You may not see a lot of Clarice Cloutier '98 when you come to Dartmouth -- but you will probably hear her.
An award winning student of Russian who last saw the inside of a classroom in fifth grade, Cloutier is also the principal violinist in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, a violinist in the Honors Quartet and a fiddler in the Wild Rovers, a traditional Irish folk band.
And though she said in her usual, off-hand fashion that she is a typical Dartmouth student, for once, Cloutier may be wrong.
She was in fourth grade when her parents approached her with the idea of stopping her classroom education and replacing it with "private tutoring," as she likes to call it.
"We talked about it for a year," she said. "It was a mutual decision."
Much of her education took place took at Yale University, where her father is a professor of dentistry.
It was at Yale that Cloutier learned Russian, and it was at Yale that she learned to play the viola. She even picked up enough French to place her out of Dartmouth's language requirement.
Cloutier's father and her mother, a former high-school teacher, taught her the basics. The rest of her formal education ("formal" may not be the best word) took place in Europe, where she studied in Russia, Switzerland, and finally at the Conservatoire d'Avignon in France.
Her work seems to have paid off.
Cloutier placed into the advanced Russian program, and she has already been awarded two citations for her performance in Russian and music classes.
Cloutier boasts awards for such disparate skills as leadership and Russian poetry recitation. She even won one of President George Bush's "thousand points of light" for playing her viola to dying hospital patients.
Cloutier said she came to Dartmouth, in part, because "this was the campus where people smiled."
