| A Hands-on Education | |
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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. |
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| Expect More |
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| 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:
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.