<p>Hello everyone, I have a question I've been wondering about for awhile. Since Dartmouth is the smallest ivy league, and is basically a glorified liberal arts college, is the small student population worth it for the trade off of fewer classes? Are the student-professor relationships better then at say Yale? Also, depending on where you live and if you celebrate the holiday, MERRY CHRISTMAS!</p>
<p>I received my degree from Dartmouth in the late 80s, so my personal experience is not particularly fresh, but I have heard similar stories from more recent grads.</p>
<p>In four years, I only had older or grad students teach me twice, once for a bio lab and once for a French language conversation lab. Those were both supplementary sessions, not the actual course. In every other instance I had real professors teaching me. Of the 35 courses I took, three were large survey courses with 100+ students, but more than a dozen had fewer than 15 students. Professors were extremely generous with their office hours, basically willing to meet with you whenever worked for you, for as long as you needed. I had two professors who routinely invited classes to their homes and one who often conducted a full course at her home so she could make us dinner while we talked.</p>
<p>There is currently a take-your-professor-lunch program where any student can ask a teacher to lunch at the nicest restaurant in town, and the college will pick up the tab. Apparently it is quite easy to take advantage of this perk.</p>
<p>I’m a first-year student at Dartmouth and my experience so far has been amazing. I’ve only been there for one term but I’ve already called campus “home” by accident a few times. In all the classes I took during fall term, the profs have been just as good (if not better) than advertised. Without giving away any names, I’ll say that one of the more famous profs on campus would respond to personal emails within minutes and would have office hours to answer any question about the course. They’ll even meet one-on-one with you outside of office hours if you email them beforehand. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be treated so well as a freshman despite how heavily the “undergrad experience” is advertised. </p>
<p>Responding to your question, I’ve never taken courses at Yale, although I did visit, and I got the feeling that things are not the same way there which is why I applied ED to Dartmouth. </p>
<p>As far as the “small student population” goes- yeah it’s smaller than the other Ivies, but it’s still 4,000+ undergrads, so it’s not like everyone knows each other. You’ll always meet new people but the smaller population does allow for a really tight-knit community.</p>
<p>I hope this helps! :)</p>