I am a rising senior in high school, and I just have a few questions. I’m sorry if I did not do this correctly; it’s my first post.
I understand the D Plan, but I could not find information about the actual curriculum requirements for undergraduates. Is it an open curriculum like Brown University? Is there some kind of structure? How much of your schedule should belongs to your major and how much to other liberal arts subjects?
Thank you!
It depends: http://dartmouth.edu/education/degrees
Basic version:
Since Dartmouth is a liberal arts, they do require you to take a certain set of distributive requirements. That means regardless of your major, you’ll have to take a science class and a music class and a writing class etc. For me, it was 12 or so of these classes, designed to give you a breadth of experience in all parts. But don’t worry, if you’re an English major, you don’t have to take hardcore math. They have a lot of variety in what they consider to fill those requirements, so for “Philosophy & Religion” requirement, you could read about greek and roman tragedy and comedies, or “Mind and Brain” which was about brain makeup (neurons and such) AND what gives humans a sense of self, and how that interplays (counts for a science OR a philosophy req!).
Then you’ll have a handful of classes to take for your major (maybe 8-11). To take those classes you might have a few prerequisite classes (Chem 5 is required for engineering classes as an example)
So then you’ve got 10 major classes, 4 prereqs, 12 distribs, which leaves you about 9 unclaimed classes to take anything you want.
That’s a rough example, and distribs have likely changed since I was there, but that’s the general idea. ATS posted the exact breakdown for you, and once you get to Dartmouth you and your Advisor can map your 4 years out for you if you want to go to that level of detail.