Welcome to Williams!
Sorry that you can't be here in person right now, but welcome to the virtual tour.
So, Williams college
was founded in 1793 thanks to a grant
from Colonel Ephraim Williams. He had
three stipulations for the college:
Number one, that the college be named
after him. Number two, that the town that
the college was in be named after
him, and number three, that that town be in
Massachusetts. So, welcome to Williams
College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
I think we did pretty well with all three
of those stipulations.
Here at Williams, the student to faculty ratio is 7 to 1, and our average class size tends to be
about 13 students. We have a pretty
special relationship and bond with a lot
of faculty members here on campus. Our
relationship with the faculty members is
something that we really take pride here.
When you arrive here on campus at
Williams as a first year, there are a
total of three dorms that you can be a
part of, one being Mission Hall. There's
also Frosh Quad, which houses Williams
and Sage dorms, which are mirror
reflections of each other. Of course
there's a hot debate about which of the
ones are better, but all three are great options.
Here at Williams we have a
unique first year residential program
called the Entry System. Every first-year
student is placed into an entry made up
of 40 students, approximately. You don't
get to pick which entry you go into but
there's a lot of intention behind the
configuration of the entries because
every entry is supposed to represent a
microcosm of the Williams community.
So, within your entry there will be people
of very different backgrounds and interests.
So, now we're going to talk a
little bit about dining and the way that
dining works here on campus is that we
have three main dining halls. We have
Paresky, which is in Paresky
Center, the main hub of student life on campus.
We have Mission, which is in one
of the freshmen dorms, but it's open to
all class years. We have Driscoll, which
is over near some upperclassmen dorms.
There's lots of different food options
on campus, everything from kosher, vegan,
vegetarian, halal, dairy-free
and anything you might need. They're
great at accommodating allergies as well.
We also have some non-dining hall
options for food whether that'd be the
Lee Snack Bar, ’82 Grill, Eco Cafe or
Goodrich, all of these still operate on
the swipe program.
So freshman on the twenty one meal swipe program, that's twenty one swipes per week.
If you have extra swipes you can
use them at something we call SNAR or Snack Bar.
This is where our center for
student life at night turns into
late-night food heaven. Like many schools,
Williams has a freshman orientation program.
We call ours EphVentures. There
are a wide variety of EphVentures to
choose from. When I was a freshman, I went
on a WOOLF trip and I was a WOOLF leader
when I was a sophomore. So I went
backpacking for the first time ever.
One of our other options is Where Am I ?, where freshmen get to explore the general
Berkshire area and get to learn where
they are. Another option we have is
called Leading Minds.
Students who want to hone their
leadership skills and learn about ways
they can be leaders on campus, that is an
orientation program for them. There's
also Root, which looks at the
intersectionality between social justice
and sustainability. We also have
Exploring the arts. Williams is weirdly
nested in a very artsy area with a lot
of surrounding museums, and for NCAA
varsity fall athletes have Team Eph, so
athletes who are first-years do not have
to sacrifice preseason training or
having a Ephventure orientation experience.
So as you see here, this is Weston, this is our admissions building and financial
aid is here as well.
So, this is the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, home to, you guessed it, the theatre and dance departments.
In this building over the course of the year there'll be over 70
productions, ranging from
professional shows to theater and dance
department shows, which are open to all
students regardless of major.
So Chapin Hall is one of our main gathering places
for large performances and lectures and
different talks on campus. We also have
different student groups who perform there.
The Berkshire Symphony will
perform there, which is a really amazing
opportunity for student musicians
because it's a professional music
group composed of half William students
and half professional musicians.
Hollander Hall and Schapiro are mirror
images of each other and, as you can see,
the beautiful sunlight streaming in
provides great lighting to accommodate
for a lot of our smaller classroom
environments.
e Class of ’66 Environmental Center is home to the Zilkha Center and you'll notice
there's lots of solar panels around. You
might be able to see that there's some
farmland in the back‚ that's because it's
trying to complete something called the Living Building Challenge.
Williams has one of the oldest environmental studies programs in the country.
Sawyer library is definitely a place where students spend a lot of time.
We take much pride in our academics here
and Sawyer is a beautiful building. It
houses, not only individual study areas,
but a huge part of it is group study
rooms because collaboration is greatly encouraged here.
Here we have Thompson
Memorial Chapel‚ it houses all of our
student faith organizations, except for
the Jewish religious center, which is
located separately, near Weston - The
admissions building. There are over 40
religious traditions represented on
campus and there are chaplains available to talk to any student regardless of faith.
So, WCMA, the Williams College Museum of Art, is a nationally renowned
art museum right in the middle of
Williams college campus. Williamstown is
actually kind of known for its access to art.
In the local area we have three
really fantastic nationally renowned art museums.
That would be WCMA as one,
MASS MoCA, which is down the road in North Adams
a little bit and The Clark just
off the campus. I, personally, don't like to brag, but the college likes me to
say that we have the best art history
program in the nation. Part of that is
our access to art, our fantastic art
history professors and also something, a
program that we call WALLS. So this is
where, once a semester, students will
take a piece off of the walls of WCMA and put it on the walls of their dorm room.
So now we're entering our Sports Complex here at Williams. All facilities
are open to all students.
Within this complex we have Lasell gym. In upper
Lasell we have cardio machines.
We have a weight room we also have the pool, which
is where our swim team and dive team
have their practices and their meets, but
also people swim for fitness and there are open hours.
We have Chandler gymnasium, which is where our varsity basketball team and our varsity volleyball teams practice and play their games.
We have Simon Squash courts. We have our ice hockey rink.
We also have our Towne Field House, which is our indoor track. We
also have Weston Athletic Complex.
We have arrived at science quad. We have
the physics, chemistry and biology departments.
And then right behind, we have
the new South Science building, which
opened the summer of 2018. South Science
Center added about 77,000 square feet to
Williams as STEM facilities and it's in
addition to Schow library, and there's
also the North Science Center being
built. It should be done about a year
from now hopefully, so when you all are
here, if you decide to come, it'll be a
a nice new science building and not just
a
loud noisy construction site, which will be very nice.
Where we are now is
Morley Circle, where we have three
buildings that comprise of what we at
Williams know as The Davis Center.
The Davis Center strives to practice and
inform students on culture, social justice,
equity, diversity and inclusion
on campus, and serve as a resource for any students, faculty members, or student groups to use.
As you can see here, Spring Street is the heart of Williamstown. Many shops are nestled here and pretty much
anything that students could want. For
example: a hair dresser, a movie theater, a sandwich shop, a coffee shop. They're really all here for us.
And so as you can see,  Spring Street is really in the heart of campus, even though it is considered "off-campus."
So, at this point on the tour I like to talk a little bit about academics at Williams.
Williams can be an incredibly competitive environment to get into,
but, once you're on campus, that
competitiveness fades away and it
becomes an incredibly collaborative
learning space.
People are at Williams‚ yes, to get good grades, yes, to succeed later in
life‚
but more than anything, they're at Williams to learn.
You're not here to do
better than your peers. You're here to succeed with your peers.
It's a fantastic community filled with students who want to welcome you here and make you feel at home here.
Williams is more than just a home away from home. It is a home in and of its self,
and a home I hope to see you in soon.
