Juliet McDermott

Dear Reader:

I haven’t much time—I’m on my lunch break—but I’m writing to you from an uncharted territory: real life. Indeed, this May I flipped across the graduation stage and tossed my cap in the air with my classmates as we celebrated what had been, and looked forward to what could be. To those of you I never knew, know this: I write to you as a Bowdoin student, a Floridian and most importantly, a voice crying out from the wilderness. While there’s much I wish I could tell you of what’s to come, there isn’t time. All I can do now is share what I wish a Florida man told me before I ventured north many moons ago.

First things first, literally no one cares. l admit, dear reader, I’ve read these words thousands of times and I usually roll my eyes when I hear them. It’s hard to take them seriously when your every move and mistake is recorded and disseminated on social media—but after leaving Bowdoin’s campus, I implore you to follow your instincts and do what’s best for you. I’ll start with this fact: After you toss your cap, it’s over. I admit this is extremely sorrowful, yet the reality of this impermanence empowers you to build healthy habits and attitudes which will outlast your years on campus.

An attitude that I’m glad I adopted at Bowdoin was courage. When I entered campus, I was a timid teenager plagued by the spotlight effect. Today, I still have my own anxieties and insecurities, but I know that I can overcome them now. A realization that helped me overcome my anxiety at Bowdoin was the very impermanence I mentioned before! Literally every single person who makes fun of you, demeans you or belittles you will vanish one glorious day in May. So why live like they will follow you for the rest of time? Take this opportunity while you can and use your time at Bowdoin as a testing ground. Are you afraid of jocks? Talk to a jock. If it goes poorly, it’s not like they cared about you anyways. If it goes well? You overcame a fear and you have a new friend!

If you’re a guy scared of talking to girls, trust me, the girls are much more scared of you. What makes Bowdoin such a fantastic “testing ground” is that you have an ideal sample population. You’re all young and eager to make new friends. While there’s also thousands of people who fall into these buckets in any large city, you usually have to put in a certain amount of effort in order to reap the rewards, either paying for entrance to a gathering or club or taking the time to commute to a meeting space. At Bowdoin? I would literally go from my room on Tower 15 and knock on random doors on the way down till I found a pre-game on a lower floor. People are always more welcoming than you assume, and if they aren’t? Then you can smugly smile to yourself that they will be washed away with time.

My final piece of advice to you is that your work matters. Believe me, I know how plush and luxurious life at Bowdoin can feel, and you need to know the only reason you were able to enjoy these luxuries is because you can either read well, write well, speak well or problem-solve well. If you possess many or all of these skills, congratulations! However, you should know your classes and extracurriculars will give you the opportunity to sharpen them. If you take advantage of them you can improve your lifestyle and opportunities exponentially. If you don’t, enjoy Park Row, babe, because that may be as good as it gets for you. Thanks to the computer scientists of the world, you can most likely graduate with a 3.8 GPA by relying on LibreChat. And that’s fine. What will certainly set you apart from your peers both here and in the workplace however, is your competence.

I’ll never forget taking an art history course called Materializing The Self with Professor DiMartino. I walked into class everyday having glazed over the reading, ready to BS my way through class discussions—but then came along this freshman named Juan Chang ’28. When I tell you, each and every time Juan spoke, you could hear pages rustling as he rushed to find his page citations. You could see his annotations despite the darkness of the picture study room. By the end of the semester, it was clear from his poise and confidence that Juan had actually learned something from that class, rather than just being in that class, like I had. I’m not here to insist that you do each and every thing asked of you. (If you did, you’d surely be one of the smartest people on campus.) Instead, I urge you to pick one, maybe two classes that you’ll do 40 percent of the work for. Some professors (those that don’t know that they have entire classes fueled by Claude) may read this and gawk. But for practical young people like us, I think setting a goal of 40 percent for a minority of classes will yield you incredible professional, academic, and introspective results.

My time approaches, dear reader, as my lunch break is over, but I hope you’ve taken my words as suggestions instead of demands. I too am working on overcoming my anxieties and diligently completing the tasks asked of me. What I do know though, is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and what’s more, we’re in a tunnel.

Peace Out Girl Scout (wink).

Neiman Mocombe is a member of the class of 2026.