Student Profile
Anonymous
- Class: Alum
- Major: English
- Gender: F
- High School: New Trier High School, Winnetka, IL
- Transfer Student: N
Big Picture
Academic Life
Academics are outstanding here. My favorite classes were the smallest ones, where you got to know your classmates, engaged deeply with the material, and were held accountable for doing so: the Faust Tradition, in which we traced the Faust myth throughout literature (I was the only freshman in this German literature seminar); Introduction to Criticism; Introduction to Literary Theory; and a course just on Spenser's Fairy Queen. As an English major, I wanted to take the softest math and science classes I could to fulfill the requirement. I took Linguistics 1 for my math (er, "quantitative and deductive sciences") requirement, which was fantastic--I ended up minoring in Linguistics. I took computer science, biological anthropology, and astronomy to fulfill the other math and science requirements. There are tons of interesting classes out there--such as the history of physics--so don't be afraid to look around, and definitely wait until one of them piques your interest; don't just settle for the first one you find.
Student Body
Even at a place like Dartmouth you will meet slackers, burnouts, and the insane--people who steal dorm furniture, people who show up to class drunk, people who pour spaghetti sauce down dorm stairwells, and people who draw swastikas on other people's white boards. You'll find these people at every college and university, of course, but it's always surprising when you meet them (or hear about them) at your own school. High-achievers are not a homogeneous bunch.
The Best Things
Thai peanut tofu wraps from Homeplate; the plethora of study abroad opportunities for Dartmouth students only; outstanding professors; the fact that there's a niche for everybody, even though it's a small school
The Worst Things
The cost; the culture of getting wasted; students who think that there is a single Dartmouth experience and that it involves streaking across the green
