Smith College

What draws students to Smith College is the intellectual challenge and rich extracurricular experience offered by an outstanding top-ranked liberal arts college. The rigorous academic program is demanding yet flexible. Smith’s broad open curriculum—anchored in the sciences and the humanities and arts—allows unlimited choices. Although each first-year student is required to complete at least one writing-intensive course, there are no other required courses outside a student’s field of concentration. With more than a thousand course offerings in more than 50 areas of study, the curriculum is rich in cross-disciplinary explorations of issues and scholarly conventions outside the Western standard. A host of unique study abroad programs in addition offer opportunities for students to expand their liberal arts curriculum. The Smith environment promotes faculty-student collaboration, and some of the research projects born of that teamwork are legendary. For every 9 students there is a Smith professor to encourage, guide and inspire. Smith professors are a world-class group of scholars who are engaged and accessible who consider teaching undergraduates to be their most important job. In 1999, Smith became the first women’s college in the nation to offer a program leading to a degree in engineering. At Smith, students are trained as engineers and at the same time educated broadly in the liberal arts. As with its engineering students, Smith is devoted to developing the best in each student. The college gives Smith students the ability to harness their skills and knowledge in a wide variety of opportunities that, in addition to academic coursework, includes internships, study abroad programs and leadership positions. Smith’s New England campus is located on 147 acres of tree-lined paths and streets. Larger than most liberal arts colleges in the United States, Smith provides unique resources and outstanding facilities including: the recently renovated Smith College Museum of Art, widely acknowledged as one of the most important art collections at an American college; a new campus center; the largest undergraduate library system of any liberal arts college in the country; extensive performance facilities; and a multibuilding science complex of teaching and research laboratories and classrooms. All of Smith’s resources, unlike those at many universities, are primarily for undergraduate students. Smith is a partner in the Five College Consortium, one of the nation’s most notable and successful collaborations of higher education institutions. Through the consortium—which includes Smith, Amherst, Hampshire and Mount Holyoke colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—students may choose from more than 4,500 additional undergraduate courses offered at the nearby campuses, all within a 12-mile radius of one another.