Continuing our series on the reputation of individual departments within larger colleges, or “Is This a Good School for That?”, we’ll be looking into Computer Science at Dartmouth. Some simply know it as the feral cousin of the more reputable Ivies, but this New Hampshire liberal arts institution is notable for its computing legacy and prolific research.
Just a brief ~perusal~ on their website turns up plenty of current studies — like presented at the 2023 Proceedings of 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing on how bias gets encoded into neural networks, or that uses natural language processing to identity effective treatment plans and recovery timelines for opioid addiction based on relevant Reddit health forums.
This all sounds promising, so let’s get into it — what makes Dartmouth a good school for Computer Science? We’ll cover that in this post, drawing on our extensive experience getting students into top computer science programs at Dartmouth and elsewhere. If you’re looking for personalized guidance in tailoring your application or finding the best schools for your goals, send us a message today to get started.
The History of Computing at Dartmouth
Dartmouth is, in plain terms, ancient. One of the oldest colleges in America, Dartmouth was a colonial college incorporated before the American Revolution, opening its doors in 1769. As a result, all of its academic programs have pretty robust origin stories, but computer science is unique in this respect because, of course, it’s a relatively new technology that has come to be pivotal in everyday operations and crucial to domestic productivity. In fact, the U.S. Department of Commerce recently reporting that the U.S. digital economy was responsible for 10.2% of our GDP in 2020.
Jobs in computer science and programming innovations are clearly more important than ever, but how does Dartmouth figure into that? Well, it has always been on . In 1940, researcher George Stibitz was the first to remotely access a digital computer, using phone lines and working from an automatic calculator mainframe in New York to complete the demonstration. According to Dartmouth, his contributions don’t stop there. This mainframe “was the first electric digital computer that would evolve into today's modern electronic computer [...] the first computer to perform arithmetic operations in binary fashion, the first placed in routine operation, and the first with either remote or multi-station terminals.”
In 1956, a Dartmouth professor coined the term “Artificial Intelligence,” and the school became integral to the research frontier and development of AI technology by holding the 2-month conference called "Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence." By the 1960s, Dartmouth was well on its way to making history. In ‘62, notorious professors (and fathers of the contemporary Dartmouth CS program) John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz instituted with the support of the National Science Foundation, and in ‘63 they began writing “Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” or the programming language commonly known as BASIC. BASIC was developed specifically for undergraduate instruction, bringing students into what was a rarified fold. Since its conception, BASIC has been common among computer scientists of all levels for its simplicity and applicability, and until recently
As you can imagine, Dartmouth’s computer science program developed in parallel with the increasing sophistication of computers themselves. But this era cemented Dartmouth as a leader in information — they were not only foundational to the language of computing itself, but they were among the first to invest in the infrastructure and research funding for computers to prepare their students for a rapidly modernizing world. At a time when computers were relegated to the remote corners of academic research and were the exclusive purview of specialists, Dartmouth’s visionary faculty insisted on making computers accessible and preempting the digital revolution.
The State of Computer Science at Dartmouth Today
The important thing to understand about Dartmouth’s CS program is that it is the result of an ethos that prioritized educating undergraduates, including them in the research community pushing things forward rather than treating them as secondary attendants to more tenured scholars. In fact, that was Kemeny and Kurtz’s reasoning for founding the computation center before such facilities were common. They said, "whether a student will ever use a computing machine or not, his life is likely to be affected by such machines, and hence, he should know something about their capabilities and limitations. In this sense, contact with electronic brains is as essential as learning to use the library."
According to students, this attitude still prevails in the department today. Between Dartmouth’s critical role in the rise of computers and its support of undergraduate participation in the field, it has curated a rigorous curriculum that in turn maintains an ambitious community of innovative thinkers at the top of their field.
If this sounds like the perfect place for you, we can help you put together a competitive application for the premier undergraduate computer science programs.