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.

Harvard University: why has everyone heard of it?

Sunday, July 4th
Harvard University campus

A Happy fourth of July from Harvard University! During my term at Harvard so far, I have had the opportunity to dine three times a day in the magnificent building pictured below. What appears to be a giant cathedral is actually home to Annenberg Hall, Harvard's main dining facility. What most universities would consider a most prized architectural feat has been transformed by Harvard from a "spare parts" civil war memorial building into one of the most heavily used buildings on campus. If they're using this outstanding facility as a cafeteria, just imagine what else this place holds in store!

Let me first give you a snapshot of Harvard from my stay here so far. Harvard commands an indescribable sense of awe and prestige all around campus. Through the oversized buildings and perfect, New England style campus, pretense runs thick in the air. The volume of tourists running through Harvard Yard averages 8,000 per day, while the Yard itself holds only a few academic buildings and Harvard College’s 1650 first year students. Tour groups of up 50 persons pass through the yard every half hour, and even in the summer, when there are only 6,700 students enrolled in summer school out of the school year’s 20,000, Harvard is a crowded place.

Being enrolled in summer school there now has revealed to me how eager high school students across the world are to enroll in by far the wealthiest, most prestigious university in the world. Out of the 1,200 or so high school students enrolled in summer term through the Secondary School Program, over one in three was drawn to Harvard from a foreign country, and almost every fellow student I’ve talked to here has set Harvard as their first choice college (not me). I hate to disappoint them, but their chances of admission are astoundingly low overall, and even lower for international students, the group for whom admission seems most in demand. For the class of 2014, Harvard College received 30,489 for an entering class of 1667 freshmen, setting Harvard’s admit rate at a record low of 6.9%.

So what exactly draws all this attention?

To begin with, Harvard claims a lot of impressive feats: it was the first institute of higher education in the United States; it has the most alumni U.S. presidents, supreme court justices, and senators of any university; and is additionally ranked number 1  by the following widely cited rankings: Academic Ranking of World Universities, U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges, and the Times Higher Education review. In terms of resources, Harvard has the largest endowment of any university in the world at $25.6 billion, and the largest university library collection in the United States with over 80 libraries containing over $15 million volumes.

Understandably, the undergraduate experience these 30,000 yearly applicants are seeking is one emphasizing the university's opportunities and resources, not to mention the immeasurable value of a Harvard stamp on one's degree after it's 400 year prestigious legacy. Despite the college's top notch academic resources, these survey findings published in the Harvard Crimson denote my general impression of the undergraduate experience at Harvard:

Prevalent stereotypes about how Harvard undergraduates have less fun than their peers found empirical confirmation Tuesday, when the Boston Globe reported that Harvard students gave lower ratings to their college experience than students at other elite schools in a 2002 survey. 

An internal Harvard memo analyzing data from the survey found that Harvard students rated their overall satisfaction at 3.95 on a five-point scale, compared to an average of 4.16 at the 30 other schools surveyed, the Globe reported on Tuesday. Harvard students gave lower ratings than peers to the level of interaction with faculty members and the quality of social life. 

This satisfaction rating placed Harvard fifth from the bottom in the survey of the 31 colleges comprising the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE). The COFHE includes all eight Ivy League schools, other top research universities like MIT and Stanford University, and leading small liberal arts colleges like Amherst College and Williams College.

 Ultimately, Harvard is not necessarily the most enjoyable place to spend one's undergraduate years, but I would argue that it offers the most opportunities, exposure to top faculty, graduate level coursework, and decidedly the most talented, luminary, and ambitious entering class of any undergraduate program in the world. Harvard's academic intensity and general academic program are, of course, a given. In fact, I won't even go into the specifics of student demographics and teaching style, as I have in nearly every other review, because Harvard is one of the few schools that I truly believe has everything one could want in an undergraduate education. For example, I recently acquired a book called "Find the Perfect College for You: 82 Exceptional Schools That Fit Your Personality and Learning Style," which matches students with colleges that match their Myers-Briggs personality type; in this book, Harvard is one of three schools compatible with each and every personality type (the others are Yale and Princeton). However, what really distinguishes Harvard from other top colleges is its true international focus. Close your eyes and imagine a place where the smartest and most ambitious young adults from all over the world literally come together into one confined area to learn and share and challenge each other. Now open your eyes - I'm speaking of Harvard.

This is very arguable, but my personal academic philosophy (and that of many top colleges) is the emphasis placed on the caliber of people around you in the college or university setting, in the sense that most students learn more during their undergraduate experience from their peers than from their coursework. This is why, for example, I take college rankings and entering class statistics as a serious indication of the quality of a college; diversity of opinion and intellectual prowess tend to come hand in hand with competitive admissions (holistically, not just based on test scores and GPA). With this in mind, Harvard is likely able to be the number one producer of Rhodes and Marshall Scholars and U.S. Presidents not because their is something magical in the water of Cambridge, MA, but because the sheer age and wealth of the institution has attracted the best and brightest minds from across the world, and that collaboration is what really produces extraordinary results.