Mid-Year

Among the 2900 men priming themselves for final exams are 75 who will be doing it for the last time as Dartmouth undergraduates. This is the group scheduled to graduate at the end of the first semester. Mid-year graduation, which has been a postwar development on the campus, involves a steadily declining number of men, and the 75 candidates for February degrees are considerably fewer than the 120 at this time last year. The present group includes five '46 men, two '47s, eleven '48s, sixteen '49s, and forty-one '50s.

As has been the practice since the war, the College will hold no graduation cere monies for the mid-year group but will invite these men to return in June to take part in the regular Commencement program if they wish. Some of the group will stay on in Hanover for further study, and it is unlikely that very many will want to leave until after Winter Carnival on February 3 and 4.

At this writing, one wonders whether Old Man Winter will ever cooperate to the extent of making possible a snowdecked Carnival that February graduates and everyone else will remember as an outstandingly successful one. This being the 40th annual Carnival, the Dartmouth Outing Club is entitled to kindly treatment, but so far it has been given only the jitters, fast becoming a winter occupational disease in New England for those who are in any way dependent upon the snow. Our Undergraduate Editor, whose prominence in The Players has earned him the job of staging Outdoor Evening, devotes his page this month to the background story of Carnival preparations and anxious scanning of the winter sky. The denouement is over two weeks away, however, and Dartmouth remains unshaken in its faith that the D.O.C. will somehow crash through, as it has so many times before when the odds seemed hopelessly against it.