Class Note 2011
Issue
March - April 2026
Class Note 2011. As no one wrote in with updates during the last two months, I spent today contemplating what to write for our Class Notes submission.
It happens to be four days from the new year as I write this, so I’m feeling contemplative. About 18 years have passed since our freshman year, and we’ve now known each other for half our lives. During our freshman fall—“half a lifetime” ago!—an ’08 told me that the people we were friends with freshman year wouldn’t be the people we’d be friends with come senior year. I kind of hated the prediction, but it held true in some ways and not in others, especially in the years since graduating. Some friendships have dwindled because of distance and rifts, while others have evolved, sometimes unexpectedly, with the circumstances despite many changes through the years, including law school, a move from New Hampshire to California, and the pandemic.
Our first year together was more eventful than any other time I can think of, from first-year trips, to orientation week, to the first week of classes, the presidential primary debate hosted in Spaulding Auditorium (and the pre-debate campaign crowds and media on the Green), our first Homecoming, freshman formal at the Hop, our first Christmas tree lighting on the Green, our first finals exams, our first snowy winter term, our first Winter Carnival and snow sculpture, our first Dimensions as students, and our first Green Key Weekend. That year was vibrant and filled with so much joy and novelty, meeting classmates living in the River, “Sussell Rage,” the Choates, Fahey-McLane, McLaughlin, and East Wheelock and students from other class years in student orgs and mentor-mentee programs.
Freshman year felt so full of possibilities and optimism. I envisioned many futures, and so little about the last two decades has tracked with my imagination. Some good, some bad, and much has not gone according to plan, but I appreciate where I am today despite (or maybe because of) the difficulties in getting here.
As our Commencement speaker Conan O’Brien observed, “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention. … [T]hrough the good and especially the bad, the person you are now is someone you could never have conjured in the fall of 2007.”
—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu
Back to 2011 Class Year
More of 2011 Class Notes
It happens to be four days from the new year as I write this, so I’m feeling contemplative. About 18 years have passed since our freshman year, and we’ve now known each other for half our lives. During our freshman fall—“half a lifetime” ago!—an ’08 told me that the people we were friends with freshman year wouldn’t be the people we’d be friends with come senior year. I kind of hated the prediction, but it held true in some ways and not in others, especially in the years since graduating. Some friendships have dwindled because of distance and rifts, while others have evolved, sometimes unexpectedly, with the circumstances despite many changes through the years, including law school, a move from New Hampshire to California, and the pandemic.
Our first year together was more eventful than any other time I can think of, from first-year trips, to orientation week, to the first week of classes, the presidential primary debate hosted in Spaulding Auditorium (and the pre-debate campaign crowds and media on the Green), our first Homecoming, freshman formal at the Hop, our first Christmas tree lighting on the Green, our first finals exams, our first snowy winter term, our first Winter Carnival and snow sculpture, our first Dimensions as students, and our first Green Key Weekend. That year was vibrant and filled with so much joy and novelty, meeting classmates living in the River, “Sussell Rage,” the Choates, Fahey-McLane, McLaughlin, and East Wheelock and students from other class years in student orgs and mentor-mentee programs.
Freshman year felt so full of possibilities and optimism. I envisioned many futures, and so little about the last two decades has tracked with my imagination. Some good, some bad, and much has not gone according to plan, but I appreciate where I am today despite (or maybe because of) the difficulties in getting here.
As our Commencement speaker Conan O’Brien observed, “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention. … [T]hrough the good and especially the bad, the person you are now is someone you could never have conjured in the fall of 2007.”
—Hillary S. Cheng, 26611 La Roda, Mission Viejo, CA 92691; (603) 546-8452; hillary.s.cheng@dartmouth.edu