The way I see it, most of us sort of knew what we were getting ourselves into when we applied to Dartmouth work, and lots of it. Once you manage to pull yourself out of the basements, there's not much else to do on less than a half of a square mile campus in the middle of nowhere, especially once you add in our nine giant libraries.
But we all came from some pretty vastly different versions of "work." I, for one, came from a school where, once you take out all the time spent on stumble upon or Facebook, I did maybe two hours total of homework a day. Studying for my tests meant a night of cramming made possible by as many Red Bulls as I could get my hands on. I think I maybe wrote one 10-page paper in my four years of high school and I'm pretty sure I slept through the entirety of my second semester of senior year. To be fair, I cared about my classes. I just wasn't about to spend all my waking hours reading a textbook seemingly designed to put me to sleep.
And while many students shared my experience, there were kids who didn't.
"It was hard," Olivia Evans '14 said of her high school experience. "On a scale from one to 10, I'd give it about a 9."
Brandon Debot '14 said his high school, like mine, was slightly more relaxed.
"As long as I did the work and put in some effort, I did pretty well," he said.
But our glory days of high school are gone. The general consensus amongst '14s is summed up perfectly by Mackenzie Bronson '14: Dartmouth is "a lot harder" than high school ever was.
Why? First off, we can't put stuff off until the last minute anymore.
"Procrastination in the sense of I'm going to start studying at 11:00 the night before a test' doesn't exist anymore," Evans said. "Procrastination is studying the general day before a test."
On top of that, life moves faster here. Most of us went to high schools with semesters, not quarters. I had eight or nine weeks before I even had to think about midterms, while here it feels like your mind goes from the hazy, outdoorsy, slightly-awkward-but-still-happily-bonding feeling of Trips straight to holy-crap-I-have-a-giant-two-hour-test-on-that-stuff-I-don't-know-today-and-I-may-or-may-not-still-be-drunk-from-the-Wednesday-night at 8 a.m. on Thursday morning three weeks later.
We're simply not babied anymore.
"You spend a very short amount of time on something in class and then you just move on," Bronson said. "You're supposed to just figure it out on your own outside of class."
Not only that, but it's on us to reach out for help.
"I haven't talked to my math professor yet," Evans said. "And that's entirely based on my own actions. In high school, I would know my math teacher it was a given."
The professors here are a step up from the teachers we had in high school, and once we reach out to get help, they truly are willing to give us individual attention.
"They really are here to work with us," Debot said, citing his profs as his favorite academic aspect of Dartmouth.
Advice for those 14s who still feel left behind? Keep trying.
"It can go either way. I've seen kids come from really negative schools, that entered and we were worried about them and I've seen them blossom.," English professor Lynda Boose, said. "I've also seen the kids that came in as promising writers and never really progress past that point. It's the amount of caring you put into it."
