For visitors to this part of Massachusetts, Smith College is a beautiful campus to see. Plant species from around the world fill the Lyman Conservatory, its adjoining botanic garden, and the campus-wide arboretum. Ponds, trails through botanical splendor, trees and large expanses of lawns surround this institution of higher learning making it a visual and spiritual delight.

Smith College, in Northampton was founded in 1875 as a private liberal arts college for women. At the undergraduate level, it remains an institution exclusively for women with an enrollment of about 2,500. Male students are now admitted to Smith College at the graduate level.

The college's faculty of researchers, performers, and writers provide it a reputation as one of the nation's top liberal arts colleges, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The college's reputation has been further enhanced by the number of awards its women have recently received. These awards include 13 National Science Foundation Fellowships, four Truman Awards, two Mellon Fellowships, a Goldwater Scholarship, a Beinecke Award, two Rhodes Scholarships, a Luce Foundation Award for study in East Asia and a Bosch Foundation Fellowship for work in Germany. Perhaps most impressively, though, the women of Smith College have landed 20 Fulbright Awards.

And with more than 1.3 million items, Smith College's Neilson Library lays claim to being the largest of any liberal arts college in the country. The massive library's featured holdings include one of the two most distinguished U.S. repositories of women's history manuscripts and a nationally prominent rare book collection. There also are special-subject libraries for the fine arts, the performing arts, and the sciences. In fact, the college's Young Science Library ranks as one of the largest undergraduate science libraries in the United States.

But a large percentage of those who flock to the 125-acre Smith College campus do so to visit the famed The Smith College Museum of Art. This classic museum showcases more than 24,000 works of art from antiquity to the present.

The college's cultural reaches also include the Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts and a music department that boasts one of New England's premium concert halls.