Dartmouth College

Dartmouth is the college Sophie Ha is admitted to and attends, a concrete sign of her academic ability and a source of competing expectations. Its place in the story changes as Sophie moves from being told she may not belong there to imagining ambitions of her own.

Sophie’s Admission and Family Expectations

Sophie’s Dartmouth acceptance sits uneasily within her family’s ideas about her prospects. Her mother had discouraged her from applying, saying she would not get in; after the acceptance, her mother worried that Dartmouth would set Sophie up for failure. Sophie links that doubt to her mother’s own difficult life, suggesting that the college represents both opportunity and a future her family struggles to trust.

Marriage expectations complicate that future. At a family gathering, an uncle’s remark about Sophie earning her MRS at Dartmouth is serious enough to embarrass her. Ever Wong contrasts Sophie’s relatives’ traditional expectations around marriage with her own family’s controlling rules, which had nevertheless never asked her to please them by finding a husband. The contrast helps Ever see Sophie’s fixation on finding a man not simply as glamour or flirtation, but as a response to the expectations pressing on her.

A Future Beyond Economic Insecurity

Sophie explains that after her parents’ divorce, her mother worked at a hotel until a manager slapped her; after her mother pushed him away, she ended up cleaning toilets. Sophie says she gave up her dinners for her brothers and watched her mother grow older and grayer under hardship. She fears becoming old, poor, and discarded as she believes her mother has been. Dartmouth therefore stands against a future Sophie associates with economic vulnerability and the treatment of women as disposable.

Ever answers by pointing to Sophie’s admission and her own capacities: she is a sharp negotiator and highly intelligent, Ever argues, and can pursue wealth herself rather than depend on a man. Sophie initially reacts with bafflement, but lowers her legs as the conversation continues. The exchange reframes Dartmouth from a credential that might merely fail to protect her into evidence that she can pursue an independent future.

Sophie at Dartmouth

Later, Sophie calls from Dartmouth orientation. She reports that her roommate, like Spencer, wants to run for office, while Sophie has set her sights on the presidency of the entrepreneur club. The ambition is specific and public-facing: she is not only entering college but already identifying a leadership role she wants to claim there.

Her update also shows Dartmouth as part of a wider set of futures opening for the people around Ever Wong. Sophie remains in contact with Xavier Yeh once a week; he has turned down a place at a prestigious private high school in Massachusetts and moved to Los Angeles to work on an independent-theater set. In the same call, Sophie tells Ever that Jenna Chu has entered Northwestern University’s medical program and won the place Ever once had. Dartmouth is thus not merely a setting for Sophie’s next chapter; it is the vantage point from which she shares news of diverging choices, including Ever’s displaced medical path.

Significance

Dartmouth gathers the story’s tensions between inherited insecurity and self-determination. Sophie’s family can regard higher education as a risk even after she earns admission, while also measuring her future through marriage. Her plans for an entrepreneur-club presidency answer both pressures with a goal of her own. The college’s significance lies less in prestige alone than in the way Sophie’s arrival there makes her ambitions newly visible—and gives Ever a glimpse of how differently their futures may unfold.