Academics

At Hampshire you’ll take responsibility for your education, customize your curriculum, and move beyond boundaries of disciplines and departments. We call this your academic concentration. It puts the emphasis on learning, not on teaching. Guided by our accomplished faculty, you’ll forge your own path, taking roads not already paved for you. In the process you’ll acquire the ability to teach yourself.

It’s more than a life skill. It’s an outlook on life.

What Questions Drive You?

Hampshire's divisional academic system provides a framework to guide you in building your academic concentration and completing a yearlong advanced study project in your final year. You’ll develop competence in four key areas: analytical writing and research, quantitative analysis and reasoning, independent project-based work, and multiple cultural perspectives.

To further support authentic collaboration, Hampshire has replaced single-subject departments with five interdisciplinary schools. This flexible structure permits you a greater richness and variety of academic activity.

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 and to consider your work from a non-Western perspective.