<p>Current Dartmouth students, can you please post your stats if you don't mind so future applicants like me can gauge what Dartmouth looks for? thanks</p>
<p>I'll be more thorough later, but I think this is the funniest part of my app - I graduated 19th percentile.</p>
<p>That means close to a 6th of the 450 people in my graduating class did better than me.</p>
<p>Er, you mean a fifth? xP</p>
<p>very interesting</p>
<p>valedictorian, perfect SAT, near perfect (above 770) on 5 SATIIs, AP scholar with distinction.</p>
<p>1000 community service hours with one project</p>
<p>moderately decent ECs (nothing great)</p>
<p>half_baked, all the more power to you man. ROCK DARTMOUTH!</p>
<p>Yeah sorry, mistyped, i meant a 5th.</p>
<p>Lol i promise, I'm not a dumb jock. i'm not a jock at all, actually. I was recruited to debate for dartmouth.</p>
<p>are you indian? so am i...</p>
<p>Haha no worries, I figured it was just a slip. But an ironic one in such context!</p>
<p>To the OP, have you looked through previous years' decision threads?</p>
<p>Sangel - yeah I am. i'm an incoming freshman. You?</p>
<p>yeah no luck</p>
<p>I'm a debater too--or at least I was in high school. I didn't realize there was actually debate recruiting. It doesn't work like athletic recruiting, does it?</p>
<p>It kind of does - you email the coach and tell him your stats and that you're interested in debating for Dartmouth. If he's interested, he'll write you a rec to the admissions office. Ken Strange has been coach for dartmouth for a long time. He was named "Coach of the 80's." He's one of the biggest, most influential figures in the debate community and has an enormous amount of political capital. </p>
<p>Even if you're not a really competitive debater in high school, the fact that you were a debater alone (without ken's rec) will substantially help your admissions chances. Even colleges wihtout debate teams realize that debaters tend to drop out substantially less than nearly any other demographic, tend to go on to good graduate schools, and tend to be generally more successful in college than, say, the demographic of people who were presidents of NHS or whatever in high school.</p>
<p>I wish I had known to email the coach. Not that it really changes much, since I was admitted to the class of 2010 anyway. But I'll tell that to all my debating friends who are still navigating the tricky waters of college application. Thanks for the info!</p>
<p>Damn, my school didn't have a debate team. There was a debate club but that was BS. However, my teachers regard me as a great debater as I have debated extremely well in class debates and I have a great political knowledge. Will this help me in any way shape or form?</p>
<p>I'm sure that being good at "debate" in the lay sense will help you in both your college app process and in life in general as it probably means you're more intelligent and articulate than most, but it won't help in the way that I'm talking about it. Policy debate as an organized phenomenon, especially on the national circuit, is so highly sought after by colleges because it involves a tremendous amount of work, time committment, competitiveness, innovation, creativity, and tenacity. The kind of person who can cut it in that environment has already proven that they have many of the skills needed to be successful in college. Debaters tend to be very ambitious; this, combined with the fact that they tend to have a leg up on the skills needed to be successful in college means that they tend to go on to the best law and business schools in the country (medical far less so - debaters tend to gravitate towards social sciences). An enormous number of the most influential policymakers in the country today were once debaters in high school, college, or both. Debaters tend to either a) burn out in college and become hippies and druggies (though very, very rarely) or b) go on to some very well reputed graduate programs. The vast majority eventually find their way to some really good law schools.</p>
<p>I guess now is as good a time as any to explain my class rank. The fact that I graduated so far back in my class is a humorous statistic that I wear as kind of a mock badge of honor. My high school stats were typical of a competitive, national circuit debater. I had great standardized test scores, tons of AP's, a good debate record, great essays and recs, but a relatively really low GPA. Why? Because, as a debater, I was smart enough and hard working enough to have nearly perfect SAT scores, take over a dozen AP classes and be an AP scholar, write articulate, well thought out essays and have good teacher recs. I studied hard and performed well on my class tests too. But there were months on end where I would go to school only three days a week. I would leave for tournaments on Friday morning and get back Monday night week after week. Keeping up with the study load was relatively easy; but, when the choice came down to spending my time doing the daily grunt homework or working towards winning the next tournament, the choice, to me, was simple. One option meant that I would do something meaningless to get a good grade. The other, in my opinion, was a way of actually furthering myself intellectually and doing something meaningful with my life and abilities.</p>
<p>The choices and priorities I had were unconventional and by no means work for everyone. Debate is really hit or miss - you have to invest enormous amounts of time and effort to even scratch the surface of the activity. Even then, at some point, it comes down to whether or not you're the right personality type and mindset to make it. This sounds weird, but when you debate long enough, you start to realize that the people who are successful in the activity all have striking similarities in their behavior and attitude on a personal (as opposed to political) level. You could throw yourself into the activity and sacrifice other extracurriculars and academics and be very successful, at which point it all pays off. Or, you could do that and never be very successful, at which point you're screwed.</p>
<p>I'm going to Dartmouth in the fall. I guess for me the choice was right, because there were people who did way more things than I did in high school, had better grades and test scores, were presidents of clubs and captains of teams and got flat rejected.</p>
<p>I liked you until you said policy. Policy chump. LD is where it's at. :)</p>
<p>LD is for people who can't do policy.</p>
<p>Hey now, let's keep it civil. All the events have something to recommend about them. </p>
<p>(Of course, I'll refrain from telling you mine since if you think LD is an inferior event, I am sure to get mocked merciless.)</p>
<p>I meant is as a joke, I just couldn't find the smiley. I did Forensics my freshman year, so I have a lot of love for other competitive speech events too. There's just a longstanding policy/LD rivalry. It's been given a kind of bitter edge in recent years because, as policy becomes more specialized, technical, and less accessible to outsiders, many schools are dropping policy programs and continuing with only LD programs.</p>