Introducting Bowdoin College

   
   Bowdoin enjoys a reputation for academic prestige and rigor, but what truly distinguishes this small liberal arts college is its location in Maine. Just twenty-five miles up the coast from the comfortable city of Portland, Bowdoin idyllic campus provides unique opportunities for an independent-minded student body. For more than 200 yeas, Bowdoin's world-class resources and  tight-knit community have balanced tradition and innovation, a combination that continues to shape principled world leaders in every field.

   Bowdoin is in the heat of Brunswick, a small town at the hub of several ocean peninsulas where retirees, fisherman, and pilots from the nearby naval AI station make for an interesting milieu. Students and locals alike can take pride and enjoyment in the college's well-respected museums, frequent guest speakers, and outstanding hockey team. Bowdoin's dining serviced service, recognized as one of the best in the country, puts on annual lobster bakes. Juniors and seniors can find great seaside cottages off campus, or choose from among a wide variety of housing options, which include dormitories with quads and singles, a sixteen-story tower of single rooms, and college-owned houses and apartments. "The bricks" are the six mid-campus dorms that house all first-yeas and foster tremendous class the houses; today these houses have been renovated, and make up the College House system, a unique social and residential opportunity,

   Thanks to ambitious fund-raising in the nineties, there are handsome new dining, library, and Outing Club facilities. President Barry Mills, himself a Bowdoin graduate, arrived in 2001 and has worked to expand and diversify the student body. In recent years, as at many other colleges, the activist spirit ebbed; now, with political turbulence at home and abroad, Bowdoin is reemerging as a place of intense political discourse.

  

     In addition to the 200-acre campus--know for its beauty--the college owns 118 aces of forest, fields, and wetlands along the shore of the Atlantic just eight miles from campus. This site, on picturesque Orr's Island (a short bridge connects the mainland) features Bowdoin's Coastal Studies Center, for research in ecology. geology,ornithology, and marine biology.

   Bowdoin prides itself on its excellent faculty and its cutting-edge information and technology resources. There is plenty here to guide a motivated student in his or her explorations. Likewise, this is a place of many extracurricular passions. Sports are a popular of college life here, but so are the Outing Club, the campus radio station, and a variety of volunteer programs. 

     Nevertheless, this is primarily a venue for intense academic rigor (though the cutthroat mentality is virtually unheard of here). Although Bowdoin students do play hard, the spirit of the college--evident in the admissions criteria, academic program, and alumni achievements--is independent thinking. Bowdoin students are encouraged to choose thei own paths, and that freedom of choice generates true intellectual growth.