Welcome to Bowdoin College

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Welcome - Main Quad

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Welcome to Bowdoin College, a community of 2,000 students on the coast of Maine. A leading liberal arts college founded and endowed for the common good, we are proud to study and research some of humanity's biggest challenges. Bowdoin is a very historic place—but we won't focus on building dates. Instead, we’ll explore our beautiful campus by learning how it can shape your experiences and opportunities. The Main Quad is the heart of campus, and your Bowdoin journey will start and end on the museum steps. From your first Opening of the College ceremony, the night before classes start, to your graduation parade, this is where it comes full circle.

Hawthorne- Longfellow Library

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The Hawthorne-Longfellow Library is named for two notable Bowdoin classmates: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of the Bowdoin Class of 1825. The collection includes more than 1 million physical volumes collected over 220 years. It also includes an extensive digital collection of e-journals, e-books and databases. Students have access to over 40,000 e-journals, 300,000 e-books, and a ton of comfy chairs. Hawthorne-Longfellow is also home to the Media Commons, an impressive collection of video and audio resources for video editing and animation, as well as darkrooms and software for photography development and editing.

Hyde Hall

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Hyde Hall is one of our first-year residences, and you can take a look at a typical room. These suite-style accommodations feature a shared common room with a two-person bedroom on each side. Each building has shared common spaces, laundry facilities and bike storage. Bowdoin provides each student with a bed, dresser, desk, chair - and of course, a new MacBook and an iPad - but the rest of your decor is up to you and your new roommates! The first-year experience is built around helping you achieve a smooth transition to college—academically, socially, and emotionally—with the help of a dedicated first-year dean.

Career Exploration and Development (CXD)

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Moulton Union is home to one of our two renowned dining halls, and its close proximity to the first-year residences make it popular starting on move-in day. In addition to the dining facilties, the upper floors of Moulton Union are home to Off-Campus Study and Research, the Office of the Dean of Students, and Career Exploration and Development, or CXD. CXD puts on over 200+ programs for career exploration throughout the year in any and every field, including information sessions, career talks, and mock interviews. Students meet with specialist advisors, all of whom have previously worked in the field for which they advise.

College Street

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College Street is a street, and yes, it runs through the College - but College Street is also the home of our student services offices and centers. The Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life, the Center for Multicultural Life, Student Accessibility, the THRIVE program, and the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center all have office space and communal shared space that is open to students. Celebrate a special holiday, host a heritage month, bake cookies, screen a movie: all of these activities are centered, literally, around College Street.

Roux Center for the Environment

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The Roux Center for the Environment is one of several hubs for Bowdoin's renowned teaching and study of the environment. In addition to classrooms and labs, the Roux Center features a "lantern" area always hosting study groups, lectures, or film screenings. Environmental Studies is one of Bowdoin's most popular areas of study. The introductory course is team-taught by a humanist, a scientist, and a social scientist, and the class explores major environmental problems through these disciplines. The program offers abundant opportunities to explore outside the classroom, including research conducted on the coast of Maine, as well as at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island, in Canada.

Schiller Coastal Studies Center

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The Schiller Coastal Studies Center is Bowdoin's world-class teaching and research facility on Orr's Island, a short drive from campus. In addition to dry and wet laboratories, tidal data and water sensors, and a whole lot of starfish, the Schiller Center is also home to the Bowdoin sailing practice facility. Large gathering spaces, classrooms, dorm-style accommodations, a commercial kitchen, and an art studio ensure that all academic disciplines have access to the coast for inspiration, education, and fun.

Whittier Field

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Bowdoin student-athletes make up about 35% of our student body, and participate at the highest level on the court and field as well as in the classroom. Bowdoin offers thirty-one varsity sports, fourteen club sports, and three levels of intramural competition in ten sports. We are a member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (or NESCAC) and most of our sports compete at the NCAA Division III level. In addition to historic Whittier Field, our athletic facilities include the Peter Buck Center, the LEED-Certified Watson Ice Arena, the Lubin Family Squash Building, Greason Pool, and Farley Field house.

David Saul Smith Union and Bookstore

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Smith Union is the hub of student life on campus and includes a café, Jack Magee's Pub & Grill, a convenience store, the mail center, a game room, study spaces, an art gallery, and the College Bookstore. Morrell Lounge hosts many events throughout the year, including concerts, fashion shows, and as well as an activities fair for our 100 or so student clubs and organizations to recruit new members. The space is so large that we can use it for everything from a roller skating rink, to a campus-wide Spring Gala, as well as for our annual graduate school fair with over 80 universities and programs in attendance.

Studzinski Recital Hall/Kanbar Auditorium

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Studzinski Recital Hall contains the 280-seat Kanbar Auditorium, Bowdoin's dedicated music recital hall. The building also features nine practice rooms, a rehearsal room, and video and audio recording equipment linked to the stage. The tall pylons around the hall create an space with an acoustical curtain that can be adjusted to "tune" the hall for different music programs. Bowdoin hosts about 50 musical performances a year and students are encouraged to participate in ensembles even if they are not music majors. Behind the recital hall, an outdoor Odeum - which is like an ampitheater, but for music - hosts performances and classes.

Peter Buck Center for Health and Fitness

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The Peter Buck Center is the core of health and fitness at Bowdoin. The lower level includes an expansive free-weight facility with rowing machines, a cardiovascular fitness center with weight machines on the first floor, and yoga and fitness studios on the second and third floors. The Health Center and the Bowdoin Athletic Department are based here. The building also hosts a three-story interior climbing wall used by the Bowdoin Outing Club, or BOC, our largest student club on campus. The BOC organizes weekend trips all over Maine to surf, hike, canoe, and snowshoe, and they lead our Pre-Orientation trips for first-year students.

Druckenmiller Hall

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Druckenmiller Hall includes the Biology, Chemistry, and Biochemistry departments. Druckenmiller's resources encompass 106,000 square feet and include a large refrigerated marine aquaria, a scanning electron microscope, a nuclear magnetic resonance machine, tissue- and cell-culture facilities, and the only confocal microscope lab in the state. Students are encouraged to participate in both academic-year and summer research during their time here. Across the academic spectrum, Bowdoin funds 200 research positions each summer. Students can work with faculty, or conduct their own research through a funded independent study project.

Chapel / McKeen Center

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Most Bowdoin students will hear the Chapel bells ringing out the time of day long before they venture inside this historic space. Renowned for its acoustics and rare pipe organ, the Chapel is used for musical performances and recordings, as well as weddings and special ceremonies. Behind the sanctuary is the McKeen Center for the Common Good, where students can engage their personal and research interests toward serving our shared community. The McKeen Center offers grants and awards that allow students to participate in all aspects of civic life, from research to voter registration to hunger prevention.

Massachusetts Hall

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Massachusetts Hall is Bowdoin's oldest building and originally housed the entire college. It's now home to the English department, which offers courses on everything from Shakespeare to the fundamentals of screen-writing. All classes at Bowdoin are kept intentionally small. The average class size here is 16 and our student to faculty ratio is 9:1. 70% of classes have fewer than 20 students and utilize discussion-based classrooms to allow students and faculty to fully engage with each other.

Memorial Hall

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The performing arts at Bowdoin offer opportunities to engage in both academic work and extracurricular clubs focused on Theater, Dance, and Music. The Theater Department is centered in Memorial Hall, which includes two performance spaces: Pickard Theater, which seats 600, and Wish Theater, an experimental black-box space. The Theater department stages about twenty different productions a year ranging from musicals to experimental multimedia pieces. Students from a variety of majors participate in productions whether or not they are taking classes in the department. Student-run groups also have access to these spaces, including the Masque & Gown, a student-run theater troupe, and our musical theater group, the Curtain Callers.

Searles Hall

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Home to Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, and the Mathematics departments, Searles Science Center contains cutting edge technology and a myriad of research opportunities. Bowdoin's pioneering Digital and Computational Studies extends big data analysis typically seen in these departments to other areas of study at the College, providing opportunities for those in Art History or English to utilize computational methods of analysis and access digital resources to add new perspectives to the core questions traditionally explored in the humanities.

Brunswick Downtown

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Our hometown of Brunswick is 30 minutes from Portland and the Portland International Airport, and is also accessible by Amtrak, bus, and shuttle bus. A summer tourist destination in its own right, Brunswick's vibrant, walkable downtown is active year-round. Coffee, pizza, Thai food, books, violin strings, aspirin, sweatshirts, burritos, rubber boots: all the necessities of life at college are found right here (or eight minutes away, at the Target.)

Thorne Dining Hall

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At Bowdoin, we take food very seriously. Our nationally ranked dining halls are magnets that bring together the campus community on a daily basis. We have two distinct dining halls, one in Moulton Union, the other adjacent to Coles Tower called Thorne. Both feature local foods, freshly made bread and baked goods, as well as vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options. Each dining hall offers a different menu for each meal, and students utilize our dining app to strategize where to eat. Bowdoin Dining is also famous for the two lobster bakes that bookend the academic year.

Park Row

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You've seen first-year accommodations in Hyde Hall, now check out living spaces for upperclass students. Park Row Apartments let students experience apartment-style living in groups of four, six, or eight. Each unit has a large shared living room and kitchen, an entryway and mudroom, and individual bedrooms with doors for each resident. Roomy floorplans and close proximity to Thorne Dining Hall makes Park Row one of the most popular residences at Bowdoin.

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