<p>Would love to hear how prospective students found Dimensions. Did it help you make a decision?</p>
<p>It helped solidify my decision to not attend Dartmouth. It’s a great school, but was not for me. </p>
<p>At 9 pm on Thursday, there was a big welcome for the students. Lots of dancing and singing from the Dartmouth first-years. Very rowdy. Then at 10 pm they sent us to various residence halls, where there was more dancing and singing from various student performance groups. It was pretty entertaining.</p>
<p>On Friday, I sat in on a Paleobiology class and a math class about derivatives. I don’t really have anything good/bad to say about the math class. Paleobiology was relatively interesting. Mainly I just talked with other prospective students. The kids were all pretty nice. I ended up leaving early since I wasn’t really enjoying my time and did not have any interest in sneaking into a frat party at night.</p>
<p>Dimensions definitely seemed to suffer from the Rolling Stone article. Some student group was organizing a petition from prospective students about how the Greek system served as a deterrent from matriculating. There were TONS of bad, corny, and forced jokes about hazing, drinking, and frats. My host was pretty riled up about the article. Kids seemed pretty devoted to their drinking.</p>
<p>All of the facilities I saw at Dartmouth were all really nice though.</p>
<p>VERY investing thread, thank you for posting it movinmom. Also, Calexico, where are you now planning to matriculate? Thank you for your response.</p>
<p>Incredible. A lot of kids I’ve spoken to are now choosing Dartmouth after this, they said.</p>
<p>This frat propaganda is so overblown. A frat or sorority at Dartmouth is no different than a frat or sorority at another school. My daughter graduated from Dartmouth in 2009 and she rarely stepped inside a frat or a sorority. She thoroughly enjoyed her time at Dartmouth and has no regrets about not being part of the frat/sorority scene. It is not as if you have to be part of that scene if you attend Dartmouth. There is so much more to Dartmouth than fraternities and sororities.</p>
<p>By the way, it didn’t seem to “suffer” at all from the article. Yeah, some kids handed out those (ridiculous, according to all the kids I spoke to) letters, but guess what I saw almost every kid do right after? Crumple them up and toss them straight in the trash. Some current students spoke about the article, but only ever if prospies asked them about it. Not a single student I spoke to (and I spoke to over a hundred or so) seemed “riled up” about it. Overall, it was really on the periphery of the weekend.</p>
<p>“My daughter graduated from Dartmouth in 2009 and she rarely stepped inside a frat or a sorority.”</p>
<p>As far as you know…</p>
<p>My host was definitely riled up about it. He said that Lohse was a cocaine addict and that the article was total muckraking (without any mention of it by us, the prospective students). He also criticized the people handing out flyers without prompting. It’s understandable (and possibly true), since he said that he is friends with a lot of kids at SAE and he also plans to rush next year, but he was definitely pretty bothered by the article.</p>
<p>And I don’t know if the dumb jokes about hazing & drinking are prominent every year at Dimensions, but I, and a few of the other prospies that I spoke to, felt like they were being made in response to the Rolling Stone article.</p>
<p>LimitlessRX: I am 99% going to commit to UChicago. Dartmouth had incredibly friendly students, great job placement, very well-maintained facilities, and a strong focus on undergrads, but I was instantly enamored with UChicago’s emphasis on “life of the mind” and serious scholarship. I think the telling difference between the students and prospies that I met at both places was that the ones at Dartmouth said that UChicago turned them off because they were too intense about academics, while the UChicago students said that they appreciated the school’s academic intensity because they came there first and foremost to learn. I suppose Dartmouth fits into the “work hard play hard” school type, which many people love, but it just didn’t appeal to me.</p>
<p>I met another kid there who is planning on turning down Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, and Caltech to go to UChicago, which was pretty impressive to me.</p>
<p>My son LOVED it!!! YAY!!! He said that the classes were incredible; the professors were interesting and engaging. He said that the Dartmouth students were so nice and friendly. The student he stayed with told him how much he has been overwhelmed and overjoyed by the intellectual atmosphere of the school. I’ve never seen my son this happy. He can’t believe his good fortune to be so welcomed into this community. He said that he asked many students about Rolling Stone and they were outraged. It’s simply not the norm. Interestingly, he made a friend who told him that at U Chicago days his host disappeared the whole time and the kids with whom he was left were so drunk that he couldn’t communicate with them. That kid is going to choose Dartmouth. The only kid he didn’t like was the boy who kept complaining and saying how he was definitely going to go to Harvard. Shows to go you!</p>
<p>Lol @Dartdart, “Shows to go you!” instead of “Goes to show you”</p>
<p>calexico:the idea that Dartmouth lacks seriousness about academics and scholarship is absurd. Talk to any Dartmouth student. There is a reason why Dartmouth is ranked #1 for undergraduate teaching and why it soundly beats Uchicago in cross-admits. AND it will give you the social life and opportunities to become well-rounded not available at UChicago.</p>
<p>Eh… that ranking is USNWR and reputational, so the metric is questionable, as it isn’t based on hard data. And I haven’t seen any up to date cross-admit data; I’d definitely appreciate it though! I know that the parchment website features such data, but parchment features a pretty limited pool of applicants, so it’s basically one small data point of people who spend a lot of time thinking about college on the internet (like collegeconfidential!) and are more likely to go off of some of the shallower reasons for choosing a college that are given by the internet (like the cross-admit comparison rates). </p>
<p>For my part, I definitely found a fair amount of diversity at Dimensions as I managed to stumble into a Christian youth meeting; however, I did have a nagging suspicion that upperclassmen were likelier to segregate along racial lines (saw tons of Asians in the religious society and comparatively fewer Caucasians, etc…)</p>
<p>@cmarmom It is my personal opinion, based on interacting with both student bodies for a very short period of time. I’m sure Dartmouth students are serious about academics and scholarship, but in my opinion significantly less so than the average UChicago student. I don’t think this idea is absurd…</p>