Dartmouth and Amherst: Different by All Means

After deciding that college visits are nice, my parents decided to take me to Dartmouth on Wednesday (also because, as my dad said, "we can go hike some mountains over there as well"). We left at seven in the morning, and drove all the way to Dartmouth just in time for their info session.

The person in charge of the info session emphasized the fact that Dartmouth is a college, rather than an university, and as such, specializes in undergrad education. This apparently amounts to the strange quarter-system schedule, study-abroad programs in the Caribbeans (and elsewhere), and no TAs at all. I don't think I would mind any of those things.

There was also talk of how "Dartmouth gets thousands of qualified applicants every year, so we can choose which ones we want to accept." That usually means bad news for me (and everyone else in general).

After our info session (spent mostly on "what is a liberal arts education and what does it do for you?" and "how do we choose which students to accept?"), our tour guides arrived and split us up into five groups. My parents and I followed this girl who was in her senior year and was majoring in Spanish and planned to become a lawyer.

We went around the school, noting all the different buildings (including the first building on campus that originally housed all the classes, teachers, and students into one tiny space) and the different things to do. The campus sort of spills into the town (Hanover), and the buildings were clustered in a cozy but cluttered way. We saw the Hogwarts-esque library (wooden paneled walls, ancient-looking books, comfy green chairs), went by some of the frat houses around campus, and saw a room that housed two large TVs (very important during the Yankees vs. Red Sox baseball games, where fans of one team screams at fans of the other team during intermission times). Our guide told us that the food at Dartmouth was very good (yay), and the alumni network is very strong. People seem to also make lots of close friends with other people on campus (and I did see a lot of students talking with each other, so they're not all loners, which is good).

After our tour of campus, we checked out one of the eight eating places on campus. This particular place had soup, salad, and this stir-fry thing that was so popular the line was very, very long. The food was generally okay though (not exactly my favorite, but with much more manageable portion sizes).

Of course, a major portion of this trip was supposed to be "hiking," so we went to nearby Quechee Gorge (in Vermont) and hiked along a two-mile trail. The gorge was really pretty, but the water was too chilly to go barefoot in the river, so we just played with the water with our hands and hiked to a dam and then came back. My mom pointed out the strange wooden boards on top of the dam, and my dad made up some semi-plausible reason as to why they were there, and my mom decided that you could only know if you were an engineer specializing in that field ("that's another possible career path there").

Anyway, we started heading home at around five, and on our way back we saw the sign for Amherst, Massachusetts. My dad asked, "Is that the same Amherst as the college?"

According to the atlas we had brought, it was, so we took the next exit and came to Amherst (the town is also home to four other colleges, including UMass, Smith, and two other ones I can't remember). I found the campus and buildings to be much more gorgeously outstanding, with a line of red brick buildings sitting atop a grassy hill, and other white, classical or Victorian buildings spilling to the side. (My impression, anyway.) To the right of the campus is a war memorial that overlooks the baseball and soccer fields, but it's on top of the hill and so you can see really, really far (according to their website, you can see 1000 acres). We missed the tour times (it was by seven now), but there were students milling about, and they seemed to be happy and generally friendly.

I personally think that Amherst is a much prettier place than Dartmouth, and if schools were only decided upon by their campuses, I would even have a hard time deciding between Amherst and Princeton. Amherst is that pretty.

In other news, I received a letter from the Advantage Testing Foundation for a Math Prize competition, which is bound to be very exciting (albeit all the way in November, so there's still a very long time to go), and also info session mail from the Claremont Colleges (not happening, because they're in California, as my mother puts it) and the Duke-Georgetown-Harvard-Penn-Stanford groupie (I don't know why those particular schools chose to be together). I also got a letter from Yale with no real information (that I didn't know already).

And SATs next Saturday. APs next next week and next next next week. This whole college thing is coming a tad bit too fast for me, I reckon.