<p>There are basically two times in your Dartmouth career when you will make a lot of new friends. The first is freshman fall.The second is pledge term. If you skip pledge term, you skip the opportunity to make a lot of new friends. You also miss the stream of new friends as future pledge classes join the house when you become an upperclassman. As a result, there is a great deal of implicit pressure to rush.</p>
<p>You will do just fine not being in a Greek house. But you won’t have the full Dartmouth experience, and you will have to be a lot more proactive in making friends than you would be if you were in a Greek house.</p>
<p>One thing to note is that Dartmouth frats are not anywhere as exclusive as the stereotypical frat. Most frats have open parties, and even when there’s no party, on weeknights usually anyone can go into the basement and play pong. There’s no real douchy hard-on pressure to rush a Greek house. But I’d say there’s a fair amount of implicit pressure to participate in the Greek system.</p>
<p>There is an alternative, I might add – a lot of people who live in the East Wheelock Cluster often constitute an enclave of sorts from the rest of campus. They’re mostly nerdy and a bit anti-social, though often good kids. I think being a consistent East Wheelock resident is kind of like being in a very weird, nerdy Greek house, without the hazing or the miscellaneous weirdness which our nerdy frats get up to.</p>
<p>If none of these options enthuse you, you probably won’t have as much fun socializing at Dartmouth as most Dartmouth kids do. But, you’ll still have fun either way (unless you somehow mess up freshman fall, which is pretty hard to do).</p>