have difficulty placing myself on a social class hierarchy because I am an imposter wherever I go. It is impossible to reconcile my two lives. On the one hand, I used to drive past dairy farms, cornfields, and dilapidated trailer parks in my rusty pickup truck on my way to high school. I only took the SATs once because I couldn’t afford to take another Saturday off from the job I had in high school, and I certainly didn’t take any prep courses. While on the other hand, I attend one of the most elite schools in the world, surrounded by people for whom Dartmouth represents not incredible opportunity and privilege but simply the next and natural step of their educational continuums. I am surrounded by more wealth and opulence than I ever knew existed when I was growing up, and yet when I call home I hear my mom complain again about how she’s not sure how she’ll pay the mortgage this time around.

My mother never finished college due to my arrival. As a result, her dreams got recycled into me while she worked harder than anyone should trying to raise my two younger brothers and me on her own. To compensate, my mother did a remarkable job of raising us to appear of a much higher class than we actually were. She insisted on driving a Volvo even though she could never afford one that was built in the same decade in which she bought it. She did not tell us not to smoke or drink because it was bad for our health; instead she told us that they were dirty redneck things to do. She tried as hard as she could to socially distance us from our surroundings, and I think she succeeded. We all honestly believed that we were a little better than the average bear in our town. The same attitude works here, too—I’m sitting here wearing the same fine merino wool Banana Republic sweater that any girl on this campus could be wearing, but I paid $3.99 at Goodwill for mine. So who’s the smart one?

I’ll never be one of what I secretly refer to in my head as the “pretty girls,” i.e. one who wears fashionable shoes, always has a nice haircut, and accessorizes well—not that this bothers me. I think I pass as an Ivy Leaguer, even though I’ve had to upgrade most of my clothing purchases by shopping more at T.J. Maxx rather than Goodwill. However, there are a lot of aspects of Dartmouth life in which I just plain cannot participate due to where and how I was raised. I cannot compare childhood European vacations. I don’t even have a passport. I didn’t go to space camp, and I never bumped into movie stars at my high school soccer games, I’ve never been in the Guinness Book of World Records, and no one in my family has ever invented or owned anything famous. When I’m feeling spunky, I’ll find ways of getting everyone to shut up by saying things like “My neighbor was once cited by the town for not having a junkyard permit because their yard was so full of half-decomposed cars.” But most of the time, these conversations just get louder and louder as people try to one-up each other while I retreat into silence and feel my beer getting warmer in my hand.

Dartmouth students also love to play the name game, which goes like this: You meet someone. You ask this person where she is from. You say, oh, do you know so-and-so? And she says, oh yeah! And then you talk about this mutual friend, and all these other things you have in common. I take great delight in being very bad at this game. I get sick pleasure by stumping people who have just announced that they’re from The City or The Boston Area by just saying “I’m from Kenduskeag.” Then I’ll enjoy the look of bewilderment on their faces for a moment before telling them it’s in Maine. If they’ve heard of Maine, it’s likely that the next thing they’ll say is “Is that near (insert name of town where I went to camp)?” And then I say “No,” because no one would ever want to go to camp in a town that reeks of cow manure most of the time and covered in arctic tundra the rest of the time, although I tend not to say that part out loud. Mainers don’t go to camp. Rich people go to camp, and Mainers are not rich people, although Mainers cater to the rich when they show up in the summertime to do things like go to camp. I haven’t met a single person here who knows anyone I knew growing up, but I have listened on the outside to hours of other people’s conversations of this nature.

My brothers both attended two-year technical institutions (another thing I find myself explaining endlessly and vaguely to the name-gamers who get excited when they hear that I have brothers in college and they think I’m about to tell them that they go to Harvard) and they make fun of me for going to Dartmouth. From my brothers’ perspective, I’m paying zillions of dollars and not even gaining any practical skills in return. They cannot and/or will not grasp what it is I do here. One of them literally asked me one day, “So what the hell do you guys do over there? Sit around and theorize all day?” Ironically, I have the exact same problem here only in reverse: I can’t even begin to explain my home experience to name-gamers for whom my home is completely beyond the realm of their experience. People take an interest in me and my situation, but only to say such things as “Wow! You’ve eaten an animal that someone you know actually killed?” I’ve had to reframe my experience into accent-free words, and censor some parts of my experience because they are too painful for even me to understand, much less try to describe to someone else who has no concept of the lifestyle I have led and witnessed. Sometimes all I want at Dartmouth is to have someone who can appreciate driving around back roads past one-gas-station towns without calling them quaint; someone who won’t laugh at a house with a swayback barn and some junk cars in the yard; someone who can also appreciate Dartmouth and what it means to have the opportunity to come here, and someone who knows that Dartmouth doesn’t represent a typical rural experience. Unfortunately, being the invisible minority (there is no Poor White Trash College Fund) so these people are few and far between.

Maybe it’s the newfound sociologist in me or maybe it’s my way of distancing myself from it, but I definitely look at both of my worlds differently than I did when I got here. When I got here, I wanted Dartmouth to absorb me rather than the other way around. It took me awhile to realize that I was brought here to represent “country girl.” The more I realized that, the more I embodied that image. My mother tried so valiantly to raise us not be rednecks, so ironically it took half of an Ivy League education to learn that large belt buckles make great conversation pieces and country music ain’t half bad. I have resumed the use of certain words that I tried to eliminate from my vocabulary, and I amuse myself by letting a little accent slip out once in awhile. Part of me thinks I’m finally coming to terms with realizing the value of my experience rather than rejecting it, which I always was so desperate to do, but part of me just isn’t sure whether this is really me or just me acting out the demographic that I was brought here to represent. One thing is for sure, though: without both my home and school experiences, I don’t think I would be able to fully appreciate either one, if that’s even possible. Also, without Dartmouth, I wouldn’t be able to write this with a critical eye rather than a tearful one.