Hampshire College

Hampshire’s approach to 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

	A Hands-on Education
	Hampshire students 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.

Founded on the belief that the best education is the one a student builds around personal goals, Hampshire offers:

• » small seminars and frequent individual conferences with faculty encouraging discussion and independent thinking, and acting as catalysts and mentors as students conceive, develop, and evaluate original work.

• » the resources of five college and university campuses. More than 6,000 courses are available to students 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 students discover their passions and shape their work. Students 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 a greater richness and variety of academic activity.

Divisional System
Instead of freshman year, sophomore year, and so on, Hampshire students 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, students become the architects and builders of their own academic programs.

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

Advanced Independent Work
A Hampshire education is not complete until students demonstrate the ability to use their knowledge in successively more sophisticated independent projects of their 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, students must include volunteer service to Hampshire or the surrounding community as part of their Hampshire education and, in Division III, are asked to look beyond the specific focus of their work by integrating their 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.