“I think you’ve come a long way,” a friend I’ve known since freshman fall said to me the other day. We had been talking about exploring identity at Dartmouth, and I smiled at those words. For the most part, they rang true.
On the most basic level, I needed to travel quite a distance even to get to Dartmouth. I am a woman of South Asian or Indian origin and a Dutch citizen (which means I’m from the Netherlands, just to clear up the confusion), and I grew up mostly in Singapore, where I graduated from United World College, an international high school.
When it comes to identity exploration, my ethnic and national identities alone are complex, and that does not even take into consideration gender, class or sexuality. Despite these complexities, I actually thought I had a pretty good hold on the definition of identity on a small-scale, individual level before coming to Dartmouth.
Even though I went to an international school and spent my time surrounded by people with a variety of cultural identities, I often seemed to miss the bigger picture. I lived in a bubble where all of my friends had complicated ethnic and national backgrounds like mine, and we understood each other’s diverse identities without much question. Yet I also lived an extremely heteronormative, upper-middle-class life. I had pretty much zero understanding of what it meant to be a woman. I have recollections of feeling extra gratified when I beat a boy in a PE swim race, but that was about it.
This lack of a deeper understanding stemmed from many of my personal privileges, including the opportunity to apply to colleges in both the U.K. and the U.S. For me, coming to the U.S. was not the obvious next step. Instead, it was a choice, a proverbial fork in the road and another reason why I think I’ve come a long way.
When I find myself reconsidering this choice, I look at my high school friends, who currently find themselves at universities in the U.K. and Australia, where they pursue vocational or linear undergraduate degrees in medicine, law and business. Even those who study more typical “liberal arts” subjects like history or economics do not have much room to explore or maneuver their way through an academic sea that has no pre-ordained direction.
Their academic pursuits had a definite goal from the very beginning — they chose their field of study when they wrote their applications. The universities they chose release them with a degree in hand that prepares them, linearly, for certain professions. This form of education funnels and focuses their academic interests in a defined direction.
The room for personal and extracurricular development within this educational style is extremely limited. My sister, who studies in London, frequently complains about her lack of opportunities, even though she actively attempts to stay engaged. She has no Office of Plurality and Leadership, very few club sports, no outing club and no Intergroup Dialogue. I doubt she even knows whom to approach for advice on academics, college life or future plans.
My Dartmouth career, on the other hand, has allowed me to expand outward in various directions. During my time here, I fell in love with anthropology (despite its troubled history) and what it has to say about people, their interactions and society as a whole. At the College, I have been able to pursue my interests in science and health care, which would have been difficult if I had chosen to study English and history in the U.K. I also developed my interests in social science research, when eventually led me to write a thesis about race and gender at Dartmouth. I was exposed to intellectual thought on social justice and identity, and have been involved in these both inside and outside of the classroom.
Most importantly, I was allowed and encouraged to consider my own identities — not just the places that I am from and my nationality, but what it means to live in a racialized and gendered world. I had never seriously or critically considered where being South Asian placed me prior to Dartmouth. Moreover, I had never used the term “South Asian” or “brown” before coming to Dartmouth because they were not “part of the lingo” where I was from. Throughout high school, I often felt that I had to compensate for my “brown-ness,” but I had never broached the subject with others. I distinctly remember going to a Woman of Color Collective meeting my sophomore year and experiencing some sort of epiphanic euphoria. Finally, I realized it was not just in my head — other women of color felt this pressure and dissonance too. What’s more, they showed resistance.
At Dartmouth, I started learning a language that was new to the tongue but very old to the experience: micro-aggressions, racism, institutionalized, interpersonal and internalized. I saw my world with new eyes. In learning this language, I experienced another revelation — I was good enough. For a long time, I compared myself to my mostly white high school friends and never felt good enough in my own skin. It sounds awful, and it was, and I am glad I had the opportunity to finally understand and confront that at Dartmouth.
In my time here, I have been able to reflect on my relative wealth, my sexuality and my (mostly) able body. I have found amazing mentors who helped me grapple with these complexities, among other things. I wholeheartedly believe I would not have experienced the same “coming of age” at a university across the pond.
Please note that my intent is not to romanticize Dartmouth. I hope by now that we all know that there are problems at this school that everyone should be tackling. I have definitely faced many challenges at Dartmouth, and they are not ones that I would wish upon anyone.
My identity exploration did not occur out of context, and this context has included the judgmental eyes of the Greek system, systemic and pervasive racism, sexism and almost every other “ism” that there is. Indeed, these “isms” extend beyond Dartmouth’s bounds, but that does not mean we should not address and confront them here at the College.
I believe the challenges Dartmouth has presented me with have made me a much stronger person, and I am thankful for this strength.
I also do not wish to romanticize Dartmouth financially — however linear the tertiary education is in the U.K., education fees are considerably lower. I come from a position of privilege in saying that I believe Dartmouth has been worth the investment.
Four months from graduation, I now have at least an inkling of who I am, and I do not think I personally would have come this far anywhere else.
