What the Hell Just Happened?: An Exit Survey of Gettysburg College by a Disillusioned Senior

By Hanna Ackerman

I came to Gettysburg for the first time ever under slight duress. It was the summer after junior year of high school and my dad, adorable as he is, decided that he had been remiss as a parent by not bringing the family to Gettysburg as his father had every summer when he and his siblings were young. My mother, adorable as she is, researches everything before we go anywhere new, which is always a good idea to be sure, but in this case she discovered a small, 4-year liberal arts school that seemed to meet all of the arbitrary criteria that 17-year-old me had set for a good college. Voila, college tour scheduled.

I was so sick of college tours that I wanted to scream, but since it was here and my parents wanted to see it, see it we would. Who am I to deny them? It was lovely. A little hot and dry, but hey, it was summer. I put it on the list and applied and several months later, lo and behold, I was accepted and wandering around on GAD with my family in a sea of pastel and khaki with a bangin’ scholarship and no sense that anything would go wrong. I spoke with a couple of professors and decided that I didn’t even want to finish high school, I just wanted to stay here.

Flash forward again, several months, and I cannot stop crying. For the love of God, I never cried so much in my LIFE. I hated this place and everything about it and I couldn’t stop looking up apartments in Manhattan and these people were boring and what the hell was I thinking and why am I putting myself through this? It was nuts. I stayed sane for five reasons: Kim, Kelly, Leah, Kevin, and Alexander. I figured, at the end of second semester, “Hell, I don’t want to go through that again. I have five friends here, how many more do I really need?” So I stayed. I went to Argentina that summer and my life changed and I saw how lucky I was… and I stayed at Gettysburg.

I worked for Residence Life the nest year, my sophomore year. What a terrible decision.

A Side Note: For those of you out there who are considering the possibility of working for Res Life, if you have a strong motivation away from structure or a moral sensibility that is relatively uncompromising in terms of actual right and actual wrong instead of following rules simply because they are rules, do not, under any circumstance except dire financial ones, even consider working for Res Life.

Again, I cried, less than the year before, but still well above my previous average of about once every two months. I made more friends. I got angrier. I fell in love (another terrible decision, if you can call it a decision). I had a telephone pole fall on my house and endanger all my kids and dealt with it. It was a year of challenges and a year of exponential growth in personal cynicism. And again, I stayed in one piece due to the loving care of a few remarkable human beings.

I would like to note that all of this was taking place against the backdrop of the careening horror of the Bush administration, so I was also plagued thoughts of dystopian futures, completely convinced that the world would shortly come to a fiery and hellish end at any moment. I was crazy, quite literally and probably should have gone to see someone, but hell, I was working for Res Life and they thought I was capable, so I must have been fine. Right?

I self-medicated, to deal with how crazy I was, with alcohol and love. Sleep was elusive at best and eating was something I did because people asked me to meet them for lunch or dinner. Then my heart broke and I was here over the summer and trying to deal with it on my own. More tears, the summer ended. I went to Denmark at my parents’ behest. It was cold and dark and things were available there on a scale and for prices unheard of here, so certain habits developed that took the place of alcohol and love. I look back on that experience with something less than loathing only because the family I lived with there were paragons of beauty and light.

In the second half of junior year, back at Gettysburg, I was dehumanized for no reason for the first time in my life and found out what it was to personally despise a man. The rest of the semester passed in a fog of complacency and mistakes. I laughed more than I did in the past, but that calm when you feel like everything is right never made an appearance. To this day, I can’t tell you what was wrong, really. I reconnected with the people who I cared about and developed the habit of deleting people on Facebook who I decided weren’t really my friends. I pared it down to about 100 people here and across the rest of the world.

It seems like a blinked and I am here and freshman year was yesterday. So, here I am, first semester of my last year of college nearly dead and gone and several more breakdowns between August and December, and what do I have to show for it? In case you missed the theme: friends. I looked at my Facebook friends list the other day and realized it numbered above 200. I was stunned at how remiss I must have been in deleting people, but as I scrolled through I realized that I didn’t want to delete any of these people. I care about their lives. I want to know what their goals are, applaud their successes and comfort them in the face of any troubles they may encounter. I may not be the happiest, or the most whole person on the face of the planet, but goddamn it if I’m not the luckiest girl alive.