Truth: Dartmouth students really do care about their GPAs. Secretly. But we do care.
Considering that roughly 90 percent of incoming students at Dartmouth graduated in the top 10 percent of their class, it should come as no surprise that we care about academics. Yet, as an incoming freshman I remember thinking how refreshing it was that SAT and ACT scores were taboo. Nobody seemed outwardly competitive or obnoxiously obsessive about his or her grades. Granted, this notion of a lack of academic competitiveness might have stemmed from the fact that Pre-O and Orientation combined lasted nearly two whole weeks, and that at one point I began to seriously doubt if I was ever actually going to take classes. But for most of freshman year I was under the impression that people didn't really put that much effort into academics. You did what you had to do to get by. And in your spare time you went out.
Looking back, I now realize how utterly foolish that notion was. Don't kid yourself, kids. Dartmouth students take academics seriously. We just don't want you to think we do. It's all part of the "work hard, play hard" mantra we supposedly live by. You know how it goes. It's a weird badge of courage we all perversely aspire to earn: "I can black out on a consistent basis and maintain a 3.9. I may even be Valedictorian? So tell me, am I a hard guyz?"
It may have taken me four years to say this with confidence, but no. You're not hard. You're just living in denial. Furthermore, you're probably going to require a liver transplant at some point in the not so distant future.
There seems to be some kind of obsession at this school with being "extreme" when it comes to academics. Constantly living on the edge and pushing ourselves to do more and more. Blacking out on Wednesdays, only to attend drill early on Thursday morning. Pulling three all-nighters back to back until raccoon eyes take over our face and our extremities twitch from all the caffeine we've consumed.
And you know, I understand doing it once or twice. It makes for a good story about our wild, crazy college days when we did stupid things and there weren't any serious repercussions to haunt us after the fact. But why we continually subject ourselves to the conditions described above is beyond me. I just don't get it.
Most of us came here to learn, so why do we spend so much time acting like we don't care? I don't actually buy it people care, they're just too afraid to show it, lest they be considered a nerd (which is ironic, considering 9/10 of us were nerds in high school).
Some of my favorite moments with people have been when they open up about what it is they care about. Whether it's about a paper they worked really hard on, a presentation they've been prepping for or just a really fascinating reading that caught their attention, I love hearing them get really jazzed about it and wanting to share that with me. People should do this more often, instead of glorifying the fact that they can't remember what they did the night before.
Call me old. Call me lame. (I'm both, trust me.) But tell me what you're interested in sometime. I'll listen.
