What is Dartmouth Culture? How is it for males and the frats?
Hey, I’ll attach a post I sent to someone else that may help you too:
Hey! To be clear, every elite school had a frat centric or finals club centric social atmosphere of something of that nature like 40 years ago. It was just very white guy dominated at the time. Dartmouth is only known for it due to the Animal House movie, based on a now ended frat.
In the last few decades, finals/eating clubs and frats have reformed at top institutions, and Dartmouth has really led the way on that. We had to, since that ridiculously overexaggerated movie made us unfairly “known” for frats.
As a result, unlike most schools, almost all parties and events at frats have become open to everyone with a Dartmouth ID. This is important, since these spaces cannot be dominated any longer by the same demographic. Places like finals clubs at Princeton on the other hand, are largely exclusive i.e. you need to know someone on the inside to get into events.
Furthermore, a lot of frats have changed or popped up which are very different from traditional frats. Many are just like student societies, focused on social justice, or playing board games or video games together. The general use of the term greek life does not really represent the majority of societies we have here. Several are even gender inclusive.
Also, most students involved in greek societies don’t live there, also unusual. Most live in college housing. As a result, people’s involvement in greek societies generally only represents a fraction of what they do at Dartmouth. So, it’s quite easy to have an active social life at Dartmouth without rushing a society. I don’t plan on it, for example, and I’m not all worried. I will always have access to parties if I want it, and besides there are tons of other things going on in the weekends, like movies, theater productions, game nights etc. These are all very well attended, and I’ve often chosen not to go to a party to attend some of these
Of course, like any college, the party scene is alive and well. So the majority of your daughter’s friends will be going out on the weekends. But as I said, there’s always other options, and plenty of people who don’t choose that. But people at these schools are a lot more interesting and less traditional party people than in high school. I never parties on high school but now I do on most weekends for one night at least. And the first few times, I didn’t even drink, and there was NO pressure on me to do so.
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