Hanover, post-graduation

It hasn't yet fully sunk in that I've graduated, probably because I'm still hanging around Hanover -- for the fourth summer in a row. I've been reading a stack of novels (trying to get through one a day), and auditing some classes from a very different perspective now that I'm no longer doing work towards a grade.

I leave for Ann Arbor to start law school in a little more than a month. But for now, having finished all the errands I needed to run post-graduation, I have a long backlog of e-mails to respond to from this blog. When I'm done with those, hopefully, I can write more about the Dartmouth experience as I've variously promised.

The application cycle starts once again, and I've been hearing from prospective '14s! And all of you want to hear more about Dartmouth and what it's like to both attend here and apply. After four years of classes and work here, a big city boy in a small town, I still love it just as much as the very first day I set foot in Hanover.

Finals Week

it's finals week at Dartmouth, but there's the double whammy of trying to say goodbye to all my professors and to tie up all the things I wish I had done but hadn't. . . 

I don't know how I managed to do it, the past ten finals weeks, to tie up all the loose ends of a term and get all the academic assessments out of the way in such a short span -- but this time, the eleventh, is proving to be impossible.

I promise to write a long (or several long) recap entries on my four years at Dartmouth here. I apologize for not updating, but I've been at college fairs talking to prospies and touring admitted students around, as well as trying to get all my work done. so I haven't really *entirely* abdicated my responsibilities to the Admissions Office, but it's been pretty close.

plus, most people stop caring after applications (4/1) and deposits (5/1). so. the Admissions Office physically has been a ghost town.

it's a cop-out and there's no excuse, but you know, there are so many things and people at Dartmouth and at this point, having less than 14 days left, I really can't sit down in front of a monitor and reflect when I could be running out and doing more.

after finals, I'll write! for now, I have to hide out in the 1902 room . . .

Dimensions

I've been running Dimensions and talking to hundreds of prospies and prospie-parents. As I've said over and over again: I've never been more fiercely proud or more completely in love with Dartmouth. I've loved every single second here, and it devastates me that I'll be graduating in fifty-seven days.

Yesterday was the Dimensions show that the '12s put on for the prospies, and there's just so much energy, vibrancy, and passion. People at Dartmouth constantly try to sneak in to see the show, and we see students going to extreme lengths (stealing tickets off prospies, making counterfeit duplicates) just to share in the passion with which the welcome is given.

I don't have any performing skills, and I constantly wonder how I got accepted to Dartmouth together with all these kids having all these secret talents (and yet are more academically gifted than I am, at the same time). I'm so lucky to be here, so so so lucky. I'm constantly amazed at this place every single day, and I can't bear to think about leaving.

The First Day of Spring at Dartmouth

New England is always fickle with its weather. It tantalizes you with the promise of spring, and then takes it right back away from you with a snowstorm. My American Drama professor Donald Pease, given his (understandable and self-evident[?]) penchant for dramatic flair, started one of his lectures on just one of those fickle days with an elegant piece about how New Englanders are hardened as skeptics against giving in to this temptation having being burnt before, much like the flowers don't poke their stems out before it's too early. Of course, his was much more eloquently worded -- but you get the general gist of the idea of how New England can be. I love New England and everything about it; the seasons, the people, the weather. It has so much personality. And, yes, I love Dartmouth so much, I even love the weather.

Today, though, there could have been no doubt, however skeptical one has become living here with regard to the weather turning warm, that Spring is upon us. Walking by the College Green, central to Dartmouth's campus, one can't help but notice that the grass is now graced by an explosion of colour, vibrancy and energy; with students setting aside their fleeces (bought from the North Face down the street, one of the only stores we have) and trading them in for frisbees to throw around. It's such a marked contrast with yesterday, when there was still a few snowpiles yet to melt after Spring Break, and zero people in total sitting on the muddy, cold, frozen grass. Everyone is having fun in the warm sunshine (even the sunshine here can be deceptive, with the way New England has taught me even being hit directly by sunshine can feel devastatingly cold) -- it is as if they all planned to flock to the Green at the same time; while I am stuck inside writing this entry!

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Yesterday, when it was still winter, I participated in the yearly ritual at the office that culminates a whole year's of work: where Admissions staffers all head down to our mailroom in the basement, and each carry a box of "big envelopes" towards the mailtruck waiting outside. I think, somehow, it is what brought Spring upon us. As I glanced towards the diverse locales written on all the fanciful address labels, I couldn't help but think that there were going to be two thousand really happy people all around the world in two days (from 59 countries! according to our website.) When students saw the "parade", as we call it in the Admissions Office, several of them literally jumped for joy at the prospect of cute little '13s joining us here in Hanover; proof, perhaps, of how much every one of us love Dartmouth. Of course, with e-mail notifications going out at 5 pm the day before, the happiness is a little dulled for everyone except us at the Admissions Office, who are all super excited to fill such a wonderful class. I myself got a "likely letter" from Dartmouth in February telling me to go party and have fun and not worry about finals, so April 1st for me, in Hong Kong, was decidedly anti-climactic.

One of the things I heard the Georgetown Law Dean, Andy Cornblatt say, at the Admitted Students' Weekend in D.C. this past week; was that the roles change as soon as decisions are announced. Before, the Dean wouldn't take your calls, would be hard to reach, you had to convince him with your pretty test scores and personal statements to even glance at you. But once you get your offer -- the tables are turned. Now the Dean will serve you dinner (which Dean Cornblatt very much did! eight times, too! all the travelling, and being broke, made me a starving Asian boy.), talk up the school, throw money at you, answer any questions you may have -- a complete one-eighty. The courting ritual of college and law school admissions reverses itself once you get accepted, and now schools have to flirt with *you*, instead of it being the other way round the way it was all the way up until April 1st.

As such, this space was previously devoted to how to best sell your candidacy for a place like Dartmouth or otherwise, so you could come join us: and now, with your brand spankin' new offers, I will devote some attention to how to choose the best college for you, as well as write entries (shamelessly) about why I think Dartmouth is the very best place in the entire nation to pursue one's undergraduate education (also so you can come to Hanover. we want you here!)

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I visited nine cities in twelve days over Spring Break, seeing all my friends in the various cities with law schools that I was deciding between. Mooching off their meal plans and couches was great for someone as broke as me, as well as getting to travel around the country on law school dime. It was doubly interesting, though, to share with them both my and their undergraduate experiences, as well as go on some tours of undergraduate campuses (in addition to law schools) given my work at the Admissions Office this year.

I will be updating more extensively, with all my thoughts and reflections, as soon as I settle in for classes.

But for now, suffice to say, Dartmouth is still in my top three most beautiful college campuses in the country, having visited pretty much every single top undergraduate school in the nation -- given my many treks to see various friends, and a short freshman stint on the debate team. It's one of my geeky hobbies to see and experience different schools, given that I was deprived of my very own tour as a senior in high school all the way across the ocean.

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As for the college experience one receives at Dartmouth, I very much think that no other place in America (or in the rest of the world: here's looking at you Oxford and Trinity College Dublin) compares. I really don't, and my entries on this space may give you some idea why.

Some of the people I've spoken to at other schools tell me: "Well, Jeff, with your personality the way it is, we think you would have been just as happy anywhere else." And I think, and respond, "maybe I would have been happy -- but I would definitely not be as stretched or challenged, or taught to think and write, to the incredible extent that I have been at Dartmouth College."

They say, next, that: "maybe you've just been lucky, Jeff, and you're not representative of Dartmouth as a whole. Plus, the fact that you work for the Admissions Office makes what you say decidedly suspect."

As for the second, perhaps more damaging, claim, of possible bias as a spokesperson for the College, I definitely think there's some self-selection going on, and some correlation -- I love Dartmouth, therefore I work at the Admissions Office. But, the reverse is also true: because I work at the Admissions Office, I've been forced to examine Dartmouth from a highly critical perspective in order for me to find truth in the things I say to prospective students. Also, I've been placed in an environment, where, as a non-high school senior I've had to give the matter of undergraduate education a lot of thought. (It's like the LSAT reasoning sections all over again. Which direction does the causality lie?)

I'd like to think, that, after starting work at the Admissions Office, I've spent a lot more time thinking about collegiate admissions in America. In addition to this, I've subsequently toured and revisited a lot of my friends' schools, and viewed them from an added Admissions perspective. With this, I'm even more equipped to come to the conclusion that Dartmouth is the very best place in the country to pursue an undergraduate education, and I'm doubly sure that that's definitely true.

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With regard to the first claim, the fact that I'm an unrepresentative sample, I definitely agree that my very own Dartmouth experience has made me think that: for me, personally, no other place in the world would have been better to pursue my undergraduate education.

I also definitely feel blessed and think that I've been more than lucky at Dartmouth, and that maybe not everyone here has been graced, for instance, with opportunities such as the extensive tutelage of someone like Professor Lucas Swaine.

But, there are two caveats: I think college is pretty much what you make of it, and that one receives in return what one is willing to give -- to reverse the Biblical maxim. So in the end, you're going to turn out just fine wherever you end up, as long as you are willing to give your best.

Also, I think that from what my friends tell me -- again, self-selection? I love Dartmouth, therefore I befriend those who love Dartmouth just as much? -- they very much love Dartmouth as wholeheartedly and just as much as I do.

Even though some of my friends, like Page Wagley, have lived a completely different Dartmouth experience from my own (and that's a blog entry on its own), it always surprises me how our thoughts and reflections on just how much this place has given us, how wonderful it has been, what it means to us, and other such considerations, are always deeply resonant.

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The fact that a place like Dartmouth isn't just good at one thing -- producing people for corporate firms, sending them to grad school, teaching them Economics, or so on, as some schools may specialize and focus on -- but good at many [incidentally, Dartmouth is great at all of these];

The way Dartmouth provides boundless resources for people to create diverse, personal, tailored and yet just as wonderful experiences of their own;

These all speak so strongly to me that it is this place, Dartmouth College, and not just my dreamy self, that has made my undergraduate education so perfect.

hanover, in winter

this is totally me. it happened to me at least three times today:


(from today's The Dartmouth newspaper comic)

Up and Running

Got into Dartmouth after a 26-hour door-to-door journey yesterday. With the time difference involved traveling west, that didn't shape up to be too much.

I left home with my parents at 9 AM on the 12th, Hong Kong time, and after flying through Newark Liberty, passing through the agricultural X-ray and connecting into Boston, I took the 6:55 PM Dartmouth Coach from Logan Airport and arrived sharply at 9:45 PM in front of the Hanover Inn. So really, I used only 12+ real hours getting in (or so my fuzzy jet-lagged internal math time calculator tells me). My body (and appetite disagree), but whatever.

Tons of snow piled up beside the sidewalks, Hanover is oh-so-pretty. I was going to say especially in the winter, but really, it's pretty any time of year. The snow means I can't use any of my usual shortcuts, though. Because I know the pathways so well, I can set myself on highway-coma mode and get to the library from my dormroom without even opening my eyes -- but now I need to make an active effort to weave through the piles of snow.

It's good to be back in my dorm room, the way I've tricked it out. My big comfy beachchair from Main Street Kitchens that feels like falling into a big pile of marshmallows. Now, I have tons of work to catch up on, classes, friends to meet, my bosses at my three jobs, catching up with professors. Will write more soon!

The English Major (pt. 3)

3) 1 course from the start of the twentieth century to the present

As very much the 90s child that I am, my interests most definitely skew towards the new. My favorite authors all wrote in the twentieth century: Wilde, Beckett, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Wharton. As such, the number of classes I've taken that would fall under this category are too many to count: basically, every class in English that I haven't had to take to satisfy the major requirements in the other categories have been in this group.

I wrote earlier about how I took American Drama with Donald Pease, a class which changed my life. I have a stack of Pulitzer plays to read on break -- cute little paper pamphlets printed by the Dramatists Play Service that are typeset atrociously, but are cheap and do the job. Law school applications (I saw online in a fee summary that I've spent $1280 USD in total) have entirely bankrupted me. But I still try and scrounge up money to get reading material. From what I wrote earlier on the class:

ENGL 047: American Drama, Professor Donald Pease

Pease is the rock star of the English department. He lectures to a standing-room-only class of 250 people, and we rent out the Loew Theater in order to house all these students. Legend has it that he has a photographic memory, reading books flipping through pages like a magazine. He also remembers all of the 250 papers he grades, and greets each student by name and talks to them about the intricacies of their paper topics. My best friend, Rebecca Armistead, calls him the "commercial guy", because he is unflappable and never stumbles or gets a single word wrong in his perfectly scripted lectures, which are delivered extemporaneously without reference to notes. His class is known colloquially as "A Play a Day", and we read a play each class day (about twenty to thirty plays) throughout the term, surveying the development of American Theater from Eugene O'Neill onwards. He takes a psychoanalytic approach to the characters and authors of plays, and speaks at a level of complexity so high other professors can't understand him in departmental meetings. Even when telling jokes his level of discourse is higher than most: he once compared the temperament of New Englanders to flowers not opening at the many false starts of spring, a flowery poetic anecdote for a commonplace event that had happened to him on the way to visiting his apartment in New York, which he maintains in order to be able to watch plays. He is the leading scholar in the nation on Americanism, and heads the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth. He is a cult figure, and since so many students have taken his class, you can find throngs of students doing imitations of his booming, unflappable, voice delivering lectures at uber-levels of complexity whenever the name Pease is mentioned.

I've also taken Postcolonial Literature with Bed Giri. To be fair, he's not always the greatest lecturer and his classes sometimes wander, but he's the nicest guy and knows his stuff well. We read Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, Chinhua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, et al. All the writers that have appropriated the English language and infused it with the vibrance and energy of the particular experience of the regions in which they write. My favorite will always be The God of Small Things, a book I read for the International Baccalaureate but didn't find myself liking (since my professor over-dissected it) but on second reading, and with the benefit of two or three years of intellectual growth, I see how its narrative and the way time is woven throughout as one of the prettiest things I have ever read.

My freshman summer I took a class with Melissa Zeiger in British and American Poetry since 1914. The post-World War modernist poets were a bleak read, and I still reel sometimes from the stridency of people like T. S. Eliot. They were so sure about the world, at a time when things were so unsure. Even the way in which they expressed their doubts were coherent and monolithic. I suppose it's all the critical theory that I've been reading as of late. In Zeiger's class I discovered Sylvia Plath's poetry, which is a hundred times better than her prose, which is not at all shabby in its own right.

I often think English classes are reading lists on which we apply critical lenses, which sometimes makes me feel guilty for taking them given that I think, I could recreate the way in which I learn at home, on my own -- and would be better served taking a class in something for which I couldn't construct such an exercise. One of my forbidden pleasures is walking about Wheelock Books, copying down the reading lists for other English classes, and reading the books on those lists in my own time.

I took Black Women Writers with Shalene Vasquez. As I mentioned, she's one of the toughest women, toughest professors that I've ever met in my entire life. The whole class was filled with black women, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. But, somewhat similar to my readings in postcolonial literature, here was the writing of a social and cultural group that was set aside by the mainstream, and their writing portrayed both their angst and their views on how to resolve these particularist differencs. There were so many books that have ascended to the top of my favorites, like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, that I wouldn't have read otherwise. The best essay I've read on Black Women Writers is by Zadie Smith, entitled 'What Does Soulful Mean?' in which she describes the first time she read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God". I found the essay in a preface to Beloved in a Dublin bookstore, and I was absolutely riveted and I wrote Professor Vasquez the very next day. What I wrote earlier:

ENGL 067: Black Women Writers, Professor Shalene Vasquez

First day of class all of the people in the classroom including the professor were black women, except me. Professor Vasquez handed out a questionnaire with three questions intended to be used for shaping the eventual pedagogy and focus of the class. It read: "1. What does it mean to be black?" "2. What does it mean to be a woman?" "3. What does it mean to be a black woman?" Obviously, I was at a loss for words, especially since the second class was a reading (out-loud) of the responses given earlier. I managed to sneak by with some nonsense about how the subaltern lacked a voice, the position of the disadvantaged commenting on society through literature gave a perspective that was worth considering. No, that was not what my professor wanted. She was one of the most dedicated, organized and strong people I have ever met, pushing my writing further through two-page reports each and every single class on the assigned novels. It was always not succinct or concise enough, and if it were, I had not gone into sufficient detail. My writing improved leaps and bounds after meeting with her extensively during office hours, and I fell in love with a set of books so culturally distinct with my background that it is not likely I would have picked them up on a bookshelf, books that are now on my list of favourites, such as Zora Neale Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God". It was a privilege to read such texts surrounded by people who were culturally and ethnically invested in the subject matter we were discussing, and have my opinion acknowledged and reciprocated.