Matthew Monroe

First Month Reflections

This week was an interesting time for me, consisting not only of family weekend but also my (roughly) one month anniversary of being a Dartmouth student and a year since I stepped foot on campus for the first time during a tour! It got me thinking a lot about how quickly my time here has already progressed and made me reminisce on all of the amazing experiences I've had and friends I've made throughout my time here. In this post, I want to look back at some of the things I've done that have slipped through the cracks of my blog, as well as take a look at what's happening now and envision what's to come.

First let's take a short walk down memory lane. My Dartmouth experience started immediately with First-Year Trips, which I can say with confidence was one of the most memorable experiences I've ever taken part in. I don't want to say too much about trips as it really is something you have to experience for yourself. But I will say that four days in the woods with nothing to occupy you other than the

My favorite view from First-Year Trips

people around you builds some incredibly powerful relationships, and the experience made me confident that no matter where my path leads during my time here I'll always have people to help me when I need it. After arriving back from trips (and taking a very, very long shower) I jumped into Orientation week. Although getting used to the school and beginning planning for the academic term is important, the point of Orientation week is (in my opinion) primarily to make friends. Dartmouth makes this easy in a lot of ways. First and most obviously, there are tons of O-Week events designed specifically to help you meet people. From Collis S'Mores at night, to bonding activities on the green, I met tons of people during O-Week that I still regularly hang out with. On top of that, the size and layout of the College mean that you'll bump into people you sort of know all the time, giving you the ability to become friends with just about anyone pretty easily. One of the big things I remember hearing about College as compared to highschool is that if you don't put effort into seeing people, you won't. While that is definitely somewhat true here, I think by nature Dartmouth makes it very easy to see people you know just about every day. At the end of O-Week came the start of classes, arguably the thing I was most excited for. By this point, I had a solid group of friends, an academic plan, and a good idea of what I wanted to focus on outside the classroom. My class roster consisted of Chinese 1 (for people new to Chinese), Chemistry 11 (the faster-paced option for 1st year General Chemistry), and my Writing 5, Metamorphosis and Otherness (part of a required first-year class sequence, Metamorphosis and Otherness was the specific option I chose, but there are lots of sections with different themes). Although a lot of people end up add-dropping their way into different classes after the first week, I've stuck with my initial roster and really enjoyed all of them so far! Although my classes are definitely challenging and take up a lot of time, I can genuinely say that I'm learning so much that I wouldn't have envisioned having the opportunity to, and all of my professors are fantastic at what they do.

Ok short walk was a bit of an understatement. That ended up being more of a four-day hike. Let's talk about what's been going on more recently. With family weekend happening @now (slightly forced usage of Dartmouth slang for "right now"), I finally had the chance to see my mom for the first time in a month. Despite the workload of classes making it a little tricky to balance my schedule, I managed to spend a lot of time with my mom and check out some new parts of Hanover and New Hampshire that I hadn't seen before! First, we went out on the town for dinner in Hanover. Despite being a five minute walk from the center of campus, Hanover main street is not somewhere I frequent, so it was nice to be able to try out some new things in the area! We had dinner at a local restaurant called Sawtooth, and then grabbed maple creamees for dessert. If you've never had one, add it to the bucket list now. It's like super rich maple soft serve. Delicious. I'm getting off topic.

Leaves are finally starting to change colors!

The next day, we headed to some events around campus, and eventually rounded out the weekend with dinner at the Dartmouth-run Moosilaukee Ravine Lodge about an hour from campus in Warren, NH. On the drive over, I got to take in some beautiful views of the fall landscape, and the night ended with a delicious, family style dinner at the lodge. It was really great getting to catch up with my mom and have her experience some parts of campus that she didn't have the opportunity to see on move-in! The weekend also reminded me of just how quickly this term is passing by, and how grateful I am for the amazing things I've had the opportunity to do here.

The sunset at Moosilaukee Ravine Lodge

I want to round this out by looking forward. In the coming weeks I want to try to stay more grounded in my experience. Already being more than a month in (or in the words of my friend Ale "1/24th of the way through college") has shown me that I need to take advantage of every second I spend here and live in the moment. Whether that means joining more activities, discovering new places on campus, or spending time with even more new friends, I'm excited to get to experience everything, and take you with me. Thank you for a great first month.