I'm a sophomore at Dartmouth and couldn't love the place any more. Actually that's a lie; I love it more every day.
What follows is a compilation of some PMs/thread posts directed to people considering Dartmouth. They're mostly oriented towards prospective undergrads, but I've chosen some that I think will be relevant to you.
One of my closest friends is an acting major, and I have friends in other fine arts departments. I would be happy to put you in touch with them, and I'm positive that they'd be happy to tell you more than I can about arts in particular. Our grad programs are wickedly small; you'd be interacting with undergrads on a daily basis, so I think they could really give you a sense of what you'd be in for.
Please please please shoot me an email (I've PM'd you with my address) or a PM. If I don't know the answer to a question, I'll see what I can dig up.
Also I swear that I'm not getting paid for this. Dartmouth people tend to be enthusiastic.
General Impressions/Feeling of the Place:
Dartmouth's really got it all. Today was the first day above 70 degrees this quarter (you know about the d-plan, yes?), and the green was filled with people sunbathing, playing soccer, throwing frisbees...the campus radio station set up a sound system outside and played music all day. This place is literally a paradise.
The Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC), celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, is so sweet. It runs hiking trips, canoeing trips, snowshoeing, fishing, skiing, and pretty much anything else you could do outside. The College owns a county in the norteastern corner of the state which it has kept completely undeveloped; the DOC maintains a trail and cabin network for students to use. Skiing is hella close by, with the college-owned Dartmouth Skiway 20 minutes up the road. The Skiway doesn't have much of a park scene, but me and my friend from Durango are working on starting a DOC club to do park work. There are rides every day to Killington and Stowe as well, so you're never going for want of skiing.
Dartmouth students tend to drink a lot. We're a very fraternity-centric school, but our frats aren't sketchy like most other places. You rush in your sophomore fall, which gives you time to figure out where you fit. The fraternities/sororities are all very open; even when you've pledged somewhere, you still go to other frats parties. A little more than half of eligible students are in greek life.
The work can get pretty tough. I came in here this fall with a 1490 SAT (2290 w/ reading), and I've gotten one A out of 6 classes so far. The professors are great though, office hours are clutch, but they do expect a lot from you. I've had some amazing profs, and learned a lot, so all-in-all I'm pretty happy with the academics here.
Dartmouth isn't for people who want to get a degree. Dartmouth is for people who want to go to college. The people you meet every day, the friendships you build over time, even the professors all are the biggest reason Dartmouth kicks ass.
Honestly, weather/skiing aside, Dartmouth is fantabulous for one reason: people. You can literally walk up to anyone, introduce yourself, and make a new friend for life. Dartmouth people take care of Dartmouth people; you just don't see this sort of love anywhere else. I completely understand that you would be inclined to go CC and stay near the Rockies, but Dartmouth has such an amazingly awesome mix of people that I can't imagine being anywhere else.
------
Frat Centric-Culture/A note on drugs
It is probably true that during the course of the year 80% of students will drink. But on a weekly basis, the number is probably closer to 40%. If you want to, you can very easily get drunk for free at fraternities five days a week. I probably averaged twice to three times a week of drinking "to excess." The drinking culture at Dartmouth is nearly completely centered around pong. Dartmouth, as you may have heard, plays a very specific variant of beer pong (we use paddles and a totally different set of rules). Going out as a freshman usually entails going over to a friend's room at like 10:30, having a few shots while socializing with other freshmen, and going out to a fraternity at like 11:30. At the fraternity you'll probably get a beer, socialize with friends who you meet there, and get on line to play beer pong. If the line is long, you and your pong partner will probably bounce to another frat and try there. My average night probably ends at around 3 am, having visited around 3 fraternities.
I would be lying to you if I said that there was a completely developed non-drinking scene. There absolutely are plenty of things to do not involving alcohol on a nightly basis. There are board game clubs, live music, movies, and so on. But fraternities and sororities are pretty important to the core culture of Dartmouth. For many people, its a way of life. So I would say that you could very reasonably come to Dartmouth expecting to not drink very often. But its not likely that you won't drink at least occasionally. However, there absolutely is no pressure to drink to excess. Many people go out having had only one or two drinks, and will only drink later on while playing pong (which works out to about two beers per game, a game taking about 20-30 minutes with about an hour wait in between games). There is never pressure to get wasted.
As a note on drugs, there definitely exists a hard drug scene. If you go looking for cocaine and ecstasy, you'll find them. But if you're not interested, drugs will never be a part of your life. I don't think that this is unique to Dartmouth, and most students will never come into contact with hard drugs.
------
Tips if you're going to visit:
by far the best restaurant in town is Murphy's on south main street, one block south of the green on the east side of the street. fantastic food and its fairly priced.
the dartmouth coop is also on south main near murphy's; its got a much better selection of dartmouth logo stuff than the bookstore does. i personally don't believe in the t-shirt curse; i bought a dartmouth skiing shirt before i got in.
the tour is fairly comprehensive in terms of seeing the campus and getting an idea of what dartmouth has to offer. however you don't get to see a dorm room. if you're interested in seeing one, let me know asap and i'll try and get in touch with someone on campus.
you may want to eat on campus. since its the summer most of the dining is closed, but you can try the Hop, which is my favorite place to eat anyway. ask your tourguide and he/she will be able to direct you better than I can via NS messaging.
one thing that i really suggest you do is try out the library. this was one of the things that sold me on dartmouth. just walk up to any blitz terminal, open firefox, and go to library.dartmouth.edu (this should be homepaged anyway). search for anything. when i was there i searched the library catalog for "hearldry", since i had been studying chivalry and knightly codes in high school. it sent me deep into the basement of the stacks (which seriously feels like a submarine), but whatdayaknow, there were at least 15 books on healdry, some from the early 1800s.
alternatively, you can go to Rauner special collections in Webster Hall (next to the library) and take out the oldest atlas in the world. i ended up finding it there when i was doing research on the spanish armada; aparantly there was a good chance that Francis Drake had a copy of this atlas with him, which would have been instrumental in his defeat of the spanish fleet.
Author: Ortelius, Abraham, 1527-1598.
Title: Theatrum orbis terrarum
Call #: G1006 .T5 1571
if you're up for a 20 minute drive, you can check out the dartmouth skiway. its going to be dead because its summer, but still worth seeing in my opinion, since you'd be spending a decent amount of time there (especially if the student-run park crew that I'm working on gets off the ground).
directions to skiway from campus: Head North on Route 10 for 11 miles into the town of Lyme. Continue around the common and Turn right at the fork in the road at the white church. Continue 3.25 miles on Dorchester Road to the Skiway.
lastly, if you want to spend some time at a frat, also let me know. they're kinda iffy about letting non students in, but i'll give it a shot if you're interested.
------
Why Dartmouth:
this place isn't hamilton college small, but its absolutely a liberal arts college.
dartmouth was far and away my first choice, but i also applied to places like colgate, uvm, stanford, harvard. shot a 1490 on the sat (i'm really good at standardized tests; not actually that genius)
the place is just really laid back. people playing frisbee on the green, girls tanning in bikinis outside their dorms, bros barbecuing, etc (at least in the warm periods...it gets pretty fucking chilly too). the school is very oriented towards outdoor leadership. we own a few thousand acres of wilderness with maintained cabins and trails, which people use regularly. we are also responsible for 70 miles of the appalachian trail, so if you're out there doing trailwork you get to meet some crazy hippies and shit.
classes are pretty tough, not gonna lie, but our schedule helps. we're on the "dartmouth plan", meaning every season is a "quarter" (including summer), and you have to be on campus or on a foreign study program for credit for 12 quarters (total of 36 classes). So thats only three classes a term, which is nice. plus since you can do summers on-campus (you have to do at least one), you can take winters off. im planning on going to austria junior winter (ive been taking german) to intern at UBS Zurich and ski on the weekends.
the place is a paradise. people go out mondays and wednesdays as well as on the weekends (the way the schedule works, its really easy to avoid tu-th classes). i'm exaggerating a bit, the work can get really stressful, and its easy to get distracted, but people get their shit done when push comes to shove.
