Dartmouth College: Choose Your Own Adventure

As I mentioned in the posts about Middlebury College, this area of the country is just endlessly beautiful. Like Middlebury, Vermont, Hanover, New Hampshire, is a charming New England village with a stellar college at its core. This place strikes exactly the right balance of a quiet place to study intensely (sprawling lawns, colonial buildings, cold winters) with a small but bustling town where there's fun to be had (movie theatre, art galleries, restaurants, Gap and Banana Republic).

Dartmouth is the smallest Ivy League university, and it's the Ivy with the second-largest percentage of undergraduates on campus--71%. The table in this post on the Ivy League schools gives you more insight into that comparison. This ratio is the reason that I recommend Dartmouth, Brown (73%), Cornell (68%), and Princeton (67%) to our students a little more frequently than the other Ivies. Remember, I'm a proud Harvard graduate, but I turned down their offer of admission for undergrad because of the way that graduate students outnumber graduate students on campus. My goal was to do my bachelor's degree where my professors' primary focus would be on undergraduate education--not on the legions of grad students who outnumbered me. This is one of the things that makes Dartmouth more special: in the words of our Texas admissions representative, "Dartmouth is all about the undergrads."

The hallmark of a Dartmouth education is its flexibility. Every student constructs their own "D-Plan", a four-year curriculum that's all about combining time on campus with time out in the world. The school year operates on a quarter system of four, ten-week terms. Students are required to be on campus for the fall, winter, and spring terms of the freshman and senior year, and during the summer of their sophomore year, but their time can be spent anywhere and everywhere otherwise. Dartmouth students study abroad in huge numbers (it's number one in the Ivy League for students studying abroad), and they graduate with strong connections to industry through volunteering and internships gained during their education. Like many of the other schools I visited that seemed a little remote, Dartmouth strikes a great balance between the time you spend studying in this gorgeous setting with time spent learning on-the-job skills and making connections in places like Boston or New York.

Even though Dartmouth is small, it's a leader in engineering, medicine, and business. The Tuck School of Business and the Thayer School of Engineering are world-renowned, and the medical school is top-notch as well. One of the most exciting programs right now at Dartmouth is its emerging program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science that is becoming world-renowned. This program has close partnerships with Harvard and MIT and allows its students to do impressive independent research in these areas. At Dartmouth, programs like this are the rule rather than the exception: this is a place all about a highly personalized undergraduate education with the "intellectual character" of a university experience.

Dartmouth is famous for its on-campus traditions and for being a bit of a party school. There are major event weekends (called "big weekends") to mark each term, including a Winter Carnival and a bonfire weekend. Many Dartmouth students get involved in Greek life; about 60% of Dartmouth students are in sororities and fraternities. Athletics are a big deal on campus: students support their Big Green in droves, and there are highly competitive intramural teams on campus as well.

I had a great conversation with Dartmouth's admissions rep for Texas, who is a Houston native. As I mentioned above, he emphasized that Dartmouth is all about the undergraduates: this is a place where every student has the opportunity to take the reins in his or her academic life--and every student is expected to participate in and contribute to the university at the highest level.

I think the most interesting insight our rep offered me was his profile of a successful Dartmouth applicant. Every Dartmouth applicant is assessed based on four points--two tangible points balanced by two intangible points. Each student's grades and test scores (tangible) are balanced by an assessment of their intellectual quality (intangible); each applicant's extracurricular achievements (tangible) are balanced by an assessment of their character (intangible). Dartmouth is one of few institutions that requires a peer recommendation. The admissions staff here is really invested in finding students who will be as bright and engaging in person as they are on paper. They want people who not only have the academic chops to perform well here; they also want people who will contribute to life on campus and who won't have peaked academically or socially in high school.

While Dartmouth is indeed all about the undergrads, it seems to me like there's even more to the place than that. The quality of campus life at Dartmouth is shaped uniquely by the choices that the undergraduates make here. This is Choose Your Own Adventure College, and its students gain a unique education in self-advocacy and self-awareness that makes this place particularly special.