With over 1,000 students not affiliated with Dartmouth staying on campus during this week alone, the College has been flooded with new people walking through the campus and eating in the dining halls this summer.
By the end of the summer, Dartmouth will have hosted a total of 63 summer groups of visitors participating in programs ranging from Cognitive Neuroscience to Lightning Soccer camp.
The Office of Residential Life estimates approximately 5,400 people who are not affiliated with Dartmouth will stay at the College during the course of the summer. The last group leaves on August 22.
Of those groups, 19 are camps for young people and the rest are academic conferences and language learning programs for adults.
Some camps offer multiple sections of the same curriculum at different times. Most of these are athletic programs which serve to hone campers' skills in such fields as hockey, tennis and soccer.
The largest camp is Thunder Soccer, which boasts an enrollment of 190 students.
Most of the campers interviewed by The Dartmouth said they hope to improve their athletic skills and have fun over the summer.
"I'd like to improve at tennis, to have fun and to meet new people," said Kristen Mayer of Fairfax, Va., who is attending the Niketown tennis camp. "It's neat to have the college experience -- dorms and roommates."
Although participants at the camps who are high school students said there is not much to do in downtown Hanover, all of the six of those who were interviewed by The Dartmouth said they plan to apply to Dartmouth when the time comes.
Dartmouth "is pretty. Not a lot of downtown though. [The camp experience] makes me like Dartmouth," said Marianne Merritt of New Jersey, who is in the Elite Hockey camp.
Barry Harwick, coach of the College's men's cross country team, heads the Gold Metal Running camp, a program founded by his father for high school-aged cross country runners.
"It's a great chance to get publicity for our program, to do some recruiting and for coaches to earn some money during the course of the summer," Harwick said.
The program has "two purposes -- one is for the kids to physically get in shape for races, and the second part is to try to teach them a lot of different things about distance running," he said.
Harwick listed teaching the campers about nutrition and the psychology of running as two examples of non-physical education.
The campers of the Gold Metal Running program run at 7 a.m., 9 a.m. and again at 3 p.m. The strongest run up to 60 miles a week.
The Debate Institute is the only non-athletic camp offered for young people. The approximately 145 students who are enrolled in the program are staying in Bissell, Brown and Cohen residence halls.
They have been here since July 18 and the program ends on August 15.
The debate campers' main goal in the program is to research educational policy, which is this year's high school debating topic. They spend their time mainly between the library, the Choates Cluster and Silsby, attending lectures, taking part in practice debate rounds and participating in workshops to improve their debating skills.
Asked why he chose to attend the program, Clay Calhoon of Oklahoma City, Okla. said, "Dartmouth Debate Institute is the premiere debate institute. I came here to be a better debater -- to be one of the elite."
