During my four years here, I have developed a love-hate relationship with Dartmouth. I love the outdoors, the professors and the students. But I've come to dislike the Dartmouth Plan.
The D-Plan is possibly one of the worst features of the Dartmouth experience. It wreaks havoc on campus groups. It destroys relationships. And its touted flexibility rarely matches the flexibility of the real world.
I'll start with organizations. If you run a group on campus, then a unique "human capital problem" threatens your group's survival. The leaders of your organization will leave Dartmouth for one, two or even three terms at any time during their sophomore and junior years. If your organization is run by three sophomores -- forget it! Next year some (or all) of you will take terms off, and your small group will exist only on the rarely updated COSO organization website.
So, ironically for our small College, for a campus group to survive, it must retain more leaders (and members) than a similar group at a university with a semester-long academic schedule. Countless organizations at Dartmouth have keeled over and died when their leaders took terms off or graduated. It's not that we are worse than other college students at planning for leadership transition. It's the D-Plan.
Relationships with friends and significant others become harder to maintain. Between Foreign Study Programs, Language Study Abroads and internships, I went for a year without seeing some of my best friends. Other students are forced to break up with their significant others. Maybe that's why Dartmouth has such a prevalent hook-up culture. In an already transient college environment, relationships are made more fleeting by a schedule that sends us roaming 'round the girdled earth. So '10s -- watch out! Better forge those friendships now, before you begin the on-again-off-again game that Dartmouth calls junior year.
Then there's the "competition" myth. Four years ago, I was told by admissions officers that the flexibility of the D-Plan would give me a scheduling advantage over my Ivy League peers. When Harvard and Yale kids are tied down by their semester-long schedules, I could apply for jobs without facing competition from them. While this is true, it's rare. Most jobs allocate internships openings for the Summer term, to suit the more common, semester-long academic calendar. Some employers will let you work during the Dartmouth spring, but most will not have the flexibility to accommodate you.
Of course, the D-Plan is not all bad. Sophomore summer is a great experience that binds the sophomore class (and probably does wonders for alumni donations). It is perhaps true that most students fall in love with Dartmouth during that warm, lazy summer. The D-Plan allows students to go on more FSPs and LSAs and to generally explore a larger chunk of the world. As Lense Gebre-Mariam '09 wrote in The Dartmouth Mirror, we become "D-plan nomads, uprooting our lives every three months and trotting to new exotic and urban locales across the globe" ("Nomads and Loners: The D-Plan Lifestyle," Nov. 9, 2007).
I think these few positive aspects don't outweigh the D-Plan's many inconveniences. Even though the D-Plan offers some advantages, it was created for a different purpose: to allow a starved-for-beds Office of Residential Life to accommodate all the students on campus. Back in the day, ORL solved the housing shortage problem by forcing students to take at least three terms away from Dartmouth. So, yet again, the problem is housing. A historical and persistent housing shortage is the reason our professors cram a semester's worth of material into 10 weeks, the reason why campus groups struggle to survive, the reason we hook up and break up so often and the reason we travel so much.
In these debates, facts rarely win the day. The D-Plan is inefficient and masks a more general housing problem. But the academic schedule has become so integrated into Dartmouth life that to amend it would require incredible frustration on behalf of the students and commitment on behalf of the administration. So I think that for the foreseeable future we are stuck -- as traveling nomads.
