I was talking to one of my good friends from the University of California, Berkeley the other day about a term that she decided to take off in the middle of her junior year. Spending that time living in Turkey, Jordan and Palestine, she was able to meet up with a number of people she had met at Berkeley prior to traveling along the way taking Turkish classes with two Berkeley students in Istanbul, touring the Dome of the Rock and Haram al-Sharif with another in Jerusalem and grabbing a cup of coffee with three of them in Amman. I can't say I could do the same as a Dartmouth College student.
Because Dartmouth is not a school of 10,000 or 20,000 students, it loses out on having the same kind of social network that universities like Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, Berkeley or even Harvard University have. I am not here to argue that the bigger the school, the better, because I do not believe this is the case. However, while Dartmouth has mastered the art of close-knit intimacy within its community, it has neglected its global reach, directly affecting the students who want to study, live and perhaps eventually pursue a career in a country outside of the United States.
The College's Off-Campus Programs office has figured it out: if you "connect" Dartmouth students to the place they are traveling by sending 8 to 15 students to some foreign location with a professor as their safety net they are more inclined to go. Moving somewhere as far away from New Hampshire as India, Morocco or China for over 10 weeks is intimidating, especially if the student does not know a single person there. Setting up a stronger Dartmouth network of some kind in the international community, without a doubt, would encourage students to think more seriously about traveling to a foreign country that does not already have a Dartmouth program within it on an off-term or spending a longer period of time abroad than what the off-campus opportunities allot. This would then give students the experience they need to truly consider a job in the international community after graduation.
We cannot blame the Admissions Office for not doing its part in diversifying the demographics of the College's campus. Dartmouth is a school of roughly 4,400 undergraduates. It will forever be a college because Dartmouth believes in the value of having a low student-to-faculty ratio. Admissions can only accept so many international students in a class size of 1,100. Rather, Dartmouth should begin to implement programs of international collaboration to solve its global reach problem by connecting students from all over the world to students studying in Hanover.
Given modern technology, connecting is absolutely possible. In a class that I took last year with anthropology professor Dale Eickelman, we spent one morning in a combined classroom setting with a university in the United Arab Emirates. By integrating the Skype technology of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, our whole class was able to interact with a number of international students in a location many of us in the class were interested in traveling to. The connections we forged in class quickly turned into a series of emails and finally, in some cases, into a personal connection of some kind.
I love walking into the dining hall and seeing recognizable faces. Whether I have a strong personal relationship with each and every face that I seem to know, from somewhere, is beside the point. What matters is that I can feel like I am a part of my community, because it feels familiar. This is one of the major advantages of going to a small school. Perhaps by forging more international partnerships, Dartmouth students could establish a social network outside of the U.S., preparing them to explore more than just the standard domestic options. Dartmouth can more effectively balance community with global reach in two ways by leveraging 21st century technology to foster personal interactions and by maintaining a red thread between current students and graduates who go on to pursue a career abroad.
