academics header
Home / Academics
 

Academics

  A Hands-on Education
  test
 

As a Hampshire student, you have the freedom and opportunity to engage in advanced research.

For an introductory geology course, for example, a professor and students flew to Iceland to investigate glaciers, land-use history, and tectonics.

   
  Expect More
  math student
  To know is not enough. Expect more from your education. Create. Share your ideas. Reevaluate. Revise. This is Hampshire--where ideas take root.
   
   

A Hampshire Education
At Hampshire, your education focuses on personalized, independent work, close collaboration with faculty, and hands-on experience through study abroad, short-term field studies, internships, volunteer work, advanced independent projects, and much more.

Exceed Your Expectations

Founded on the belief that the best education is the one you build around personal goals, Hampshire offers you:

  • » small seminars and frequent individual conferences with faculty encouraging discussion and independent thinking, and acting as catalysts and mentors as you conceive, develop, and evaluate original work.
  • » the resources of five college and university campuses More than 6,000 courses are available to you in the Five College system at no extra charge; a convenient free bus system provides transportation among them. Never mind the best of both worlds. How about the best of five?
  • » flexible areas of study designed to help you discover your passions and shape your work. As a Hampshire student, you may design academic programs encompassing several disciplines or choose to study a single field in depth after satisfying distribution requirements.

Interdisciplinary Schools
To encourage a truly personalized education, Hampshire has replaced single-subject departments with five interdisciplinary schools. This flexible structure permits you a greater richness and variety of academic activity.

Divisional System
Instead of freshman year, sophomore year, and so on, you qualify for a Bachelor of Arts degree by completing a full-time program composed of three levels, or Divisions, of study. The underlying philosophy: after exploring widely and deeply, you become the architect and builder of your own academic program.

Advanced Independent Work
A Hampshire education is not complete until you demonstrate the ability to use your knowledge in successively more sophisticated independent projects of your own design. These projects follow a graduate thesis model, with students expected to complete original work of a high standard, with assistance from their faculty mentors.

In addition to the distribution requirements, you must include volunteer service to Hampshire or the surrounding community as part of your Hampshire education and, in Division III, are asked to look beyond the specific focus of your work by integrating your scholarship into the larger academic life of the college.

The faculty also expect all students to consider some aspect of their Hampshire work from a non-Western perspective.


 

Contact Us

Office of the Dean of Faculty
Hampshire College
893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
413.559.5378
Fax 413.559.6081
dof@hampshire.edu
 

© 2013 Hampshire College 893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002 . 413.549.4600