<p>The name is obviously a misnomer because Dartmouth is in the Ivy League and is an amazing school. I feel like Dartmouth always gets a bad rep because it's in the middle of nowhere, and does quarters, not semesters. I'd like to know some opinions of actual people at Dartmouth as to how it really is.</p>
<p>Are you kidding?
Dartmouth is amazing.
It has amazing resources, amazing internship opportunities for its students, amazing teachers.
Is Dartmouth Harvard?
No.
Is Dartmouth an incredible school?
Yes.</p>
<p>Dartmouth is not for applicants who believe vague generalities and rumors. For you, Dartmouth is “very bad”</p>
<p>Speaking on the fact that Dartmouth is in “the middle of nowhere,” I visited Dartmouth the day after falling in love with Harvard. I loved everything about Cambridge: the town, the proximity to Boston, the endless streams of people, etc. Harvard went from #2 to #1 immediately after I stepped foot on campus.</p>
<p>But Dartmouth? Oh my god it’s beautiful. Hanover is the single most pretty campus and town I’ve ever seen. The town has an insular feel, yes, but it was a beautiful morning and there were people EVERYWHERE. There were more people on Dartmouth’s campus than Princeton’s when I visited. Dartmouth has a distinct feeling that was both more friendly and more warm than Harvard seemed to have. I fell in love with Dartmouth and briefly considered applying ED there (which is big for me; even though I’m still not going to for financial reasons, even considering it means a lot). </p>
<p>Dartmouth may have its less-than-desirable qualities, but it really is a quaint college campus surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States. </p>
<p>And the quarters system seems only beneficial to students. From what I could tell, more students had the opportunity to study abroad, get internships, and do independent research as a result of having so much freedom with their academic schedules.</p>
<p>The quarter system allows students to take fewer courses at a time but more intensely than in the semester system. D found it wonderful. As an aside, she was pretty sure that she would not apply to Dartmouth after spending most of the summer there as a rising senior. I quote: “It literally is the middle of nowhere. If I can’t do 8 weeks I can’t do 4 years. Probably a no.” Guess what 13 wishes she could do the last four years again? It’s beautiful town and a fantastic school.</p>
<p>I don’t know a single person on the Dartmouth faculty who thinks the “Dartmouth Plan” is good for educating students. Keep in mind, the Plan wasn’t developed for educational reasons. Dartmouth is the last of the Ivies to admit women, and when it finally did so, it faced a big housing crunch. Thus the “D-Plan”, which shuttles a significant percentage of the student party off-campus each term. The educational downsides are pretty obvious. In most cases, the terms aren’t long enough to accommodate the curricula; you are taking the amount of material you’d normally teach and learn over a semester and stuffing it into a nine or ten-week term. Students cram like crazy for exams, take them, and within 24 hours forget most of what was on the tests. The process of intellectual gestation, which is such an important element in learning, is all but non-existent. To the extent that the system “works”, it’s because many of the students are very bright and work very hard, grade inflation is rife, and many faculty members make themselves very available to provide help. You can get a good education at Dartmouth, but a lot of it will be under excessive duress.</p>
<p>I totally disagree with the above. My daughter is a senior at Dartmouth. She loves the D plan. Yes, she works very very hard, but that would be the case at any top school. Having 3 classes each term instead of 5, she can really focus and dig deep into the material. Yes, they move fast. I would never say the average student is under duress. They all have time for activities and a social life. Do they cram and forget? No more than any other college student. There are also some other key benefits to the D plan. The primary one is the opportunity for solid internships during terms when other colleges are in session. These provide a different kind of learning, but it is extremely valuable. Just like most things in life, there are pros and cons to the D plan, but lack of a first class education is not one of the cons. There is a reason Dartmouth always tops the rankings for undergraduate teaching.</p>
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<p>That must be why they also use the quarter system at that notoriously anti-intellectual school, the University of Chicago. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^ And Northwestern… another B level school?</p>
<p>Don’t forget that other B level school Stanford.</p>
<p>Dartmouth is bad because they have Greek letter frats like some kind of low class state school. Real ivies call everthing something different - eating/final clubs instead of frats, concentrations instead of majors etc. Because they chose not to arbitrarily call the same thing something different, Dartmouth is basically worse than community college.</p>
<p>Yeah, Navelwatcher, how many ivies did you attend? I attended one and it had no frats. Instead of spirited parties, we had dope dens on just about every floor of every dorm/house on campus where kids were melting their brains away on acid. When I was there, my classmates wouldn’t hang out at fraternity houses on the weekends. Nope, such silliness smelled of the common man and the state university. Instead, my school chums would riot in the streets or storm the ROTC building on campus. Give me the loud lads of Dartmouth. You can keep the lost souls of Harvard.</p>
<p>Sarcasm detection failure.</p>
<p>^ Like. Semper fi.</p>
<p>HA. (10 char)</p>
<p>Sarcasm delivery failure.</p>
<p>With mounds of attacks on Dartmouth this year, including slash and burns by “Rolling Stone”, NYT and student protestors, sarcasm is not the tone or pitch that many who love Dartmouth will hear clearly these days. Bad humor is not humorous.</p>
<p>If, however, I had read any of your posts before I saw this one, I would have seen that you were quite bright, that this post was out of tune with your prior messages and that, therefore, this message was meant in humor not malice. Alas, poor Naval, I didn’t know you well. Still, stick with wisdom. You are better with it than wit.</p>
<p>Hanover looks like a great little town, but it’s still little. Do many of the undergrads feel a little claustrophobic by about February?</p>
<p>If you have such doubts about such an amazing school, maybe you shouldn’t bother applying. There are plenty of seniors out there applying in hopes of joining such a close-knit and supportive group of people up in Hanover. Don’t apply if you’re only looking at those “less than desirable qualities” because every school has some.</p>
<p>“Do many of the undergrads feel a little claustrophobic by about February?” Doubt it. At that point, you’re less than halfway through the winter term; you had a long Thanksgiving to New Year break wherever you wanted to be; and it’s Winter Carnival time! Plus, you can always hop on the Dartmouth Coach for a weekend in Boston.</p>
<p>As I read some of the non-sequiturs posited as responses to my critique of the D-plan, which outlined opinions that are widely shared by faculty, I was reminded of another challenge we face here: a tendency of the Dartmouth community towards knee-jerk defensiveness in response to even the mention of possible change (the oft-cited motto “Lest the Old Traditions Fail” captures this unfortunate, self-defeating mindset). The testimony of a parent regarding something like the D-plan is often anecdotal, and not broadly instructive. And comparing us to the University of Chicago and Stanford? Based on comparative lists of Nobel laureates alone, do we really want to go there? In terms of campus intellectual cultures, those are apples vs. oranges comparisons.</p>