The amount of student bed space available in the College’s living and learning communities, now around 20 percent of all housing, will remain unchanged after the implementation of a residential housing system next fall, senior assistant dean of residential life and director of residential education Mike Wooten said.
Students will still have the option to live in the LLCs after they have been placed into the houses proposed in College President Phil Hanlon’s “Moving Dartmouth Forward” policy initiative, he said.
The living learning communities aim to integrate how students think with where they live, in a process called “transfer learning,” Wooten said. “This year, applications to join a living learning communities surpassed the number of available spots,” he said.
Residents and leaders associated with the LLCs expressed satisfaction with how the four new communities, unveiled and opened to students last fall, have been progressing. More than 200 freshmen moved into LLCs, or learning-based residential programs, in September.
The Global Village is one living learning community in which students live and interact within a multicultural, multinational and multidisciplinary community.
The Dickey Center for International Understanding, one of the Global Village’s partners, has brought in speakers and a variety of experiential learning programming for members of the community, Global Village lead team member Casey Aldrich said.
Prior speakers include former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell and author of “Redeployment” Phil Klay. Next week, the community plans to hold an event involving a computer-based simulation focusing on world energy. These events have not only been well-received, but also well-attended. Although she was hesitant to admit a correlation, Aldrich said that members of the Global Village community have been enrolling in the international studies minor since joining the community.
The Center has been communicating and working with a variety of partners, including the Office of Pluralism and Leadership, the Montgomery Fellows, the various language departments and the Frank J. Guarini Institute for International Education to design programming and encourage event attendance.
Each term the programming cycle revolves around a different topic. Last fall, the community focused on global health. This winter they are focusing on environmental issues, while the spring will put a spotlight on international security and war and peace. Students will have the opportunity to visit the ice core labs in the Thayer School of Engineering during this term.
Global Village resident Bob Wang ’18 said that he applied to the LLC to maintain his French and to meet people who want to talk about international affairs.
The Global Village has provided opportunities for students to have intellectual conversations and to meet interesting people, Wang said, such as former U.S. global AIDS coordinator Eric Goosby.
Wang said that the main aspect of the LLC that he would want to see improved is the placement of sections. Freshmen are placed on floors with mostly upperclassmen, he said, missing out on the same freshmen floor experience that they would have living in a traditional dorm building during their first year at Dartmouth.
Assistant director of residential education for living learning programs and academic initiatives Katharina Daub said that the Triangle House, another LLC, is a “well-structured community.”
Triangle House, an LGBTQIA community, features live-in advisors including an undergraduate advisor, a staff advisor, the interim director of OPAL Reese Kelly and a live-in postdoctoral fellow at the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, Brianne Gallagher.
The house hosts brunch once a week where residents engage in discussions about gender issues, Daub said.
There are 10 design-your-own communities, which allocate space for students to live together and create their own LLC based on a topic of their choosing, she said. Often students apply for the program so that their prior floors can stay together, she said.
Examples of such communities include “Muggles for Magical Awareness,” which has discussions revolving around the Harry Potter book series, Daub said. Another example is “The Other Reed Hall,” where students of a variety of areas of expertise gather every Friday for dinner and share one thing they learned that week.
The most difficult part of the design your own community process was finding bed space for the students, Daub said.
The new Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network Innovation Center has an associated LLC that aims to help students become involved in entrepreneurial activities on campus, such as a start-up boot camp, Daub said. Currently, the program has an equal representation of each class. Members of this community had the opportunity to visit start-ups in California during the winter interim period to meet with Dartmouth alums working in start-ups.
The fall of 2015 will see the first major adjustments to the new communities, including potential changes to programming and the percent of enrolled students living in the communities, he said.
