A couple friends and I led a fake tour over Dimensions, and it was one of the most rewarding things I've done in a long time. We saw 30 '15s hanging out on the Green with no apparent agenda, so we approached them. "You guys here for the 3:20 tour?"
It was fake because we're not actually tour guides, not because we lied to them. OK, maybe we lied about a couple things. The library wasn't built in 1843, and the numbers listed on the front of the building are actually the date that it was built, not its address. Oh well.
The '15s are the future of Dartmouth, but they're not Dartmouth yet. They're so eager to learn, and so hopeless in their attempts. They're in the exact same place that I am.
High School Seniors : Dartmouth Students :: Dartmouth Seniors : Adults
Read: We're as clueless and shy and nervous as they are, just fast-forwarded four years.
We took them through the library, pointing out all of the people on First Floor Berry and telling the tour group that these people weren't actually working. They were nerds, yes, but workers, no. We told them that as you climb the stairs, the amount of facetime goes down but the studiousness goes up. They laughed nervously. Soon enough, they'll be telling these jokes like they've known them forever.
We took them to the Novack blitz terminals and told them all about flitzing. The concept of flitzing was as foreign to them as traditional dates are to us. Bars? Dinners? Theater tickets? Jeez. At what point do we no longer send a morning-after blitz?
We walked down frat row. There were guys hanging out on the porch of one of the frats, heckling the tour group. We pointed to the hecklers and said they were "drunkards and on pot." Might be true, but doesn't matter. They threw a whippit at us. The '15s tittered nervously at our jokes. I'm really unsure how many of them they understood. They did ask us about both the Dartmouth Seven and the Dartmouth X, however. So they were probably pretty savvy.
The last leg of the tour brought us to Fahey-McLane and Russell Sage. We pointed to the dorms on either side of us.
"These are freshman dorms," we said. "Many virginities are lost here."
Many fewer are probably lost in the post-graduation world. But you never know.
I wonder what it would be like if the real world had a Dimensions weekend for college seniors. We could go down to New York or Boston in the fall when we're going through corporate recruiting. Stay at some i-banker's apartment and go on tours for the whole day. Jeez, I wish I could see what kind of Dimensions show Morgan Stanley puts on. They probably get really decked out in flair and tell you how excited they are to have you, and how Morgan Stanley people have more fun than Goldman people.
Maybe somebody in the real world can take us on a fake tour. I can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL is that some of the prospies on that tour are definitely going to come to Dartmouth. I hope I run into one of them when they're seniors here.
