A Girls Student Days and After | Page 3

recreative side of school-days. She is already laying
the foundations for a successful, useful, normal existence, establishing
confidence at the outset and not handicapping herself through her
whole course by making people lose their faith in her. Our ideal
freshman may be the girl who is to do distinguished work; she may be

the student who does her best; and because it is her best, the work,
though not brilliant, is distinguished by virtue of her effort. She may be
the girl who is to make a happy home life through her poise and
earnestness and common sense. Whoever she is, in any event in
learning to do her best she is winning nine-tenths of the battle of a
successful career. It is she, attractive, able, earnest, with the "fair-play"
or team-play spirit in all she does, true to herself and to others, whom
every school wants, whose unconscious influence is so great in
building up the morale of any school. Mark this girl and follow her, for
she is worthy of your hero worship.
This is the girl who goes into school in much the same spirit that she
would enter upon a larger life. She is not a prig and she is not a dig, but
she knows there are responsibilities to be met and she meets them. She
expects to have to think about the new conditions in which she finds
herself and to adjust herself to them, and she does it. She knows the
meaning of the team-play spirit and she takes her place quietly on the
team, one among many, and both works and plays with respect for the
rights and positions of others. It is in the temper of the words
sometimes stamped upon the coins of our country--E Pluribus
Unum--that she makes a success of her school life. She knows that not
only is our country bigger than any one of its states, but also that every
school is bigger than any one of its members whether teacher or student.
In a small family at home conditions have been more or less made for
her, just as they are for other girls. Yet she knows that the school life is
complicated and complex, and it is impossible for her to feel neglected
where a more self-centred or spoiled girl fails to see that in this new life
she is called upon to play a minor part but nevertheless a part upon
which the school must rely for its esprit de corps. She goes with ease
from the somewhat unmethodical life of the home to the highly
organized routine of the school because she understands the meaning of
the word "team-play." She has the coöperative spirit.
Yet there are other girls, too, in this school which the freshman is
entering. There is the student who errs on the side of leading too
workaday a life, and in so doing has lost something of the buoyancy
and breadth and "snap" which would make her associations and her

work fresher and more vigorous. "The Grind," she has been called, and
if she recognize herself in this sketch, let her take care to reach out for a
bigger and fuller life than she is leading. And there is, too, the selfish
student whose "class-spirit" is self-spirit; and the girl who is not selfish
but who uses herself up in too many interests, dramatic, athletic,
society, philanthropic and in a dozen others. She is probably
over-conscientious, a good girl in every way, but in doing too much she
loses sight of the real aim of her school life. To these must be added
another student,--the freshman who skims the surface, and is, when she
gets out, where she was when she entered--no, not quite so far along,
for she has slipped back. She is selfish, relying upon the patience and
burden-bearing capacity of her father and mother, as well as the school.
No doubt every girl would meet her obligations squarely if she realized
what was the underlying significance of the freshman year; the school
life would surely be approached with a conscientious purpose. What a
girl gets in school will much depend upon what she has to give. No girl
is there simply to have a good time or merely to learn things out of
books. Nor is she there to fill in the interim between childhood and
young womanhood, when one will go into society, another marry, and a
third take up some wage-earning career. No, she is there to carry life
forward in the deepest, truest sense; and the longer she can have to get
an education and to make the best of the opportunities of school and
college life, the richer and fuller her after-years will be. Both middle
life and old age will be deeper