amherst college walking tour

On-Campus Visits

Thank you for your interest in Amherst College! We're delighted to welcome in-person visitors to our beautiful campus. The calendar below shows the current available schedule for campus visits, including the program offered on each date. Advance registration is required. To register for an on-campus visit:

Select an available date from the calendar to the right.

Click on your preferred visit option and complete the campus visit registration form.

Look for your confirmation email after submitting your registration form.

For groups of ten or more visitors, reservations are required and must be confirmed in advance. To inquire about the possibility of a group visit, please submit our online group visit form at least two weeks prior to the requested visit date. Please see the Amherst website for more information on driving directions and parking. We look forward to your visit!  

Amherst College Transfers: 2024 Requirements, Dates, GPAs & More

How long do amherst college tours last.

CampusReel hosts a total of about 47 tour videos for Amherst College , so you can expect to spend between 141 to 235 minutes total watching content. Of course, we are constantly adding new content. Come back to CampusReel often to see new videos and campus tours of Amherst College and stay informed on campus life.

Where do Amherst College tours start?

On CampusReel, you can start your Amherst College tour wherever you’d like. If you’re touring Amherst College in person with a traditional walking tour you’ll likely start at the admissions office. The school’s address is listed as Amherst, MA so we recommend plugging that into your GPS. Before beginning a tour at Amherst College , make sure you check the weather and plan out your itinerary and accommodations appropriately. Amherst weather can be unpredictable, so bring comfortable shoes in case it rains. Also, check what stops the tour includes to make sure you’ll see everything you’re interested in! The Amherst College website likely outlines important information for tour visitors.

When do Amherst College tours start?

Needless to say, a CampusReel virtual tour of Amherst College starts whenever you want. However, most schools provide 2-3 different start times for group tours in-person: in the morning, afternoon, and late afternoon. We recommend choosing the second available timeslot because Amherst College students will likely be up and about by then. You can explore Amherst if you wake up early and want to gain a deeper understanding of the surrounding community. Check the Amherst College admissions site or student services to confirm tour times.

What are the best landmarks and locations at Amherst College ?

Below is a list of every Amherst College building that has a tour on CampusReel.

• Amherst Town Clerk at Amherst College
• Alumni Gymnasium and Athletic Complex at Amherst College
• Amherst College: Keefe Campus Center at Amherst College
• Morrow Dormitory at Amherst College
• Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College
• A J Hastings Inc at Amherst College
• Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
• Robert Frost Library at Amherst College
• Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College
• Memorial Dr at Amherst College
• Greenway Dormitory at Amherst College
• Williston Hall at Amherst College
• Book and Plow Farm at Amherst College
• Seeley Mudd at Amherst College
• Valentine Dining Hall, Amherst College at Amherst College
• James Hall at Amherst College
• The Lord Jeffery Inn at Amherst College
• Merrill Science Center, Amherst College at Amherst College
• Amherst College Quadrangle at Amherst College
• King Hall at Amherst College
• Converse Hall at Amherst College
• Norwottuck Rail Trail at Amherst College

What will I see on a Amherst College tour?

All CampusReel tours for Amherst College include everything from dorms to dining halls to student interviews and gameday videos. Most importantly, you will see Amherst College students!

What is city Amherst, MA like?

Amherst is listed as New England. You need to evaluate the area carefully to make sure this is an environment you want to go to college in. Some people love a town this size, and others don’t. Either way, it will affect your time at Amherst College .

Who are the tour guides for Amherst College on CampusReel?

Scroll up to the top of the page to select from a number of tour guides available at Amherst College . Keep in mind anyone can upload content to CampusReel, so the available tour guides are constantly increasing.

Summary and Overview of Amherst College tours:

Amherst College , like all colleges and universities, has its pros and cons. At the end of the day, your goal with these tour videos is to try to decide if Amherst College is the right school for you. After you’ve taken the time learn about the campus, Amherst and overall experience, then you can consider taking your search one step further and visiting Amherst College in person.

Check out these related virtual tours:

• Campus tour to Wesleyan University
• Campus tour to Williams College
• Campus tour to Middlebury College

2024 College Admissions Calculator

Predict your chance of acceptance

2024 College Comparison Tool

$10,000 Scholarship - No Essay

sponsored by Edvisors

Video landing page link

Your message (optional):

We're happy to see you again 😊

The Value of College Tours

• Author By Lindsey Huang ’26
• Publication date February 4, 2024
• Categories: Class of 2026
• Categories: Tips and Tricks

A lot of college students will understand that making a decision about which college to attend requires a ton of careful consideration. One way to learn more information that factors into a final decision about which college to attend is by visiting the college in person and taking a college tour. Sure, you can see photos and videos of the college online and read about what the college has to offer, but the opportunity to talk to a current student and see the college in person is invaluable. 

I’m fortunate I could tour Amherst before I decided to commit. Although most people tour colleges during junior or senior years, I toured Amherst the summer before my sophomore year. My dad was visiting Boston for a work conference, so the rest of my family and I decided to tag along and take the opportunity to visit some colleges. So, I toured many colleges around Boston and toured Amherst since I was interested in attending a liberal arts college. I’m grateful to have toured early on in my high school career because, starting the spring semester of my sophomore year, the pandemic made it hard to travel, and many colleges, including Amherst, stopped offering in-person tours, opting to offer virtual tours instead. 

Truthfully, I don’t remember much from my Amherst tour because it happened more than 4 years ago (wow, writing that made me feel old!), but I remember bits and pieces that stuck with me. One thing that stood out was that the Amherst tour guide was willing to answer questions with their own experience and personalized the tour. They were super friendly and easy to talk to, making the tour stand out from the other tours I attended at other colleges. Another thing that stood out from the Amherst tour was the architecture of the buildings. I distinctly remember walking into the Science Center, Greenway Dorms, and Beneski Museum and being blown away by the design. My memories of these buildings greatly influenced my decision to attend Amherst. 

As a current student at Amherst, I’ve seen the value of a tour from a college student’s perspective. Sure, it might feel strange to be sitting in a classroom and see a group of touring students walk past your classroom, but I know many students who work as tour guides, and all of them are passionate about Amherst and know so much about the college. I love getting to wave to them and seeing them on tours out and about on campus, and it’s always great to see how much fellow students want to help out high school students with their college decisions! 

Amherst College

Founded in 1821, Amherst College has retained its character and quality partly by maintaining its small size (1850 students). The scenic campus lies just south of the town common. Get information on guided campus tours or pick up a self-guided walking tour brochure at the admissions office. There are also a few museums on campus, including the small but fantastic Mead Art Museum and the equally fascinating Beneski Museum of Natural History .

220 South Pleasant St

Get In Touch

https://​www​.amherst​.edu​/

Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

19.19 MILES

It was Springfield where, in 1891, a young Canadian physical education instructor called James Naismith first invented basketball. The game is celebrated…

Amazing World of Dr Seuss

18.63 MILES

This innovative museum is dedicated to the life and work of Springfield native Theodore Geisel, aka Dr Seuss. On the 1st floor, interactive exhibits use…

Old Sturbridge Village

28.07 MILES

Historic buildings from throughout the region have been moved to this site to re-create a New England town from the 1830s, with 40 restored structures…

Emily Dickinson Museum

During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson (1830–86) published only seven poems, but more than 1000 were discovered and published posthumously, and her verses…

Skinner State Park

This mountaintop park, at the summit of Mt Holyoke, peaks out at a rather modest-sounding height of 942ft. But that's high enough to earn the visitor…

Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

Co-founded by the author and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, this superb museum celebrates book illustrations from around the world with…

West Cemetery

For a peek at Amherst's colorful past, make your way to the West Cemetery, between Triangle St and N Pleasant St. Here you'll find the graves of Amherst's…

Mount Holyoke College

The nation's oldest women's college, founded in 1837, is in the center of South Hadley, the southernmost and sleepiest of the Five College towns. The…

Nearby attractions

1 . Mead Art Museum

A small but scintillating collection of art works that span the globe, ranging from American and European paintings to Mexican pottery to West African…

2 . Beneski Museum of Natural History

Kids will dig the enormous woolly mammoth and dinosaur skeletons at this museum on the campus of Amherst College. Exhibits focus on the geological history…

3 . Emily Dickinson Museum

4 . West Cemetery

5 . University of Massachusetts

The enormous University of Massachusetts at Amherst illustrates the distinction between public and private higher education in the US. Founded in 1863 as…

6 . Hampshire College

The region's most innovative center of learning is Hampshire College, 3 miles south of Amherst center on MA 116. Students here don't pick a major in the…

7 . Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

8 . Summit House

At the summit of Mt Holyoke, a former hotel dating from 1861 is now a museum and visitor center. Old photographs show Summit House as it was in its heyday…

« All Events

• This event has passed.

David Peck Todd’s Amherst College–An Architecture & Walking Tour

December 2, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm.

The Amherst Historical Society devoted its 2023 exhibition to Mabel Loomis Todd, focusing on her skills as a botanical artist, writer, editor, and civic leader. She was devoted to her husband, David, and traveled with him as he pursued an active career as a professor of astronomy at Amherst College. He traveled to distant lands in Europe, South America, and Asia to pursue astronomical phenomena. A crater on Phobos (a satellite of Mars) and an asteroid are named after him. Mabel Loomis Todd edited some of his scientific papers and wrote an extended narrative of their trip to Japan.

What buildings on the Amherst College campus would David Todd have known? Thanks to Blair Kamin’s book, Amherst College: An Architectural Tour , we now know the buildings that were central to his experience from his undergraduate days to the time of his retirement. On Saturday, December 2, join the Historical Society’s president, Gigi Barnhill, as we walk in David’s footsteps to visit the buildings that were part of his life in Amherst. We’ll discuss the architecture, the College’s successful reuse of many of the buildings, and aspects of David’s career. We will be able to enter several of the buildings and explore the campus at our own pace. The tour will conclude with a visit to The Dell, David and Mabel Todd’s home.

More information and registration

• Google Calendar
• Outlook 365
• Outlook Live

ANDREW D. KAUFMAN

EDUCATOR AUTHOR INNOVATOR

The Great Russian Books and My Spiritual Quest

A Personal Reflection Essay by Professor Andy Kaufman, 2003

From College to the Kremlin: Finding Myself in Russian Life and Literature  My passionate interest in Russian literature and culture goes back to my years as a Russian major at Amherst College, where my intense curiosity about Russian culture led me to spend almost a year and half abroad in Russia in 1989-90. First I was a participant in an ACTR-sponsored foreign exchange program at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow, and then, based on an independently submitted application, I was accepted as a private student (stazher) into the Department of Soviet Literature, on the Faculty of Philology, at Moscow State University. While at Moscow State, I became friendly with Dr. Aida Borisovna Abuashvili-Lominadze, a professor at the university and a member of the former Union of Soviet Writers. Through Professor Abuashvili-Lominadze I had the opportunity to become friendly with and learn from several prominent cultural figures, such as the writers, Andrei Bitov and Tatyana Tolstaya, the scholar, Sergei Bocharov, the journalist and professor, Galina Andreevna Belaya, and Gavril Popov, the former Mayor of Moscow and now the Rector of the International University in Moscow.

Through my experiences and relationships in Russia, I began to sense the strong connections–and antagonism–between Russia’s artistic-scholarly culture and its socio-political-economic culture. These connections were not only of academic interest to me; they were also of personal interest, since many of my Russian colleagues and friends at that time had experienced first-hand the repressive power of the Soviet State. The connections between these different aspects of Russian life also became evident to me for another reason: Having become involved in student organizations at Moscow State dedicated to the study and dissemination of literary and artistic values, I became painfully aware of just how rapidly the societal interest in such values was diminishing in Russia. I witnessed the combination of bitterness and longing, hope and despair, that filled the cultural air in those days, fueled in part by the growing obsession with materialistic values and concerns brought about by Gorbachev’s reforms.

Keeping the Humanities Human  During my time of living in the Former Soviet Union, I realized that my study of Russia, from that point forward, was never going to be a purely theoretical or abstractly academic pursuit; it would forever be imbued with the human element and everyday realities I had observed and experienced as a participant in Russian life. The connection between my academic study of Russia, my artistic sensitivities, and my worldly interest in what was happening in Russia at that time found expression in an article I published in the popular national Soviet magazine,  Yunost’ , in 1991. That article, based on an academic paper on contemporary Soviet culture I submitted as part of a course at Moscow State University, was written in Russian and was called: “ Pis’mo russkomu avtoliubiteliu ot amerikanskogo studenta, vspominaiushchego ikh sluchainnogo znakomstvo. ” [“Letter to a Russian Driver from an American Student, Recalling Their Accidental Acquaintance”]. When I returned to Amherst College for my senior year of college, I wrote a Senior Honor’s Thesis on Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time. My Amherst career also culminated with my decision to pursue a doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford.

I discovered early on in my Stanford career that my impassioned, personalized tendencies in studying Russian literature, encouraged at Amherst, would have to take second fiddle to a more professional approach to reading, research, and writing within the framework of a scholarly discourse. While at Stanford I became influenced by and increasingly conversant with various theoretical paradigms, such as (to name a few): the linguistic theories of Roman Iakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin, the semiotic theories of Yuri Lotman and the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, the psycho-linguistic theories of Jacques Lacan and Ferdinand de Saussure, Freudian psychoanalysis, Nietzschean moral and epistemological philosophy (and its antecedents in eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophy), the sociological paradigms of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and the art historiography of W.J.T. Mitchell. Even as my intellectual curiosity about new critical paradigms grew, I instinctively gravitated throughout my graduate studies towards a Formalist-influenced type of literary scholarship, combined with strong tinges of the American “Old Criticism” belief in the capacity of literary art to speak to the universal and transcendent aspects of human experience.

Glasnost’, Perestroika,  and My Rediscovery of the Russian Classics  Paradoxically, my unabashedly idealized scholarly proclivity was formed during a period, in which I directly confronted some of the harshest, most un-idealized realities of contemporary Russian life: I was spending my summers during graduate school working as a management consultant in Russia. Partly out of a desire to study the economic changes taking place in Russia, but mostly out of a need to deal with the economic changes taking place in my own life (i.e., the need to earn additional money), in 1993 I co-founded KTK Consulting Group, a management strategy consultancy, offering cultural insight and strategic marketing assistance to American businesses interested in entering the Russian market. My personal responsibilities, which were executed during my summer vacations from graduate school, included performing market research and analysis in Russia, teaching “crash courses” to our American clients on the essentials of Russian culture, and making strategic business introductions in Russia for our American clients.

While living and working abroad, I witnessed first hand the extraordinarily difficult decade of the 1990’s in Russia. The hopes and aspirations aroused by  glasnost’  and  perestroika were being shattered by political turmoil, a growing disparity between the extremely rich and the extremely poor, excessive corruption in all spheres of life, and a generalized feeling of angst about the future. These large political and socio-economic themes, which I had been studying at Stanford as part of my Related Field in Russian and East European Studies, became apparent to me in a real-world context, as well. My experiences of living and working in Russia provided me not only with added practical insight into Russian society and cultural life, but also with a reinforced appreciation of the vital relevance of my scholarly study of Russian literature and culture.

Appreciating the Transcendent Power of Great Literature Having experienced Russian life from within, I began to feel a growing sense of responsibility as a scholar and as a teacher of Russian language and culture to continue to include in my academic work a serious consideration of the social, political, and economic realities of Russian life, to which I had been exposed and in which I had participated. Furthermore, I felt obligated to begin to define for myself precisely what role my outside experiences should play in my scholarly work. One of the theoretical problems this search raised for me as a scholar was the question: To the extent that literary texts point to a worldly reality outside of themselves (and I tend to believe they do), how specifically do those texts deform or transform that external reality into an artistic reality that is different from the outside world they depict? I have been grappling with this question for years.

And I have begun to develop some tentative answers to it. My experiences in Russia have made me all too aware of the extent to which Russian literary creations are linked on multiple levels to the socio-political and economic forces in which they are produced. And yet at the same time I simply cannot deny the fact that when I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Tiutchev’s “Silentium!,” or Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, I, like so many readers, feel myself in the presence of an almost indefinable experience of sublime and haunting beauty, which seems somehow to be more perfect than the outside reality it represents. That presence, I have come to believe, is something called art. I am persuaded that, while each literary work is produced in a specific socio-historical context, and is influenced by the conditionings and prejudices of its creator, that work–if it is first-rate art–also speaks to universal human truths that transcend its historical context and authorial limitations. Every literary text, I believe, contains a poetic universe that transforms the raw facts of ordinary reality into an extraordinary artistic experience filled with a grandeur and a completeness lacking in the everyday world. The works of Russian literature show us that, in art–and perhaps only in art–life’s dualities can be made whole and impurities made perfect.

NOW AVAILABLE

• Apple Books
• Barnes & Noble
• Books-A-Million