The Masthead

Editor-in-Chief: James Wang
Publisher: Amanda McNally
Managing Editor: Robert C. Meyers

Read this issue’s articles!

Smiles and Empathy

Sitting on my roof looking down Maple Street, I begin to think about my fellow ’09s quickly approaching graduation, our future, and how I can’t imagine leaving my home here at 9 Prospect Street. A breeze picks up, sending the sunlit leaves of the maple tree that just reaches out onto the roof into a glittery dance and I look over to my friend who is thumbing through the pages of The Atlantic. She is wearing crimson red shorts after our getaway stroll up Balch Hill; my mind wanders to an article in that issue called “What Makes Us Happy.” A curious question. The article covers, for the first time, a 70-year longitudinal study performed at Harvard examining what leads to happiness. As the wind drifts, I start to think about the key to happiness here at Dartmouth.

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A Love/Hate Relationship

My freshman year, a friend told me that one of his goals at Dartmouth was to explore as many cultural spaces as possible. While that sounds like a pretty clichèd endeavor, it’s still something many of us fail to do—getting out of our comfort zones and choosing to deal with people who aren’t like us, ones who challenge our views, expand our horizons, or just plain get on our damn nerves with their inanity. The following are two experiences that have shaped my time at Dartmouth: one gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, and the other involves a love/hate relationship that gives me fuzzy feelings, too, but also makes me want to stab myself in the eye.

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When I started running the Tucker Foundation’s Prison Project at the beginning of my sophomore year, I was going to the women’s prison in Windsor, VT alone. By the end of that fall, I had successfully recruited one freshman to join me on my weekly visits. We started to get to know the women, discovering their intense love for their children and families, and hearing stories of their drug addictions, and the sexual and physical abuse many of them endured as children or young adults. We also discovered their passion for laughter, writing poetry, crocheting, and supporting one another.

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Sharing Stories

June 14th will be an interesting day. After two months of hanging out on the Green, appreciating life, and sleeping on porches, we ’09s will receive a valuable piece of paper and then be replaced by a (wonderful) new class. Though I haven’t experienced it yet, I imagine the transition will be a rather sudden, dramatic affair, over before most people will realize it has started.

And then we’re gone, off to do a great many different things. At that point, we’ll all probably have a romanticized memory of this spring, coupled with the idea that the end came too quickly. I’m guessing that we’ll all feel a kind of regret that we couldn’t extend our last term indefinitely. In any event, hopefully this summer there’ll be better things to do than sitting around thinking about Dartmouth. (It’ll just feel like an off-term anyways.)

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Experiences on the Crew Team

There are 38,000 undergraduate students at Penn State. The school fields 27 varsity teams. (I choose Penn State as the example only because I am from Pittsburgh and most of my high school friends are Nittany Lions.) Dartmouth, by contrast, has a student body of roughly 4,000, and supports 31 varsity teams. In 2007, Penn State set a record by selling out the entire student section of the football stadium (22,000 tickets) within 59 minutes of tickets becoming available. The Nittany Lions average over 100,000 fans per home game. I don’t have statistics on Dartmouth football attendance, but I am fairly certain student tickets are free and that there are more people on Collis porch than at Memorial Stadium on any given Saturday. My point is not to argue that Dartmouth students are awful fans or to complain about the football team. Rather, I think this illustrates that the purpose of athletics at Dartmouth, and in the Ivy League in general, is drastically different than that of other Division I schools across the nation.

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“So we went to school to copy, to imitate; not to exchange language and ideas, and not to develop the best traits that had come out of uncountable experiences of hundreds and thousands of years living upon this continent. Our annals, all happenings of human import, were stored in our song and dance rituals, our history differing in that it was not stored in books, but in the living memory. So, while the white people had much to teach us, we had much to teach them, and what a school could have been established upon that idea!” -Luther Standing Bear, What a School Could Have Been Established (1933)

I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about what would be the best way to open a piece such as this, and the only truly acceptable way to do so would be to share that Dartmouth has taught me to approach writing with caution. The process itself is the purest expression, an epitome if you will, of the Western concept of “legitimate” thinking. That is, written materials are granted an importance that is not extended to the spoken word. In our day and age, everything must be written down to be remembered. But the emphasis on the printed word abstracts the spoken relationship that exists between people.

With that in mind, I have only a short reflection of my time at Dartmouth. Read the full story

Of Music and Milkshakes

So what if your pun-intentional specially flavored milkshake arrives 30 minutes after you order it? At least it’s still as rich as ever, thanks to the ice cream’s New English provenance—specifically, to the Jersey cows from Vermont whose resemblance to big buttery scoops of caramel-flavored ice cream helps produce the best artery-clogging shakes on either side of the river. Location: one Lone Pine Tavern but two straws.

Actually, it’s hard to focus on the person sitting across from you, sharing your oh-so-delicious milkshake, because you can’t decide whether you have a bigger crush on Ryan Dieringer or Tica Douglas. Together, they form the campus band The Making of San Bernadino. Though I’ve witnessed Kevin Barnes of Of Montreal professing love and proposing marriage in a wedding dress on stage, for me, Lone Pine will always be for Platonic lovers.

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Final Frustrations and Thank Yous

On the top of a hill, behind the white buildings and Green that define Dartmouth so well, are an old tree stump and a statue of Robert Frost. Dartmouth students know the tradition and meaning of these relics well. These days, we take pictures in front of them as part of scavenger hunts and sorority pledge missions. Robert Frost, whose statue I’ve spent time studying by on sunny afternoons, once famously wrote that “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” Ok, but Led Zeppelin also famously sang, “Yes there are two paths you can go by / But in the long run / There’s still time to change the road you’re on.” Forgive me Mr. Frost, but Led Zeppelin has provided me with the mantra these days that I repeat frequently when gazing into the unknown and the terrifying future.

I lived the words of Led Zeppelin three years ago when I transferred to Dartmouth. I made my decision in the middle of the summer of 2006 after touring Baker Tower and seeing mountains roll on forever —it felt like home. These days, I think transferring was both the dumbest and the smartest thing I have ever done. I missed out on freshman year here, and because of that, I was not on campus-wide e-mail lists, I never got an academic advisor, and I didn’t learn what an NRO was until after it would have been helpful. I feel that another year here would have given me time to actually effect change on campus. I also know that if I hadn’t transferred, I would have missed out on an experience that challenged me in ways I did not think were possible. I would not have met the people I now call my best friends. I would not have found out how exhilarating it was to run 109 laps around a bonfire.

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Dartmouth’s Most Important Lessons

Today, I handed in my thesis—a monstrous, blood-sucking 150-page short story collection that consumed my life for five months—and now, in the wee hours of the morning after a margarita and a beer, I’m sitting down to write 1,500 words about my “Dartmouth experience.”

For some reason, my thesis seems like nothing compared to this. I pretty much made everything up in my thesis. Something tells me I can’t do that here.

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