When I stepped onto the Green for the first time as a newly minted Dartmouth student, I was still high off high school graduation and hopes of what my four years of college would look like. I, like many other first-year students, felt on top of the world walking around the Ivy League campus I had been dreaming about since kindergarten. I never imagined that this feeling would slowly begin to vanish throughout my time at Dartmouth, leaving negative feelings I had never experienced in its place.
I will always remember the moment the seed of inadequacy was planted in me during first year orientation. At one of the many speeches freshmen are required to attend, a professor speaking to us asked everyone who graduated valedictorian of their high school to raise their hand. Almost every single hand in Moore Auditorium shot up, and even though my class rank dropped my senior spring thanks to trigonometry and a bad case of senioritis, I raised my hand anyway. Smiling, the professor cautioned that these would be the people we would be competing against for grades in all of our classes. She said that earning an A, a mark reserved for the top students, would not be possible for everyone sitting in the auditorium. As looks of panic crossed the faces of some around me, I naively wondered why we even needed to get A’s in classes. Coming from a public school as a first-generation college student, I was always told if I worked hard in high school, I would get a break at university. This mindset was quickly crushed as everyone around me from freshmen to seniors claimed they needed a 4.0 to get into medical school, law school, or engineering school. Meanwhile, I hardly even knew school after college existed and had no idea what the difference between an associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degree was.
Even before our first classes as college students started, all my friends were planning what requirements they needed to be able to apply to graduate school in four years. Soon enough, I, too, proclaimed I was pre-med solely because I felt pressured to have a plan after Dartmouth. I struggled through freshman year pre-med classes, staying up late most nights to finish problem sets and study for the never-ending bombardment of exams. I juggled my classes all while working as much as I could at my job and participating on a sports team. Even though I was already pushing myself extremely hard, I looked around at my peers who all seemed to be acing their classes, publishing papers with prestigious professors, and participating in numerous organizations, and I told myself I needed to do more.
In my next year at Dartmouth I forced myself to get a second job as a UGA, join multiple clubs, rush a Greek house, do an internship I didn’t want, and declare a double major all with the aspiration of living up to the reputation of the perfect Dartmouth student that I saw everywhere I looked. While I liked all the activities I was a part of, I spent most of my sophomore year sick from lack of sleep and mental health. When I saw my peers upset about getting an A- on an exam, I looked at my D and cried. I spent many days in bed sobbing and wondering why I couldn’t have it all like everyone else. Still, when anyone asked how I was doing, I lied and said I was great, like every other Dartmouth student is.
The breaking point came when I called someone from home out of desperation one night to ask why Dartmouth made the mistake of accepting me into their school when clearly I was less than everyone else they chose. He reminded me that I have worked hard my entire life and deserve to be here as much as all of my peers and that I must not be the only one out of over 4,000 students who was struggling. Surely enough, when I reached out to a friend and expressed my deep feelings of inadequacy for the first time to another Dartmouth student, she told me that so many other people experience the same feelings of inadequacy and receive the same grades but that everyone feels too pressured to admit it. She reminded me that graduating from an Ivy League school, or any school for that matter, is still a huge accomplishment even without a 4.0, a three-page resume, or an internship at a Fortune 500 company.
A lot of things have changed since my first two years on campus. I decided to drop pre-med, and, in fact, am not worried about graduate school at all after Dartmouth. While I still maintain a hectic schedule, now I do it out of love for all my activities rather than pressure to achieve some perfect persona. Still, sometimes when my friends talk about their internships at Google, NASA, or Capitol Hill, I wonder if it’s wrong of me to spend my off terms working at my family’s Dairy Queen for minimum wage. When I start to feel this way, I am reminded that I don’t need to compare myself to anyone around me and that all my choices are completely valid. We are all successful, accomplished, intelligent individuals, and we need to stop pressuring ourselves to the point of mental breakdowns in a harmful attempt to attain our own warped view of perfection. Although I’ll always carry my little seed of inadequacy with me, I now have the tools to manage its growth, and I try to share my experiences with anyone who might be feeling the same way.
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