About

Welcome to the Div III at Hampshire site and blog!

This site was created in order to bring resources, tips, and news for Division III students together all in one place. The posts will include such things as:

  • Tips on writing contracts
  • Suggestions for finding/forming committees
  • Ideas about expectations for how much work to do each week
  • Suggestions for time management
  • Tips for managing large projects
  • Writing prompts to help you think about ideas differently or to get unstuck
  • Instructions for creating peer writing or peer critique groups
  • Information about events and workshops
  • Tips from librarians about finding and using resources
  • Information on media resources
  • Ideas about how to organize your thinking and/or your papers

and more! You can also use this site to find resources and important dates and reminders. We hope it is helpful.

If you have ideas about what would be helpful to post to this site, email Laura Wenk at lwenk@hampshire.edu.

If you came to this page to understand more about what Division III is:

  • Division III is the final stage of a Hampshire education. It is a two-semester project or paper done during the final year. In addition to finishing this major project/paper, Div III students must also complete two “advanced educational activities,” one each semester. These can be upper-level courses or relevant internships, teaching assistantships, etc.
  • Students begin to formulate their plans for Div III during the spring of their third year, or sixth semester, in a manner similar to how they formulated Div II two years earlier. They talk with faculty to 1) find a two-person committee, one chair and one member, to oversee their Div IIIs and 2) draw up, in collaboration with their committees, a Div III contract that describes their Div III plan. These are finalized early in the seventh, semester.
  • The Div III committee interacts with the student considerably more often than the typical Div II committee does. It might meet with the student once every other week or even, particularly in the final semester, once a week, to supervise progress on the Div III project. In many cases, the chair of the committee meets with the student more frequently than the whole committee – sometimes meeting with all their Div III students as a group (make sure you work out the details of when, where, and how often to meet with your chair and committee). When the project or paper is finished, the Div III committee has a final meeting with the student, and the chair, with input from the member, writes an evaluation of the student’s Div III work.