Rice, Dartmouth, or Berkeley?

Tank07
Thu, 02 Apr 2015 13:33:45 +0000

I’ll speak to some of your Dartmouth notes from experience…

Montreal is a couple hours drive North. Boston is 2 hours and NYC is 5 hours, both with regular Dartmouth Coach bus service. So you look at the town itself in your research and immediately say “isolated” whereas I considered it small New England town community and “centrally located” (har har)
Incoming students will often say “I’m going to totally go to [insert city name here] every weekend for STUFF TO DO” then invariably they, along with everyone else, always stays on campus because there’s a bunch to do and all your friends are there so why would you leave?

Check out some other threads on Greek life at Dartmouth. Freshmen can’t join houses, so there’s always plenty to do outside of the Greek system if you look around (comedy shows, midnight breakfast, movies on the green, Iron Chef Dorm Room competitions…). Additionally, just going to hang out at a Greek house doesn’t require heavy drinking. There are a lot of students that just don’t feel like drinking a lot or at all, and if you hang out at specific houses, you’ll find out which ones are totally cool with that.
I think sometimes people come in with the cliche movie plot idea where you say you don’t want to drink then an army of beefy frat dudes descend all around you with beer bongs chanting “CHUG CHUG CHUG.” This, in reality, rarely happens anywhere in life (Besides the Jersey Shore - BOOM take that Jersey!) and in my own personal experiences if someone asks you if you want to a beer and you say “naw” they generally reply with “ok, cool”

Dartmouth (small student body, small town, Northeast seasons) is so different than the other two you mentioned (many students, cities, Warm/temperate climates) that you should be able to pick Dartmouth or exclude it by visiting and see if something just clicks with you. Most people I know, myself included, visited and all said the same thing - when they stepped foot on campus, something just clicked and made them feel like it was home to them.