A great place

Introduction
The best way to figure out if Dartmouth is for you is to stay a night with students. The admissions office will hook you up with a student, no problem, and you will know for sure if it's the right place for you the next day. You can do this at almost every college, but I think Dartmouth is slightly unique in how difficult it is to understand why everyone loves it so much without experiencing it yourself.

Campus Life and Social Life
There are opportunities to go our partying every single night and the odds are that you'll spend the majority of your friday and saturday nights in frat basements. The good part about this is that you become really close with your classmates and get to know a lot of them outside the classroom. At a lot of the schools in bigger cities the social life filters out into the city and you don't really socialize on-campus with classmates as much--that's simply not the case at Dartmouth. The bad part is that it can get pretty insular. Personally, I loved it, but some people get a bit claustrophobic. I mean, you are in the middle of no where. Academics
First of all, there are almost no classes with TAs. And the few that do have them (this would be a sum total of 2 classes over my 4 years) do not use them for the purposes of teaching or even student interaction. They are simply there to grade tests and ask questions on a less formal basis than you might with a Professor. I don't think this can be emphasized enough, because so many top-tier schools isolate their teachers from the student body and your interaction with the professors is always through a TA. Not so at Dartmouth. And the Professors are almost universally amazing. There are a few duds here and there, but generally the Profs within the major departments are in the top of their field. That being said, I think some of the more peripheral subjects like, say, anthropology suffer from the smaller size of the school (because there's less demand for the more obscure topics because there are simply less students). I majored in Government and minored in English (two very popular departments) and almost every Prof I had was excellent, but there are some departments that aren't as strong.

Student Body
The single thing that probably played the biggest role in my decision to come to Dartmouth were the students I met when I visited. Simply put, these are the nicest students you're going to find in an ivy league. Maybe it's just the setting, but the students are generally very humble and easy-going. There is a lack of pretension at Dartmouth that is quite stunning when compared to some of its peer schools. And, we all get wasted. Alright, maybe that's not fair, there are a lot of kids who get involved in other aspects of campus life like the outing club (the largest in America) or the newspaper (the oldest college newspaper in America) but a lot of us play pong (not beirut, mind you) all the time, get wasted, and have a blast doing so. It's amazing watching a friend you saw drink slam 5 beers in 1 minute (called the "5 in 1 club") coherently and intelligently answer a question on the effect of industrialization on Western Europe at the turn of the century the next day.

In Closing...
Dartmouth has some of the most rabidly evangelical (in the a-religious use of that word) and rabidly fanatical alumni in the world. Our alums are more active than any other college's in America and there is a reason: we all fall in love with the place. It's hard to peg what does it, but if you're considering Dartmouth, do yourself a favor and talk to a recent alum of the college--They'll always end the conversation by telling you how jealous they are that you have 4 years at Dartmouth ahead of you.