A self-guided tour of Skidmore's campus provided by the Office of Admissions. Currently, tours are not allowed inside campus buildings.
Eissner Admissions Center
Hello and welcome to this self-guided tour of Skidmore College. Your tour of campus starts here at the Eissner Admissions Center on North Broadway in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Before you head onto campus, here's a little background on our home town - a "perfect college town" according to the Princeton Review - of Saratoga.
Saratoga Springs is a beautiful town, known for its arts, culture and horses. Saratoga is home to the longest running thoroughbred racetrack in the country, having been open for more than 155 years.
Skidmore’s campus is located just a mile from downtown Saratoga and, with approximately 30,000 residents, it's a city big enough to bustle with activities on the weekends and small enough to ensure you always have a quiet spot to sip coffee outside a café. It's a community that's passionate about “shopping small” and as a result boasts an incredible number of unique restaurants, quaint shops, galleries and more.
Here's a fun fact: before the construction of the "new" Skidmore campus on North Broadway in 1963, the College's academic and residential buildings were located throughout downtown Saratoga. To this day, many buildings are known for their historical association with the College and some still proudly display engraved "Skidmore" cornerstones on them.
Last but not least, the region surrounding Saratoga is well known for its many recreational and outdoor pursuits, including the Adirondack and Green Mountains. Within just a few miles of campus there are also many (25, in fact) public parks and trails, including much-adored Congress Park, Saratoga Spa State Park and Saratoga National Historical Park.
Now, make your way across North Broadway to the front entrance and onto "Perimeter Road" for our first stop at Zankle Music Center.
Arthur Zankel Music Center
The award-winning Arthur Zankel Music Center is home to one of the nation's finest liberal arts music programs. Zankel has a gorgeous concert hall backed by a three-story-high glass wall and an awesome digital recording studio that’s helped produce Grammy-winning albums. Along with orchestra, chorus, and ensemble performances, Zankel offers a packed schedule of guest artists—like Arlo Guthrie, the Beijing Guitar Duo, and Joshua Redman—who work and perform with students. The biggest hit each year is sold-out, student-run Beatlemore Skidmania, which gets live-streamed for alumni in several major cities.
JKB Theater
The Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater Building—JKB to us—houses a 350-seat main theater, experimental Black Box theater, rehearsal studios, and costume and scene shops. Skidmore’s theater major is a pre-professional program, and the department has strong relationships with places such as the O’Neill Center in Connecticut and the British American Drama Academy. Grads go on to careers in theater, TV, and film, and in true entrepreneurial fashion have created numerous startups in Boston, Chicago, and New York—grads like Emmy-winning producer of Parks and Recreation David Miner, who launched the National Comedy Festival at Skidmore some 25 years ago. The event draws comics from schools such as Stanford, Brown, Emerson College, and of course, Skidmore!
Saisselin Art Center
Open 24-7, the Saisselin Art Center houses Skidmore's prestigious, pre-professional studio-art program, which offers an incredible array of art concentrations—10 in fact. We’ve got ceramics, communication design, digital media, drawing, and fibers. That’s five.
And there’s also jewelry and metals, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. Our grads become artists of every stripe, business owners, nonprofit leaders, industrial designers, teachers, and more.
Scribner Library
Students love studying in our four-story library. Named for college founder Lucy Skidmore Scribner, the library is packed not just on weeknights but throughout the day and even on weekends. Our students are serious about their work. Scribner has lots of nooks and crannies where you can find peace and quiet, and there’s lounge seating near all the windows, with great views of the campus greens and the wide horizon. It’s also home to the academic technologies and media offices, the Writing Center, the Documentary Studies Collaborative, and the GIS Center.
Case Center
High in Case Center, we hang flags from every country represented by the student body—more than 60 in all: Cambodia, Swaziland, Uzbekistan, you name it. When it comes to the US, 45 states are represented, as well.
For the student body, Case is the place to grab a snack or a cup of coffee at either the Spa or *Burgess Café, meet a professor on Porter Plaza, do business at the campus post office or bookshop, or stop at student government, leadership activities, or student diversity offices.
Case Green
Welcome to Case Green, a popular hangout, thanks to its natural setting in the heart of campus. Surrounding it are academic and administrative buildings, the library, the dining hall, residence halls, and of course Case Center. The first Friday of each school year, Skidmore’s 130 student organizations host a club fair to help you and other first-year students choose groups to join, from Hip Hop to quidditch to e-sports to pre-health to basketball. The largest are Benef-Action, the community service club, and the Outing Club, which leads amazing trips into the nearby Adirondack, Catskill, and Green Mountains. Students love not having have frats or sororities, and the inclusive community this creates.
Murray-Aikins Dining Hall
It’s a fact. Skidmore students totally love the food at Murray-Aikins Dining Hall, picked by Business Insider as the seventh-best college food in the US. Features include no trays (to cut down on food waste), a homemade-pasta station, a cook-it-yourself griddle, vegetarian and vegan specialties, international foods, and comfort food like mac and cheese and chicken fingers. Other plusses: food allergies accommodated, lots of different seating, fireplaces, natural light, open until 11 p.m., and seasonal use of organic veggies from our campus garden. First-year students get an unlimited meal plan—all you can eat.
Community Garden
Skidmore’s Community Garden was inspired several years ago by a handful of idealistic students, with support from the Environmental Action Club, Sustainability Office, and Facilities. Located a stone’s throw from residence halls and Case Center, the garden annually supplies more than 1,000 pounds of organic food to Skidmore's dining hall and the Saratoga Farmer’s Market. It also provides an outlet for students interested in environmental issues, social justice, and economic development to learn about and build the local food movement. For a deeper look, watch our video below.
Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery is a national leader among college and university museums for fostering dialogue and the cross-pollination of ideas. It’s also just a really cool, inspiring space inside and out. When they aren’t creating exhibits with students and colleagues, Skidmore professors use the Tang as an extension of their classes through exhibit visits, research using objects from the museum collection, and discussions with visiting artists. Students gain exposure to the Tang through internships, research, and work-study jobs. And each year, about 40,000 people visit.
Williamson Sports Center
Skidmore's athletic facilities support men's and women's varsity teams, club sports, intramurals, and fitness/wellness programs. Three-quarters of our students participate in at least one of these. The Williamson Sports Center has basketball, volleyball, and racquet courts, a swimming pool and diving well, and fitness/weight rooms, among other things. Skidmore also has nine tennis courts and artificial-turf fields for field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, and softball, while baseball, ice hockey, riding, and rowing do their thing just off campus. At the annual Big Green Scream, students pack the basketball arena for men’s and women’s games, win prizes, watch student performances, and generally just go nuts.
Dance Center
Home to Skidmore’s highly regarded dance program and host to professional dance companies, the Dance Center consists of a large dance, sport, and recreation space, a fully equipped dance theater with sprung stage and adjoining dressing rooms, and two large dance studios. Unlike most liberal arts dance programs, Skidmore awards a bachelor of science degree. Dance majors must complete a minimum of 25% of their credits in dance courses, whereas conservatory programs often require twice that. Translation: Skidmore dance majors receive high-level dance training, but still find room for electives and often a second major that round them out and help prepare them for careers in fields such as performance, choreography, and dance education.
Wachenheim Field
Wachenheim Field, our completely rebuilt, top-of-the-line playing surface, serves men's and women's varsity soccer and lacrosse, and intramural and club sports. Skidmore’s athletics program offers you some of the nation’s top sports opportunities, with 19 varsity teams playing against comparable NCAA Division III institutions throughout the Northeast. A founding member of the highly competitive Liberty League, Skidmore wins a number of conference championships each year, and many varsity teams have earned trips to postseason play—most recently field hockey and golf, men’s and women’s basketball, and men’s and women’s tennis. The riding team was the national champion a few years ago.
Residence Halls
Skidmore has some of the best residence halls in the country, according to college guides. Translation: you will be pretty happy with your living space. The eight residence halls primarily house first- and second-year students in doubles and triples. Seven of our res halls offer you suite-style living, where a few rooms share a common bathroom.
You can also count on the latest high-speed wireless in the res halls. Floors are coed, but you can choose options such as all-women, gender-neutral, or substance-free floors.
Jonsson Tower
Jonsson Tower - or "JoTo" - is another one of Skidmore's residence halls and has the hands-down best view of campus. The Tower is home to singles, doubles and triples for students across all four years.
The Jonsson Tower basement is also home to Campus Safety and the college radio station, WSPN. The first floor of Jonsson Tower is home to Health Services and the Counseling Center.
Sussman Apartments
Welcome to the Sussman Village apartment complex. Primarily for juniors and seniors, each two to five-person apartment has a furnished living area including a kitchen, plus laundry facilities in each building. The complex is heated and cooled geothermally and powered in part by solar and hydro. With the nearby North Woods apartment complex, Sussman has boosted Skidmore’s reputation for top-notch housing. No wonder 90% of students choose to live on campus.
Northwoods Village
The Northwoods Village was built in 2006 and offers juniors and seniors beautiful loft and garden-level apartments. All apartments are Gender Inclusive - students can choose to live with others regardless of sex, gender, or gender identity
Other features of the Northwoods Village include an outdoor volleyball court, fire pit and patio in Moore Commons, laundry rooms in every building and, last but not least, immediate proximity to the sprawling Northwoods trail system that completes the north boarder of Skidmore's campus.
North Woods
Skidmore owns a unique and valuable resource in its 250-acre North Woods—our own Central Park. This patch of moist oak-hickory forest contains more than 660 species of plants, including rare ferns, and animals from red-spotted newts to red-tailed hawks. An academic resource for the natural sciences and other studies, it's also great for hiking, snow-shoeing, and cross-country skiing on the many interconnected trails.
Palamountain Hall
Palamountain Hall and adjacent Bolton Hall and Tisch Learning Center sit at the crossroads of Skidmore’s academic enterprise. Asian studies, education studies, English, world languages and literatures, and management and business live here. Speaking of which, Skidmore offers you more than 40 majors, including pre-professional fields and a self-determined major. Most popular are business, psychology, English, economics, political science, studio art, and a slew of sciences. Foreign languages, including Chinese, Italian, and Japanese, are the biggest minors, and our media and film studies minor is growing fast. Some 60% of our students study abroad, one of the top figures in the nation.
Center for Integrated Sciences
With our science programs growing every year, Skidmore has begun the process of constructing our brand-new science center which will be connected to the existing Dana science center, which is called the Center for Integrated Sciences.
Full completion of this building will be done by 2024, but it is being constructed in phases – as each phase opens, students will be having classes in those spaces. The North Wing of the building is now open and actively used by Skidmore students.
Attached to CIS is the Dana Science Center, which is where we house most of our sciences on campus. Altogether, we have 10 different science programs, including environmental sciences and studies, biology, and neuroscience, just to name a few. Research is a big part of our sciences at Skidmore, where students can actually start doing research as early as the second semester of their freshman year. There is also a program called the Health Professions Advisory Committee, or HPAC for short, for students interested in doing a pre-med track.