Dartmouth College

Hanover, NH
July 24, 2010

After my second trip to Dartmouth and a good deal of research, one would think I would have a decisive opinion on this small research university located in Hanover, New Hampshire. A two hour bus ride brought me from Harvard through progressively more rural and beautiful landscape, until we arrived in Hanover. The small town located on one side of Dartmouth’s campus really meshes with the college, providing loads of accessible eateries and coffee shops in addition to a CVS, Gap, and a movie theater. The campus itself has an amazing New England feel with stately, uniform brick buildings and a huge “campus green” that provides a central open space for ultimate frisbee and other student activities throughout the year right in the heart of campus.

Dartmouth’s main draw is the amazing academic experience it is able to offer as a small liberal arts university. Dartmouth’s campus holds only around 4,200 undergraduates and  an 1,800 graduate students in medicine, engineering, and business, but that doesn’t stop it from accomplishing great research. Dartmouth is often regarded as providing the experience of a small liberal arts college, simply on a larger scale. The college prides itself on all of its courses being taught by full professors (matched only by Brown among Ivy League competitors) and having no teaching assistants, thus providing students with arguably the most intimate teaching environment of any Ivy League school (along with Brown). In fact, the teaching at Dartmouth is so good that the college was ranked number 1 among national universities for “Best Undergraduate Teaching” by U.S. News & World Report.

The idea of such an “intimate” academic environment stems mostly from the absence of graduate students in most departments. The idea is (like at most small liberal arts colleges) that without grad students around, there’s nothing to detract from the undergrad experience, and professors can both invest more time and effort into teaching undergrads and call only upon undergraduates to help them with research, since there are no graduate students to hog research positions. It could thus be said that Dartmouth’s defining attribute is the availability of opportunities for students of all ages (no upperclassmen advantage) and intensities (no preference for majors over non-majors).

Dartmouth also maintains a unique academic calendar colloquially known as the D-plan. The college runs on the quarter system, meaning that there’s a fall, winter, spring, and summer quarter as opposed to the a typical fall and spring semester. In order to graduate, students must take only three out of the four quarters each academic year, that ushers in a lot of flexibility that students have come to love. During the Freshman and Senior years, students are required to be in residence the whole academic year, so as to secure a proper introduction and conclusion to their academic experience. During Sophomore and Junior years, however, students may spend any term on campus, on leave, on a FSP (foreign study program), or on an LSA (language study abroad). This sort of freedom allows students to customize their academic experience and get great placement into internships in say the winter, when their competition (other university students) is tied up in the semester schedule. Another great example of availability is the required “sophomore summer” on campus, where sophomores rule the school with most upperclassmen gone and get top academic priority among professors and also get to try out leadership roles in campus organizations that would be taken up by upperclassmen.

Here's the broad outline for scheduling. Any term marked "R" means in-Residence on campus. As you can see, Sophomore and Junior years are where the real freedom lies:

Here's a sample schedule for a typical student:

All of this furthers the idea that the school is all about facilitating any experience for each and every student as best they can. This ultimately means awesome resume building, many would argue, at the expense of a truly academic experience as offered at most other semester schools that spend more time in depth on academics and have higher academic expectations during the regular year with fewer distractions. Personally, I think the D-plan specifically speaks to the type of people who want an “in and out” experience in college that doesn’t offer the attachment and typical college environment that most students grow to love.

One Dartmouth student seriously critiques the D-plan in the Dartmouth newspaper article “D-plan Dilemma,” citing that the alleged D-plan perks of more available internships and study abroad programs first of all aren’t all they’re cracked up to be since most such programs aren’t flexible enough to accommodate the D-plan. Secondly, the D-plan destroys clubs and relationships, since friends and couples can go a whole academic year without seeing each-other due to a frenzy of FSP and LSA programs, coupled with the risk that many students don’t get their first choice program and have to settle with what’s available. Student organizations can also go consecutive quarters without having the whole group together to make important decisions or to run events. The author also comments that though this jumble increases diversity of activities and opens up leadership roles to more students, the ultimate effect is to stifle group capability, especially for demanding groups like student publications, sports teams, or arts and music groups. Maybe the semester system doesn’t sound so bad after all!

Everything I’ve mentioned so far had a pretty neutral effect on me, but what really turned me off from the school was the overwhelming presence of Greek life on campus, a system in which over 60% of students participate. Dartmouth was, after all the inspiration for the movie “Animal House” which notoriously depicted the ravages college students and alcohol are capable of causing. Greek houses are everywhere, though it should be noted that they are all non-residential Greek houses, so they don’t carry the exclusivity often associated with such groups. Because the houses are small, they are merely social spaces for students to gather and eat, not to sleep, so all students still live in common university housing. My tour group was hazed repeatedly by shirtless frat guys and loud music blaring from frat houses, even right across from the school’s amazing library. To me, the Greek scene was just too dominant to be an appropriate part of social life, and it appeared to strongly detract from the academic experience rather than enriching campus culture overall.

Ultimately, this beautiful college in Hanover, New Hampshire provides an amazing undergraduate education with a very unique D-plan academic calendar and awesome student-professor interaction. However, it’s social scene and general student demographic may not appeal to everyone, and this school should be thought of as occupying a very particular niche among the nation’s top colleges.