Title: Matriculation Ceremony

General Information about Item:

• Initiation Ritual
• Dartmouth College
• Informants: Charlie Pashlo
• Date Collected: November 3rd, 2018

Informant Data

• Charlie Pashlo is a freshman student at Dartmouth College and has lived in Newtown Connecticut his whole life. Because he is still in his first year at Dartmouth, Charlie has not yet decided on his major. He is on the Dartmouth Swimming team and is a teammate and close friend of mine.

Contextual Data

• Cultural Context: I interviewed Charlie on the first floor of the Baker Library. Charlie was introduced to Dartmouth’s matriculation ceremony during orientation. He was surrounded by all of his fellow floormates during the ceremony, which took place in the early afternoon in president Phil Hanlon’s office.
• Social Context: Dartmouth’s Matriculation Ceremony occurs during freshman orientation week. Orientation week involves many activities and traditions that help new students to bond with the other members of their class.

Item

• Every year, all Dartmouth freshman dress up in formal attire and are led by their UGA to the school presidents office. They are greeted by the president who gives them a brief talk about the Dartmouth values. After the talk is over, he shakes the hands of every student one by one, concluding the matriculation ceremony. After they do this, they have officially concluded the matriculation process and are officially enrolled in Dartmouth College.

Analysis

• Initiation rituals consist of three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. In this ritual, the separation stage occurs when the freshman gather with their floor and travel to the president’s office. Next, the transition stage happens when all the students arrive in the president’s office and listen to him speak. Finally, the incorporation process occurs when these students shake the president’s hand and return to their dorms.

Meaning and interpretation

• The matriculation ceremony is a ritual that occurs each year during Dartmouth’s freshman orientation. It acts as a way for the students to both meet the leader of their new school and to formally enter the college. The matriculation ceremony is something that every Dartmouth student goes through, and many of them fondly remember it as it signified the official start of their time as a Dartmouth student.

• Comparison:
  • Comparison within the subgroup:  In this sub-group, we focused on Dartmouth College social initiation rituals. The main similarity with these initiation rituals is that they all have the three phases of initiation rituals: separation, transition, and incorporation. Another similarity between most of these rituals is that freshman experience. A student’s freshman year is a time learn about his or her new community and the traditions that form its unique culture. Freshman year is also the time that most students join the clubs or sports teams that they will be most involved in throughout their Dartmouth careers. Therefore, it makes sense that so many of the Dartmouth social initiation rituals take place during the freshman year, such as the matriculation ceremony.  The matriculation ceremony and many of the rituals in our subgroup also involve helping freshman feel like they have officially become members of the Dartmouth community, and it also forms a connection with the leader of their community.
  • Comparison with the rest of the subgroups: The subgroups differ dramatically across the board. One difference within our subgroup is who initiates and rums each initiation ritual. Sometimes these rituals are set up and funded by the Dartmouth administration, and sometimes they are student-run. Another difference is the duration of each ritual. Some social spaces take a while to initiate into or involve various rituals to initiate new members, while others only require one short ritual.

Transcript

• Charlie Pashlo on how Dartmouth’s matriculation ceremony acted as an initiation ritual “we weren’t really considered students of the college until we did it.”

• Collector: J.P. Mortenson, Dartmouth College, Russian 13, Professor Valentina Apresyan, Professor Mikhail Gronas, Fall 2018

• Tags/Keywords:
  • Initiation
  • Ritual
  • Matriculation
  • Freshman class
  • Dartmouth