Coffee with a Professor

I'm pretty sure I've written about this before, but one of the best parts about Dartmouth is the relationships students are able to develop with professors. This ability is the result of a number of factors, most especially Dartmouth's size and, more importantly, its commitment to undergraduate education. We're called Dartmouth College for a reason, and the result is that professors are here, yes to do research and publish literature in their respective fields, but mostly because they want to teach undergraduates. Actually, the word "teach" doesn't quite capture it, because they're also interested in working with and learning from their undergraduate students.

Still, even with that in mind, actually developing relationships with professors here can seem like a daunting task. All professors hold open office hours every week, but there's this notion that in order to go talk to them, you've gotta have a very specific question about the class or the professor's field of research. Here's the thing though: while they're happy to talk to you about matters that relate to their class, one of the greatest hidden secrets about profs is that they actually love talking to students about other things!

Last Wednesday, I went to my government professor Daryl Press' office hours with a question that was rather philosphical. I'm taking his class called War and Peace in the Modern Age, and basically what we've been doing is reading and discussing first person accounts of warfare written by soldiers, civilians, and journalists. Meanwhile, professor Press gives lectures on such subjects as military spending, logistics, and the function of military statecraft in international relations. What I wanted to know, though, is whether or not there's intrinsic value in people - not as citizens of a democracy or as policymakers, but just as members of human society - having an understanding of wars, who fights them, how they're fought, and what it means to approach, as David Loyd writes in My War Gone by, I Miss it So, the "frontier of human experience." So while my question was inspired by what we were covering in class, it really didn't have much to do with what the syllabus says the course is about (as it turns out, though, he used our conversation as the basis for 2 questions on the next day's take home midterm; we ended up having to answer 2 of 4 possible questions and ironically, I didn't touch the ones related to what we'd talked about). Professor Press had to run to a meeting before we could really delve deeply into the question, though, so we made an appointment to get coffee today.

I met him after his afternoon class on nuclear weapons, and we went over to Novack Café in the library before heading for a table on the patio outside Kemeny, the newest academic building on campus and home to the Dickey Center for International Understanding, among other things. I wasn't sure what we were going to talk about, because even after thinking about it for a while I felt like I was actually less prepared to talk about my question from last Wednesday than I was during that first conversation. But we bounced some ideas off each other and decided that we'd meet again at the end of this course to discuss what the class was actually was all about. Sure, we're going to learn about everything I outlined above (military logistics, etc.), but will we have also gotten something less tangible but fundamentally more important out of it? We'll see.

That stuff out of the way, the conversation actually - no joke - turned to admissions. One of the things that's been really neat about this internship for me is that the world of admissions is really interesting, and to a lot of people. There are so many questions people have, and I really enjoy talking about how the process works (that's your cue to send me emails or ask questions through the comments part of this blog). So there we were - government professor (and realism/nuclear weapons expert) and senior government major, talking about collegiate admissions while sipping coffee on the Kemeny patio. The coolest part for you all: this sort of thing happens all the time at Dartmouth. And so we talked about admissions for a while and then had a discussion on social mobility in this country (questions actually inspired by something I learned in international political economy, another international relations class), before he had to leave to pick up his kids from daycare.

Will this help me in his class? It's an interesting question. If a professor gave students grades based on how well he knew them, he'd be a terrible professor. So no, office hours visits don't give you automatic points. However, it never hurts to demonstrate to professors that you're thinking critically about their course material. And even if you don't talk about the class itself, you never know when you might need a reference or a recommendation. So when you all begin your college careers, remember this: you don't need to have a million dollar question in order to strike up a conversation with a prof. At a school like Dartmouth, all you need to do is show up and say, "Hey, I'm in your class, and I'd just like to introduce myself." The conversation will take care of itself.