Smith College

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Since its founding in 1871, Smith College has provided women of high ability and promise an education of uncompromising quality. A world-class faculty of scholars are fully engaged in your intellectual development, and an open curriculum encourages you to explore many fields of knowledge. Mentors for scholarship, leadership, and service help you observe different achievement models so you can set your course with conviction and confidence.
Smith College educates women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose. A college of and for the world, Smith links the power of the liberal arts to excellence in research and scholarship, thereby developing engaged global citizens and leaders to address society’s challenges.
Experience a living tradition of intellectual rigor and scope. Take a risk on an untested concept. Develop the acuity to frame an argument, and the eloquence to persuade others of its merit. Take an art class even though your major is engineering. Work with a faculty of scholars who respect their students enough to expect the highest academic achievement standards.
At Smith, the world is your campus. You will explore international and intercultural issues, living and studying with women from all over the world. Each day, Smith students initiate and engage in spirited dialogues inside and outside the classroom, exchanging ideas and perspectives, and experiencing genuine learning across cultures. In collaboration with faculty advisers, you will design an academic program that empowers you to be ready to live, work, and lead across borders.
The world is your classroom. Acquire the knowledge, understanding, and skills to be prepared for living in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse world. Since 1925, Smith College has been a pioneer in studying abroad, demonstrating that active engagement in the world enhances a liberal arts education. Spend a semester or academic year on one of Smith’s programs in Florence, Geneva, Hamburg, or Paris, or choose from Smith’s consortium and approved programs in Spain, Japan, India, and Mexico Middle East. Travel to locations worldwide with faculty-led programs during January interterm or work at an internship for the summer. Find the program that’s right for you.
Smith’s vast array of innovative programs and centers, cross-disciplinary initiatives, and internship and service opportunities are designed to enrich the academic experience to help students further explore their passions in real-world pursuits.
Develop the confidence that comes from being held to high standards of performance and achievement. Read Sylvia Plath’s poems in her handwritten drafts. Live in a house with a ghost. Study DNA sequencing with one of the world’s leading molecular biologists. Contemplate the cosmos. Speak Hebrew at lunch. Exceed your expectations of yourself. Reinvent yourself. Imagine yourself at Smith.
Join a supportive and diverse community that respects individual choices and achievements. Deejay for a radio station. Run for the head of the student government. Choreograph and produce your dance performance. Join comedy troupe. Lead your crew team to a varsity victory. Study the traditions of dance and theatre in Brazil. Serve an internship with the United Nations in Geneva.
Smith College is a distinguished liberal arts college committed to providing the highest-quality undergraduate education for women to develop their intellects and talents and participate effectively and fully in society.
The college began more than 140 years ago in the mind and conscience of a New England woman. The sum of money used to buy the first land, erect the first buildings and begin the endowment was the bequest of Sophia Smith. When she inherited a large fortune at age 65, Sophia Smith decided, after much deliberation and advice, that leaving her inheritance to found a women’s college was the best way for her to fulfill the moral obligation she expressed so eloquently in her will: “I at this moment make the following provisions for the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.”
Smith has changed much since its founding in 1871. But throughout its history, there have been certain enduring constants: an uncompromising defense of academic and intellectual freedom, and attention to the relation between college education and the broader public issues of world order and human dignity, and a concern for the rights and privileges of women.
Today the college continues to benefit from a dynamic relationship between innovation and tradition. And while Smith’s primary curriculum of the humanities, arts, and sciences still flourishes, the college continues to respond to the new intellectual needs of today’s women—offering majors or interdepartmental programs in engineering, the study of women and gender, neuroscience, film and media studies, Middle East studies, statistical and data sciences and other emerging fields. Were Sophia Smith to revisit Northampton, she would undoubtedly find her vision realized, as students at her college prepare themselves for exemplary lives of service and leadership.

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