Colleges Williams College

Williams College www.williams.edu

Williams College is a private institution that was founded in 1793, making it one of the oldest colleges in the country. It’s set on 450 acres in a rural location at the foot of Mount Greylock in the Berkshires in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The school’s traditions include a semi-annual, schoolwide trivia contest and a Mountain Day each October when students hike Mount Greylock. Williams is also part of the unofficial Little Three athletic conference with Amherst College and Wesleyan University. The school requires almost all students to live on campus. The college has seen many firsts: Its alumni society is the oldest in the world; it hosted the first intercollegiate baseball game; and its class of 1887 was the first in the U.S. to wear caps and gowns at graduation.

Academics

Following a liberal arts curriculum, Williams College provides undergraduate instruction in 25 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs including 36 majors in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. Williams offers undergraduate instruction among three academic branches: Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science and Mathematics, though there are two graduate programs in Economics and Art History. The college maintains affiliations with the nearby Clark Art Institute and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and has a close relationship with Exeter College, Oxford. The school also has Oxford-style tutorials, which rely heavily on student participation. The student-faculty ratio at Williams is 7:1, and the school has 72% of its classes with fewer than 20 students. Popular majors include Econometrics and Quantitative Economics, Political Science and Government, and Psychology.

Special Highlights

Hopkins Observatory. Williams College is the site of the Hopkins Observatory, the oldest extant astronomical observatory in the United States. Erected from 1836 to 1838, it now contains the Mehlin Museum of Astronomy, including Alvan Clark’s first telescope, as well as the Milham Planetarium, which uses state-of-the-art projectors and digital projectors. Williams joins with Wellesley, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Colgate, Vassar, Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr to form the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium, sponsored for over a decade by the Keck Foundation and now with its student research programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation

Chapin Library. The Chapin Library supports the liberal arts curriculum of the college by allowing students close access to a number of rare books and documents of interest. The library includes over 50,000 volumes as well as 100,000 other artifacts such as prints, photographs, maps, and bookplates. The Chapin Library’s Americana collection includes original printings of all four founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Additionally it houses George Washington’s copy of The Federalist and the British reply to the Declaration of Independence. The library’s science collection includes a first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, as well as first editions of books by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and other major figures.

School Mission & Unique Qualities

Williams’ mission is to prepare students to explore and pursue their goals through comprehensive, individualized career education. We encourage all students to discover their interests, skills, and values so they can lead fulfilling and impactful lives. Williams has a close relationship with Exeter College, one of the oldest constituent colleges of Oxford University. In the early 1980s, Williams purchased a group of houses, today known as the Ephraim Williams House, on Banbury Road and Lathbury Road, in North Oxford. The Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford (WEPO) was founded in 1985. Every year, 26 undergraduate students from Williams spend their junior year at Exeter as full members of the college.

Student Reviews…

“I am thoroughly enjoying my time at Williams. The academics are very challenging. Considering the school’s reputation, and the fact that most students were the Valedictorian or Salutatorian at their respective schools, this was not a surprise. But everyone is very supportive, so it’s not a competitive environment. The campus is absolutely beautiful, but it’s very rural.”