Academic advisers and advisers from the major department help each student plan a course of study to meet their goals. Most Mount Holyoke students elect to take writing intensive courses, drawn by the limited enrollment, careful reading of assigned texts, and frequent papers. Equally important, the Mount Holyoke graduate should be quantitative able to recognize and isolate various forms of quantitative argument, to reason effectively with numerical information, and to use modern computation skills with ease. It is perhaps in the mathematics or science classroom that the value of single-sex education is best demonstrated. A normal schedule is four courses per semester, but some students take as few as two.
Courses meet one to four times a week.
January Term fits between semesters and provides an academic change of pace with lectures, films, workshops, and student activities. Special courses are offered for credit, and some students teach courses themselves. A career exploration program off campus offers a three-week glimpse into the future. Frances Perkins students also regularly participate in the Five College course interchange program with Amherst, Smith Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Copyright 1998 Mount Holyoke College.