We asked Simone Swink '98, a student guide, to give us a short version of her spiel io visifors. Step lively, please, Any questions?

We asked Simone Swink '98, a student guide, to give us a shortversion of her spiel to visitors. Step lively, please. Any questions?

my name is Simone Swink, I'm a sophomore at the College which means I'm a '98. We don't go by the regular names of classes here, we go by the year you're expected to graduate. If you have any questions about my personal experience or students' general opinions, feel free to ask. I'm walking backwards for much of the tour so please warn me if you think I'm going to crash into something. I almost fell into a manhole this summer.

Okay, let's start by walking toward Robinson Hall...

Excuse me, where are you from andwhat's your major?

Portland, Oregon, and I'm planning to be a history major. Right now we're standing in front of Robinson Hall, This houses the Daly Dartmouth, which is the oldest student-run college newspaper in the country. The offices of the yearbook are here as well as the headquarters for the two student-run radio stations—AM and FM which broadcast to the entire Ugper Valley. Also the Dartmouth Outing Club is housed here It's the oldest college outing club in the country. As an incoming freshman, you have the opportunity to go on an Outing Club trip. If you go, you join five or six other freshmen led by an upperclassman, usually up part of the Appalachian Trail or down part of the Connecticut River, and you can choose among hiking, kayaking, canoeing, mountain biking, rock climbing, and horseback riding.

On the third day of your trip you end at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge about an hour north of here. There you learn the Salty Dog Rag, the Alma Mater, and the morning before you leave you eat green eggs and ham in honor of one of Dartmouth's more famous alumni, Dr. Seuss.

helps freshmen, sophomores, and juniors find leave-term jobs and internships. On the second floor areCnumber of offices and meeting rooms for student organizations. Behind you on this floor is the Collis Cafe. In the "Basement is the pool room, video arcade, and Lone Pine Tavern. You'll notice that to the right of the circulation desk are two Mac computers—one of the many places on campus where students can check their e-mail at any time of the day. Let's walk outside to Thayer. I'll meet you out there.

We re standing outside Thayer, which houses three of the five dining halls on campus, including Home Plate, which serves mainly low-fat and vegetarian food; Full Fare, which is the-all-you-can-eat place; and Food Court, which has a deli, grill, salad bar, taco bar, pizza counter, and so on. You can go upstairs to Topside convenience store and charge whatever you want to your I.D. lf you look down the road you'll see a White building with columns in front—that's South Fairbanks Hall. It houses the Tucker Foundation, which is the umbrella for community service and religious organizations on campus. Last year Dartmouth students did something like 32,000 hours of community service and during any given term at least a quarter of the undergrads are involved in community sendee like literacy projects, Students Fighting Hunger, the Big Brother/Big Sister program, the prison project, or Operation Insulation. If you want to do a term's worth of community service you can apply for a Tucker Foundation Grant. This will cover your food and lodging expenses as long as you are working at least 50 miles from Hanover.

We're walking down Massachusetts Row, three buildings that make up the Massachusetts Dorm Cluster. All of the 40 residence halls around campus are grouped into clusters overseen by area coordinators. The ACs are upperclassmen responsible for planning programming. On Thursday nights; people can come down to the TV lounge for free pizza or ice cream and watch Seinfeld or Friends; softie nights the cluster will sponsor a capella groups or short lectures by profs; and, during the summer, clusters often hold barbecues. All dorms are mixed by class there are no freshman dorms here.

You'll have anywhere from seven to 12 freshmen on your hall as well as an under graduate advisor.

That's an upperclassman trained to help freshmen with whatever problems they encounter, from roommate problems to computer crashes. All the A dorms are mixed by coed by room and some by f100r...."

Um, excuse me, does that mean that youhave boys and girls in the same room?

No, it just means that some rooms on die floor arc male and some are female. All dorms have fall laundry and kitchen facilities as well as study and TV lounges. Any other questions?

Okay, well, we're standing at the beginning of Tuck Drive. That brick and black building at the end is Feldberg Library for Business and Engineering. Dartmouth has three professional schools business, engineering, and medicine—as well as 18 graduate programs in various departments. There are about 950 graduate students in contrast to the approximately4,200 undergrads. Dartmouth's focus is on the undergrads and this is probably best exemplified by the fact that professors teach just about all classes, an exception being a large intro science class where you break down into lab sections of about 20 people apiece. In some cases a teaching assistant will lead this, but in most cases profs will do it as well. Let's cross the street.

We're walking past Silsby Hall and Rockefeller Center. These two buildings house the departments of economics, government, and sociology as well as many classrooms. In the basement of Rocky are several large lecture halls where campus organizations like Young Democrats, the Conservative Union, and Women in Politics bring speakers to campus. Also, the Rocky Center runs a program called Montgomery Fellows which brings visiting professors or luminaries in a certain field to campus for anywhere from three days to three terms. Recent Fellows include physicist Freeman Dyson, former Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller, and historian David McCullough.

If you turn around, you'll see there's a large rock behind Rocky. To some that's the spiritual center of campus because it marks the site where the first building of the college was erected. Eleazar Wheelock and his sons and other Dartmouth students built a log cabin on that site and had their first classes there.

We're standing at the beginning of Webster Avenue, more commonly known as Frat Row, where most of the fraternities ana sororities are as well as the president's house. There are 15 of seven sororities, and four coed societies. About 60 percent of the men and 40 to 45 percent of the women belong to the Greek system. You're not allowed to rush until the fall of sophomore year, so as a freshman you have the chance to go around to the houses and get to know the people. If you've visited other schools, you may notice that the houses here look smaller. Only about ten to 15 of the members can live in the house, but 35 to 100 will belong. I bis is one way the Greek system is prevented from becoming really exclusive—you don't have all of its members living in one place for three years. Also, most parties are open; you just need your Dartmouth I.D. Any questions?

Do you belong to a sorority? Yes, I'm a Tri-Delt. Is that a real sorority ?

Yes, it's real. It's not just SaturdayNight Live.

Excuse me, is it true that Animal House was based on here?

Yes, but that frat's not on Frat Row. Also, that was written about Dartmouth when women hadn't been admitted yet. It's much more civilized since 1972 when women were admitted.

Is there a lot of pressure to drink? No, at least I haven't felt it. You can go to frats and dance or talk or whatever and no one cares if you're drinking or not. It's really pretty relaxed. Any more questions?... All right, let's walk toward Kiewit.

This is the hub of computing on campus. More than 7,000 personal computers are spread out around the campus because every undergrad and most grads and profs have them. You're actually required to have a computer upon matriculation. Within your first couple of weeks here, you'll find you use the phone very litle. with your friends, stay in contact with organizations you belong to, check dininghalf menus, and have increased access to professors, you use the campus e-mail system, called Blitz Mail. Using the Dartmouth network you can access all nine libraries' card catalogues and do much of your research in your room. If you're taking an art history class, and you don't want to go to the art library to view slides, you can download the digital images on your computer through the Artemisia program and then pull them up whenever you need to use them. Any questions? OK, then cross the street.

We're about to walk inside Baker Library. To my left, in Carpenter Hall, is Sherman Art Library and to my right is the Sanborn English Library. Also in Sanborn is the Composition Center. Attached to all the freshman English courses is a writing assistant an upperclassmen trained to critique students' papers. Let's walk into Baker.

We're going by the old card catalogues, which are out of date as of 1991 having been replaced by Computers. We're standing on the fourth of nine floors of open stacks look past the circulation desk and you can see them. Computers are spread throughout the stacks so that students can work on papers instead of lugging all their books back to their rooms. I'll meet you at the bottom of the stairs. Down here is one of the most famous rooms on campus. This is the Reserve Corridor, known for the Orozco frescos that cover the four walls. They were painted in the 1930s and scholars still come from around the world to study them. This room is also important in that professors put articles and books on reserve here for students to check out for two hours at a time. Any questions? OK, I'll meet you all outside.

If you've been walking around Hanover much today, you've probably heard the Baker bell tower ringing out. The bells are hooked up to the campus computer system with a databank of more than 2,000 Songs. You can "blitz," or e-mail, your requests to the student manager and hear selections from "Like a Virgin" to the "Brady Bunch." The bells also chime the hour.

If you continued on down this road, you'd come to the buildings for computer science and biology, and beyond that the Dana Biomedical Library as well as several buildings of the Med School. Behind me on the hill are buildings housing the Kresge Physical Sciences Library as well as the offices for earth science, environmental studies, chemistry, physics, and astronomy.

Across the street is Rollins Chapel, which is interdenominational. Many services are held throughout the year as well as some small recitals and concerts. On my left is Webster Hall, which has been used as a programming venue for the past couple of years but which will be converted into the tenth library of the campus system. It will house Special Collections, which have grown too big for their space in Baker. Among them are the complete papers of Daniel Webster.

Let's cross the street.

We're standing at the beginning of Dartmouth Row. Behind me is Wentworth Hall, named after the New Hampshire colonial governor who helped Eleazar Wheelock secure the College's charter. This is where Robert Frost lived when he attended Dartmouth: when he came back to teach, he taught in the same building. In the middle is Dartmouth Hall. It burned down twice, and the second ond time it was rebuilt in 1904 the three central doors were sealed. That's one way to tell who the freshmen are at the beginning of fall term: they're the ones tugging on the central doors trying to get to their language drills. These buildings used to be the College's dorms, dining hall, library, and classrooms. Now they house the headquarters for the foreign-study and language-study-abroad programs as well as the departments of history, classics, religions, comparative literature, and several languages.

If you turn and look at the Green you can see remnants of a fence by the flagpoles. In the early 1800s, when Hanover was still an agricultural community, farmers used to let was no need for the fence and the College decided to tear it down. The alumni raised a big ruckus, because by that time a new tradition had arisen: the fence had become the "Senior Fence," and woe to any underclassman foolish enough to

The Green is the center tor four of the major weekends on campus. In the fall is Homecoming, and in the days leading up to it the freshmen scurry around building a bonfire out of railroad ties. Traditionally it's supposed to be as high as the number in our class, so ours was supposed to be 98 tiers high; but for safety reasons no one really builds it that high. We finished off the top of . ours with popsicle sticks.

On Friday night, which is Dartmouth Night, the bonfire is lit and freshmen are supposed to run around it as many times as their class numerals; that gives them good luck the rest of the time they're here. Since only three or four people ever manage all the laps, there's a more abridged tradition: if you run up and touch the bonfire before it sinks in on itself, you're also supposed to have good luck.

Um, so we 're the class of'00. We don'thave to run any laps? And we don't have abonfire?

Oh, you will. Most likely, the bonfire will be a hundred tiers, including popsicle sticks.

During winter term there's Winter Carnival. A snow sculpture is built in the middle of the Green and all the Greek houses and societies build sculptures on their lawns around whatever the theme of the carnival is. Various snow-related events and competitions take place on the Green out at Occom Pond, on the golf course, and up at the Dartmouth Skiway. Dartmouth has its own ski area about 20 minutes tip the road, and when it's open, a bus shuttles to it from Baker.

During spring and summer term, Green Key weekend and Summer Carnival are held halfway through the terms. Usually there's a carnival on the Green with bands playing along with booths offering food and games. The unofficail big day of the summer, though, is Tubestock. If you walk across Ledyard Bridge on that Saturday afternoon, you'll see a thousand sophomores floating down the Connecticut River on innertubes while music plays. Some frats manage to build rafts and get ping-pong tables out there.

We're about to walk past the entrance of the Hood Museum. The Hood has approximately 60,000 pieces in its collection but only a very small fraction of those are on display at one time. The museum has rotating exhibits; it often tries to schedule them around what art-history classes are studying. Admission is free so students can wander in when they want. If you want art that isn't on display,; you can make an appointment with one of the curators who will pull out whateve you want

This is the Hopkins Center. It brings together music, drama, dance, visual arts, and film under one roof. There's more than lf four and a half £ acres of usable floor space. Right now you're standing on top of the Loew Auditorium, which seats about 400 people; two of the term's film series show out of there, and film classes have screenings there as well. Behind me is the Courtyard Cafe.

We're standing next to the posters for the various workshops. The jewelry and woodworking workshops are located here; the pottery workshop is located across the river. After paying a nominal studio-art fee and some money for materials, you can use the workshops whenever they're open. You don't have to be enrolled in a specific class and experience doesn't matter. There are qualified instructors to help you.

This is the bronze head of Warner Bentley, a former Dartmouth drama professor and first director of the Hopkins Center. You see people going out of their way to pass him, particularly around midterms and finals, because rubbing his nose is supposed to bring good luck.

And now we're back at the front of the Hop. This is the official end of the tour. For those of you who are disoriented, in front of the Hop is the Green and to the left of the Green is McNutt admissions office. If you have any questions or need directions, feel free to ask. Thank you for coming.

WENTWORTH

ALUMNI GYM

WEBSTER

Simone

HOPKINS CENTER

DARTMOUTH HALL

BAKER LIBRARY

BARTLETT

Wilson

COLLEGE HALL

PARKHURST

ROLLINS CHAPEL

SPHINX

FAIRBANKS