What VT College Really Teaches You: How Having a Psychologist in Vermont is your Secret Weapon
- Cody Thomas Rounds
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
The information in this blog is for educational and entertainment purposes only
The Lived Experience
You arrive in Vermont convinced that college is a grand, vertical expansion. The white peaks of the Green Mountains frame your future, the air tastes like possibility, and you mistake the epic, physical view for perspective itself. You believe the landscape is a mirror for your destiny. Freshman year is pure, unadulterated momentum: a frenzy of self-invention. You choose a new name, build a frenetic schedule stuffed with honors societies and niche clubs, and construct a set of friends born from sheer proximity and the hunger for a ready-made identity. You fill every available hour—the networking lunch, the midnight study session, the overly detailed social media post—believing that speed equals purpose, and busy-ness equals belonging.
Then, November arrives.
The season shifts with a harsh, surgical honesty, a brutal clarity that the mountains in September never warned you about. The sky flattens to a permanent, featureless gray, and the celebrated foliage falls faster than your early confidence. You quickly learn what it means to live in a place that will not flatter your need for distraction. The world suddenly shrinks into the radius of your dorm room, the icy walk across the quad, and the unavoidable sound of your own thoughts. There is a deep, rural isolation that resists superficial engagement.
The silence of a Vermont winter is the first unexpected curriculum. It asks for a level of honesty you didn't budget for—not the honesty of confession, but the honesty of analysis. You start meeting yourself in the uncomfortable gaps: between classes, between late-night texts, in the heavy pause between the noise you once called belonging. You feel the dissonance between the perfect student you present to the world and the restless, confused person you are alone at 2 AM. You realize that your carefully engineered momentum was, in fact, a sophisticated form of avoidance.
By spring, the snow melts to reveal less about the world and more about you. You have friends who know your coffee order but not your thoughts. You have opinions on everything and clarity on nothing. College is slower, stranger, and profoundly lonelier than the brochure promised. You realize that real growth doesn’t announce itself with a flourish or a declaration; it happens privately, in small humiliations, quiet endurance, and the necessary boredom of long, un-interrupted afternoons.
The Fatigue of Performance
Sophomore year brings the heavy, dangerous illusion of control. You know the institutional rhythms now: where to sit to look engaged, what conversational moves will signal intellectual depth, how to construct the perfect façade of composure. But composure, you realize, is a mask, and you can feel the elastic slipping and chafing beneath your chin. You start measuring yourself against others—their relentless certainty, their pre-packaged five-year plans, their perfectly curated purpose. It becomes a silent, zero-sum competition that everyone participates in, where the true cost is paid in energy and genuine connection.
The specific metrics of this competition are never spoken aloud: the number of internships secured, the apparent ease with which peers handle a triple load, the practiced casualness with which they dismiss success. This constant comparison breeds Imposter Syndrome, the cognitive dissonance between the mask you wear and the deep anxiety you feel. You are not just doing the work; you are expending twice the effort to look like the work is effortless. This effort is the anchor dragging you down.
The workload deepens, and so does the inner noise—a constant, critical monologue. You catch yourself running on autopilot, performing competence long after the internal engine has stalled and you’ve lost the actual direction. The cognitive load of maintaining the mask is crippling. This is where the first true fatigue sets in: the deep, existential exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix, because it is not biological. It is the exhaustion of becoming someone by sheer force of will—a relentless, uphill push—rather than by the organic, patient unfolding of genuine understanding. This is ambition burnout, the cost of treating your identity as a project for external approval. The effort required to keep the performance running is what drains your focus, destroys your capacity for authentic connection, and turns potential energy into toxic friction.
Junior year, the mask doesn’t just slip—it cracks. The vast campus that once promised infinity now feels like a miserable, claustrophobic loop: same buildings, same routines, same superficial conversations about “what comes next.” You start to see how much of adult life runs on evasion, how ambition becomes avoidance of deep emotional work, and how certainty is often just an elaborate disguise for fear. You sense the toxic internal pattern—the self-sabotaging loops that ruin your focus and waste your time—but you don't yet know how to interrupt the script.
Precision Over Achievement
Winter presses in again, but this time, you meet it differently. This time, the stillness of the landscape feels less like a threat and more like a necessary tool. With nowhere left to hide, you are finally forced to observe your thoughts: how they repeat the same arguments, how they argue pointlessly with settled reality, and how they distort every piece of incoming information into a reason for anxiety.
The key discovery is that the problem isn't the world; it's your interpretive filter. You notice that anxiety isn't chaos; it is an overdeveloped imagination working against you—the ability to brilliantly pre-experience future failures and manufacture urgency where none exists. This insight begins the shift toward a true growth mindset. You stop asking, "Why is this happening to me?" and start asking, "What pattern is this an example of?"
You begin to suspect that the core challenge of adulthood isn't achievement (because achievement is fleeting), but precision: the surgical ability to see what is real without the filter of your own internal drama or ego. The external landscape of Vermont—cold, clear, and unembellished—becomes the template for your internal view.
By senior year, you are sharper, quieter, and far less performative. The frantic need for external validation has quieted into a desire for internal integrity. You realize that talk is cheap, but follow-through is the only currency that matters. You start valuing consistency over intensity, and depth over speed. The people who impressed you most as a freshman are now often the ones most exhausted by the maintenance of their own tireless performance. The strange ache of ending is not nostalgia; it’s the quiet satisfaction of calibration. You’ve learned how to read yourself under pressure, recognizing how loneliness clarifies motives and how repetition becomes discipline.
You graduate with two educations: one public, built on facts and frameworks and stamped on a diploma; and one private, built on pattern recognition—the rigorous, indispensable study of your own mind.
Functional Introspection, Calibrated by a Psychologist in Vermont
Somewhere in those four years, often triggered by a crisis or quiet desperation, you realize that raw intelligence cannot steady you. You can think your way through a theoretical physics problem, but you can’t think your way through emotional uncertainty.
That's where the commitment to personal development—often facilitated by the best practitioners of Vermont psychology principles—enters, not as a last-resort rescue, but as a primary tool for calibration and optimization. The work moves past generalized "feelings." A good psychologist in Vermont moves past generalized "feelings." It is less about being cheered on and more about rigorous, dispassionate observation. The stillness of the Vermont landscape, which once felt isolating, is now used as an external prompt for internal focus. The quiet demands the slowing of thought itself.
The core technique of this mindset shift is the analytical approach: The questions posed are simple and surgical: What are you avoiding? What story are you running when you get defensive? The goal is to cultivate a growth mindset—training yourself to treat emotion as data, not drama. For example, the impulse to rage isn't merely "bad anger"; it's a piece of data indicating a perceived violation of respect or safety. That spike of irritation isn't an indictment of your colleague; it's a signal that a specific boundary of yours is being crossed. The internal world is not a storm to merely survive; it’s a complex, self-referential system to be managed and refined through consistent maintenance.
This process—the functional introspection taught by a skilled masters level psychologist—is the deliberate separation of reaction (the hot, automatic defense) from response (the cool, deliberate move). It means knowing your self-sabotaging patterns so intimately—the cycles of procrastination, the defensive intellectualizing, the need for approval—that they can no longer blindside you. You learn to spot the first flicker of an old habit before it consumes the entire day. This is a psychological discipline that directly parallels physical conditioning, building internal endurance where emotion and impulse once dictated pace and direction.
Mastery, in this context, is the ultimate goal. It is not about the absolute control of reality, but control earned through absolute awareness of self and a disciplined mindset. This is true personal development. You learn to treat discomfort—the anxiety before a presentation, the shame after a mistake—as vital information, not an indictment of your worth. You view your internal life like a craftsman views a piece of wood: something to shape, refine, and strengthen under pressure. Friction is not failure; it is feedback. You stop negotiating with the same tired problems. You recover faster from setbacks. You waste less energy on reactivity, because the system is already mapped.
This systematic approach leads to true behavioral optimization. You begin to think less about the ephemeral concept of happiness and more about systemic optimization and alignment—the state of living so that what you do, what you say, and what you fundamentally believe all point in the same direction. It is the elimination of internal contradiction. By the time you leave Vermont, you understand the lesson the landscape was teaching all along: that stillness is not emptiness—it is control in disguise. It is the space required for precision.
You came to college chasing an external definition; you leave it practicing internal discernment. The difference is everything.
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About the Author
Cody Thomas Rounds- Clinical Psychologist
Cody is board-certified clinical psychologist, but he sees himself as a lifelong learner, especially when it comes to understanding human development and the profound impact of learning on our well-being.
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