. Second, they should reflect on these goals and prioritize them. And most importantly, students should manage their time well, which does not necessarily mean somehow cramming in four classes, band rehearsal, a club sport, a job and then going out three nights a week.
Fortunately, Dartmouth students are known as relatively happy compared to other college students. The Princeton Review consistently ranks Dartmouth among the top schools in terms of student life. We start our freshmen year with trips through the Dartmouth Outing Club, and many of us enjoy skiing, camping, hiking and so many other activities -- all of which can be great for our mental as well as physical health, in moderation.
As long as we are able to balance our perfectionism with reality, and modify it with a dose of healthy relaxation, our overacheiving and our compulsive quirks can remain source of pride and amusement, not a huge problem.
The clincher about Dartmouth is that some students who seem to be perfectionists and overwhelmingly future-oriented actually enjoy what they do.
So maybe it is possible that a certain degree of perfectionism will lead us to achieve a successful college life, and even happiness.
Let me conclude with the case of Jack Liu '11. Liu, who runs his own web design company, noted that the hard work pays off.
"Frankly, running a business is fun," Liu said. "It gives me a break from school work. I learn many things that I don't learn in class. Of course, you need to find the right balance."
Balance. Maybe that's the key after all. Balancing the occasional ice cream with some leafy greens, a few all-nighters with some indulgent naps and the rigors of an Ivy League education with some old fashioned "Animal House" fun.
