Stuff Dartmouth Kids Like: The Bucket List
So basically everyone who will ever be a member of the Class of 2018 was admitted this week. Besides the fact that this makes me feel more ancient and irrelevant than I already do, it also means that in September, Orientation Team will be handing out their newest version of “101 Things to Do Before You Graduate.” I remember getting one of these sheets and promptly losing it, though a ton of my friends still have the versions their UGAs gave them posted on their wall, check-marked and all.
We talk a lot about the “Dartmouth experience” – yours, mine, ours. The term gets bandied around so much it might as well be in our Dartmouth lexicon, though unlike all the other lingo, there’s no set definition. Everyone knows what facetime is and a blitz is a blitz, but the “Dartmouth experience” is something far more nebulous. Does doing all 101 things make you the Quintessential Dartmouth Student?
I wanted to make a bucket list for my senior spring because I didn’t want to graduate feeling like I hadn’t done Dartmouth right, that there was somehow a piece or two missing. I couldn’t even think of things to put on it, because I am a creature of habit and pretty much everything I do now is just how I’m going to do things until June 8. Hang out at frats besides basically the only two I’ve stepped foot in since 12X? Who needs new friends? Start getting Collis breakfast in the mornings? Any day I have time to shower before class is a major victory.
In any case, I sat down to write the “Senior Spring Bucket List AHHH.docx” and put exactly two things on it – hike the Gile fire tower and have a cabin weekend – before I started crying and decided that I was over it. (Yep, that’s right – the senior spring beer tears have started. Exactly none of my friends are excited about it.) The whole thing just seemed so final, like with every word I wrote I was plodding ever closer to the Day-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Then I watched some Keeping Up With the Kardashians with my friend and felt much better.
We like lists because they make it easier for us to feel accomplished. We are all Type A neurotic perfectionists and having lists – to-do-this-weekend lists, to-do-before-I-graduate lists – and being able to check things off makes us feel safe, like if we just go through the motions and do everything we’re “supposed” to do, everything will be okay.
But it’s different this time. At literally every point in our lives before this one, we have been heading toward something concrete. We finished elementary school and went to middle school. We finished that and became high schoolers. We took the SATs and joined extracurriculars, had our teachers write us recommendations and applied to college. We graduated from high school and freaked out but we knew we would all be back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, summer vacation. We got here and we took classes, studied abroad, found internships for our off terms. Which colleges and which internships mattered, but it was comforting to know that we would be going to a college, that we would be doing an internship. Now what?
Now, the choices are limitless. We get to go out into the world and for the first time, make it our own. Gone are the preestablished communities. Gone are the same people we’ve lived with for the last four years. Gone is the certainty that our high school friends will be back in the old neighborhood after the school year is over, and gone is the possibility that even if you fight with him or break up with her, you will see them after winterim or the next time your D-Plans match up and you will have a chance to make it right.
That’s why we make bucket lists. We cross our T’s and dot our I’s in the hope that when our lives are unstructured for the first time since we were babies and the rhythm of our days was determined by nothing but hunger and our energy levels, we will be able to look back and think that at least we did it right. We had the Dartmouth experience.
But I say screw the bucket list. You can do the Ledyard Challenge and play pong and order EBA’s, but none of that is what’s important. None of that compares to the quiet contentment of sitting in silence with your best friends on a porch, watching the world go by. The satisfaction of stapling your final seminar paper and feeling its weight in your hands, the weight of weeks of no sleep and research and typing and deleting and retyping. The thrill of seeing your name in print for the first time, and every time after that. The ordinary comfort of walking into a place you know every inch of and seeing nothing but familiar faces.
If you want to do the Ledyard Challenge and play pong and order EBA’s because that’s what makes you happy, do it. But don’t sit around making lists of things you think you’re supposed to do. We’re almost out of time to do the things that will make us remember college fondly, that will make us excited to come back and see the bonfire next year or go to a Dartmouth Club meeting in whatever city we end up in. We’re almost out of time, so go out and do what makes you happy. Life is too short for bucket lists.