The Right Kind of Change

By Emily Esfahani-Smith | Monday, September 22, 2008

When I was a freshman, I was caught up playing the catch-up game. Many of my upperclassmen peers—at places like The Dartmouth Review—were not only older than me, but were smarter, better read and more informed than me. They could hold their alcohol, while discussing the intricacies of the College’s alumni governance controversies. They could play pong on a Thursday night and test like champs the next Friday morning. In the meantime, my freshmen friends and I struggled to hold down half a can of Keystone Light. We just couldn’t keep up.

But there were the freshmen who tried to keep up. Some did. Some drank four nights a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays), played the social butterfly, or just played “social,” hooked up with the older boys (if you were a freshman girl)—or alternately, played video games, if you were a freshman boy—and were above all happy, while managing to coast through classes shooting in the 3.0s, as far as grades go. But who thought about grades?

Those kids were the exceptions. There were the other freshmen, who drank and got caught. Who drank, and felt themselves carried away by Safety & Security, or, worse, in the back of an ambulance. Or the freshmen girls who, insecure and unhappy, quickly acquired eating disorders, or came to be called “slam pieces,” as one frat derisively refers to them. The freshmen boys usually had funnier stories—involving urinating themselves, or “hosing,” and nudity. Less funny are the ones who are consumed by it (and I don’t mean the wetting of the pants): one freshman boy, whose trouble with alcohol never ceased, told me, “my mother says she doesn’t even know me anymore.” Chaos—that is freshman year.

It’s not just alcohol that changes you either, in a college there are also academics, and activities, and new friends, and, at some distant point, the job search, and on and on it goes. For many of you, being an overachieving smarty-pants is old news; being an overachieving smarty-pants who has the drinking habits of a medically-defined alcoholic, on the other hand, is new stuff. Putting it all together will no doubt cause you to change in ways you hadn’t imagined. Some will change for the better, others for the worse. The trick is putting yourself in the first category. That requires work, though, as all good things do.

You’ll no doubt receive an inordinate amount of advice in the next few days, advice that you won’t take. Why not? It takes experience, more than anything, to learn how to navigate the seas of college. That’s what college is, after all. Adjustment. Transition. Growth. Change. What’s the catch-up game if not change, repeated, repeated, repeated—then revised, until you’re caught-up? A fully mature adult. Or something like it.

This change, the one I describe, is not reinvention, ...though, nor is it a conversion. Rather, it is the subtle and deliberate, at times painstaking, movement from what you are to what you want to be. What you should be. Chances are, who you are will never be quite good enough, in the grand scheme of things.

When you wrote your college essay, your guidance counselor probably gave you the advice, “Be yourself.”

Please. You’ve got to be better than that.

But that’s not a call to arms; revolutionary change is damaging in big and small things; creating a war-zone inside yourself is a fools bargain filled with pain. Don’t change like that: your mother should know you, recognize you, when you go home for Thanksgiving. Rather, “Nice and easy does it,” as Frank Sinatra says. We agree.

And the big changes don’t end with freshman year. Prepare yourselves for the D-plan, which is change on crack. The D-plan reduces life to three-month stints here, there, and everywhere. Sophomore fall, you might join a Greek house, make great new friends…and not see them again for six months, as you go abroad to Barcelona, then work for a term in New York.

Then there’s Sophomore summer, a touching-point for your class. After the bliss that is Sophomore summer, maybe you’ve made your best friends, maybe you’re dating someone, and then wham. You might not see them until Junior spring, or worse, Senior fall. Friendships dissolve, relationships dwindle. You work hard to counter the D-Plan’s tendency toward entropy, but feel drained on those last blurry-eyed nights of each term, before you say goodbye—again—to a different set of friends.

But it is all worth it, you realize, by the time senior year rolls around. Like you freshmen, us seniors are here for the full year, and are about to embark on our own adventures soon. We will cherish our last year here as you cherish your first. And though none of us are fully-matured adults, we’re beginning to resemble something like it (that’ll be us running around in our suits this fall, trying to beat the job market)—and we wish you the best of luck playing your personal catch-up game, as we finish playing ours.

The Right Kind of Change

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