Talks to Freshman Girls

The poor girl in college has certain advantages: she is respected for the effort she has made to get there; she at once excites the interest of her teachers; she finds herself in an atmosphere of sympathy and encouragement. She is generously praised, and is made happy by the appreciation of her gifts. Let her guard against vanity and priggishness. The poor and brilliant girl has her own temptations.

If she suffer in some things because of her poverty, it does not matter much. Privations, if they do not injure health, are bracing and tonic. A girl will learn at college, if anywhere, how to be rich though poor. She could be placed in no situation where she could more successfully ignore poverty. Simplicity in dress is “good form” in college. The fatal word “vulgar” is fixed by the initiated upon display, or extremes of fashion. Taste and neatness are luxuries within the reach of girls of small means.

The rich girl has her difficulties. She is often handicapped by poor preparation, which is not so much the fault of her fitting school as of her social life too soon begun. She has had many distractions, with less serious labor of preparation. College routine will be at first irksome to her; but if she has chosen to go to college, she has stuff in her, and she can make of herself the finest type of student. Her money will be “means,” and she will learn noble ways of spending it. Many is the rich girl who is secretly helping a poor girl to get her education.

Rich appointments make a girl’s way harder at college, on the whole. Scholars are distrustful of the appearances of wealth, sometimes unjustly. The wise college girl will cultivate simplicity, that she may be in harmony with her surroundings, and that she may have a free mind.

The girl of wealth may lack the element of the heroic and the romantic in the college career of the poor girl, but her compensations are that she can command all means of culture; she can travel, buy books, visit cities, and meet significant people. Her wealth buys her a wider life; while the girl of small means has one more concentrated and intense. Her pleasures may be keener because they are conquests; she relies on herself and develops her own resources. We will wait to judge the two until they are forty.

Health is one of your “college duties”; so is happiness.

“If I have faltered more or less

In my great task of happiness,” —

wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a master of gallant living. He really had something to whine about, but he lived with all his colors flying.

However, I shall not deny that there are “blues” peculiar to college life. Occasionally they will be part of your education. There will be wounds to your vanity; and years afterwards you will remember the snub of some brusque, brilliant professor and will smile to think how much you learned by it. You will see another girl surpass you, and envy will give you a fit of the blues; for envy always punishes itself. The college has, on the whole, an atmosphere of noble feeling, of “admiration, hope, and love”; but a sin that some college girls have to fight is the ugly sin of envy. Jealousy is akin to it, and is sure to enter into narrow, intense friendships. The remedy is many friends and many interests.

A genuine source of blues is disappointment in one’s self. I wonder if you will believe an old college girl’s experience that an occasional bracing failure is the best thing that can happen to you. It will help you to keep your balance, and to know yourself. Moreover, it will rouse you as nothing else will.

Trifles loom large in college life, its critics say. A freshman’s world looks black to-day because of a bad recitation or a neglectful friend. I do not reason away her troubles: I only remind her of Abraham Lincoln’s remedy for the blues (and he knew well what they were). “Remember,” he said, “that they don’t last.” Also I would set her to some absorbing task: “work is good company,” and compels her to think about what she is doing and not of her troubles.

It was recorded upon the tomb of a Roman lady long ago, “She made nobody sad.” Make nobody sad with your woes, or your face, or your voice. And if you wish to cheer yourself, cheer somebody else. You very likely need rest for your nerves. College girls wear upon themselves and upon one another by too much talking. Their minds are so mutually stimulating that they need rest from their own company. One of the first conditions for a satisfactory intellectual life is a room to one’s self. The college girl who cannot command it should spend much time alone out of doors, even if she carry with her a book.

When the college day is ended, and you look back over its hours, what will have made its success, and what will have made its happiness? Have you been “nobly busy”? I leave to you the answer.