Between “midterm” papers that, for some reason, fall closer to the end of the term than the middle, and the general burnout-induced slump that plagues campus, week eight historically possesses an unforgiving character. There are occasions when we hit the lottery and have perfectly linear schedules in which our assignments and exams space themselves out, but more likely than not, it’s the opposite.
I wrote down a list of all the things that annoy me about this part of the term and cringed at my entitled whininess. I tried again, and realized that you obviously cannot make your complaints about your Ivy League education sound down to earth, no matter how hard one may try. But the only point of sketching them out in the first place was to say that times of frustration are fleeting if you will them to be. When I’m awake in the early hours of the morning, sitting at my desk and regretfully writing a paper that should have been finished a day or two ago, I am reminded by my warm cup of earl grey tea and the curation of miscellaneous instrumental music that plays in my old wired headphones that no, it is not all bad all the time.
The ability to be grateful, I think, is the one thing I could not have survived college without. As seniors, it’s easy to be ungrateful, to preemptively throw in our worn-out towels, to forgo readings even if we enjoy the subject, to blow off friends we haven’t seen in a while. Ironically, a lot of the time, we’re so masochistically fixated on the events that will be our “lasts” that we’re too distracted to realize all we have to look forward to.
Did I describe my final course election as “daunting” and “existential?” Has this editor’s note, my last one as Mirror editor, preoccupied a non-insignificant portion of my thoughts for the last few weeks? Yes and yes, but I find that thinking about all of the “firsts” you’ve had at Dartmouth helps conceptualize the potential of all that’s left. My first time out of the country, the first flitz I received, my first all-nighter, my first time going backcountry skiing, writing my first article for the newspaper, my first job interview and my first of many nights spent editing on the second floor of Robinson Hall — all forever bound to my experience here. This term alone, I’ve experienced some unusual ones — like catching my first fish while ice fishing at Post Pond, getting my car stuck in a snowbank for the first time and making my first map for my geography class — none of which I would have anticipated.
Though I’ve realized throughout the years that I will never get everything I wanted out of Dartmouth, I know I will never get anything else out of it if I stop trying. As winter approaches its end, I look forward to 10 weeks of spring that will be marked by the hopeful “firsts” despite the many “lasts.”
This week in Mirror, we shift our focus outside of Hanover. One writer investigates the history of Lewiston, Vt., a lost town across the Connecticut River, while another talks to students about their must-dos and recommendations when visiting Montreal for a north-of-the-border edition of Weekenders. Finally, we hear about the experiences of international students whose home countries are affected by conflict and how they’ve learned to navigate intense change and uncertainty while at Dartmouth.
