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Williams College – located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, at the foot of Mount Greylock in the Berkshires – is one of the oldest colleges in the country. The school was originally a men’s college; women were first admitted in 1970. The college’s fraternities were abolished in the 1960s. The school’s traditions include a semiannual, schoolwide trivia contest and a Mountain Day each October when students hike Mount Greylock. The Williams Ephs, named after the school’s founder Ephraim Williams, participate in NCAA Division III varsity sports in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. 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.
Williams College has three academic branches – languages and the arts, social sciences, and science and mathematics – and graduate programs in the history of art and economics. Williams has small class sizes, with a student-teacher ratio of 7-to-1. The school also has Oxford-style tutorials, which rely heavily on student participation. 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. The school has a tradition at each graduation to drop a watch from the top of the college chapel. If the watch breaks, tradition holds that the class will be lucky. Notable alumni include Elia Kazan, director of "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire"; John Frankenheimer, director of "The Manchurian Candidate"; and Prince Hussain Aga Khan, whose father is the spiritual leader of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims.
School mission and unique qualities (as provided by the school):
Talented, highly motivated students and faculty from across the country and abroad gather in the natural beauty of Williamstown to create a community of learning that is both personal and powerful. Personal are the bonds that grow among faculty and students - in the classroom, lab, theater, and studio and through an endless array of extracurricular activities. Powerful are the learning that results, the impact Williams students go on to have on the world, and the strength of their lifelong attachment to each other and to the place.
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