This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Special Issue.
Winterim — the College’s extended winter break, lasting from late November until early January — is one of the traditions that makes Dartmouth unique. The break is both longer than that of most other schools, lasting six weeks, and, unlike even other quarter-system schools, begins before Thanksgiving.
While many students have strong opinions about winterim — with some lamenting that it is too long and others reveling in the added time to sleep in and reflect on their fall experiences — the history of the initiative may be less familiar.
Unlike many of the College’s traditions, the six-week pre-Thanksgiving break is in fact a 21st-century invention. Its institutional roots, however, are much older.
Prior to 1958, there were in fact two winter breaks: the Thanksgiving recess from Nov. 20-26 and the Christmas recess from Dec. 18 to Jan. 4. According to the College “General Regulations & Courses” archival books in the Rauner Special Collections Library, these breaks did not bookend terms but rather interrupted the first of the College’s two semesters, which ended in early February.
The year 1958 marked the transition to then-College President John Sloan Dickey’s three-term Hanover Plan, with its goal of developing a liberal arts curriculum emphasizing “independent learning” over “dependance on teaching,” according to a transcript of the address in The Dartmouth’s archives in Rauner.
The Hanover Plan moved the end of the first term from early February to Dec. 12, with a Thanksgiving recess from Nov. 26 to Dec. 1, according to the 1958-1959 General Regulations & Courses book. The plan also laid the groundwork for our current system, the D-Plan.
In 1971, with Dartmouth facing pressure from peer institutions to open its doors to female students, physics professor Arthur Luehrmann proposed the D-Plan to the Board of Trustees in a Rauner file entitled “Coeducation, High Salaries, Larger Faculty, Small Student Body and Financial Solvency for Dartmouth: A Constructive Proposal,” colloquially known as the Luehrmann Plan vertical file.
Luehrmann’s proposal aimed to present a plan that would keep the same number of holiday terms while redistributing them across the calendar year. This arrangement would allow Dartmouth to operate a full-scale program year-round, sustain the current on-campus student population during the regular academic year and boost overall enrollment by nearly 40%.
According to his proposal, Luehrmann aimed to achieve coeducation while preserving “graduate studies, a small student body, a large male enrollment, a compact campus, a strong athletic program, high salaries and Black studies.”
The dates of the winter break under Luehrmann’s D-Plan were roughly the same as under the Hanover Plan, but later 21st-century transformations of winterim’s exact timing can be traced back to the winter break benefits identified in Luehrmann’s proposal.
The first year in which winterim was extended from three weeks to six, beginning before Thanksgiving, was 2012, according to the Office of the Registrar’s online academic calendars. Dartmouth’s calendar briefly reverted to the Thanksgiving recess model for the 2020-2021 academic year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the registrar’s website.
In Luehrmann’s plan, the possibility of winter employment was a product of the flexibility of off-terms under the D-Plan.
“By packing two vacation terms together or one term and a term of foreign study, it may be possible to undertake more ambitious projects, or to secure better-paying jobs,” he wrote in the 1971 proposal.
The 2012 expansion of winterim, however, has allowed that off-term employment ethos to expand into the break. Many students now use their winterims to pursue internships, including programs offered by the College itself.
The Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, for example, holds an ImpACT Winterim Leadership Intensive program during the off months. According to the Center’s website, ImpACT is a three-week program designed for students to address a social challenge in their homes or the Upper Valley community while engaging with peers to explore frameworks for social change.
While the College provides funding for those participating, it does not assist students with locating the internships.
Jude Poirier ’28, who participated in the program this fall and worked with “policy spreadsheets,” explained that other students were responsible for “designing new media initiatives.” The initiative falls under the ambit of virtual, Dartmouth-designed “systems mapping” social impact workshops, Poirier added.
Liam Kenny ’28, another ImpACT participant, said he did grant writing for a New Hampshire public education system nonprofit he had also worked with during high school.
Kenny said he and his peers had the opportunity to work with organizations with which they had previously partnered.
“You get to pick [the non-profit] you apply [for and] do whatever they need you to do, because they’re not paying you, Dartmouth is, which is really great,” Poirier said.
While some students opt for spending the holidays on campus, others enjoy the break at home or by traveling.
Ali Sattar ’26 said there was a “wide spectrum” in students’ winterim experiences.
“[Winterim] can be being in Cancun or being in the Bahamas, staying on campus or as simple as going back home,” Sattar said. “It depends person to person.”
Sophia Jiang ’28 said she spent her first winterim at home in Wisconsin “networking” via the Student-Alumni Winterim Chat Program — an initiative by the Alumni Affairs office to match first-years with alumni for text conversations.
Jiang said the break was a “unique experience,” as she went back to her hometown “a changed person” following her first Dartmouth term. She said she felt she was “nearing adulthood, [with] one foot in Dartmouth and one foot in Madison.”
Connor Sullivan ’28 said he spent the break with family in Chengdu, China, and also found himself “stuck between” Chengdu and campus.
Sullivan said his fall term coursework in “Western philosophy of government” influenced conversations with his relatives about “the Chinese school of governmental thought” and U.S.-China trade relations.
Sattar explained that he has split his winterims between Hanover and Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, the Florida Keys and the United Kingdom, where his family now lives. Of his time spent on campus over the break, Sattar added there were not a lot of “resources” or much “human connection” in Hanover during winterim, adding that campus is “very desolate.”
He noted that “once the athletes leave,” around the holidays the winterim student population in Hanover decreases to “100 or less.”
However, Sattar also said that being on campus during the winter “allows you to decompress and look around, look at Baker … and be like, ‘Holy s**t, I’m at Dartmouth.’”
Student body president Chukwuka Odigbo ’25, who has spent “every interim since [his] first year” on campus, said he finds that, with each passing year, “it’s just gotten better.”
Today, the Provost’s Office works with the First Generation Office to organize resources such as near-daily newsletters, a food pantry through Dartmouth Dining, fitness classes, faculty and staff-hosted dinners and weekly student experience surveys, according to Odigbo.
The College also offers $50 winterim Co-op Food Store vouchers — an initiative launched in fall 2022 by Dartmouth Student Government. The program aims to help those on campus with additional access to food resources, according to the DSG website.
According to Odigbo, 70 students made use of the food voucher program this past winterim.
“Every year, there seems to be more intentional commitment [from Dartmouth administrators],” he said.
Administrators sent out a survey for students to give feedback on their winterim experience on campus, which was a “very good temperature check,” he added. The College administration, and International Student Experience director Seun Bello Olamosu in particular, was “so open to hearing what students were thinking, what students were feeling,”Odigbo said
He added that it “would be cool” to see Dartmouth implement more “micro-internships” or “micro-practicals” for students to engage in during winterim.
Jackson Hyde '28 is an intended philosophy major from Los Angeles, California. His interests include photography, meditation, and board game design.
