Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Willliamstown, Massachusetts. It’s small, with just over 2,000 undergrads, and it’s in the beautiful – but rural – Berkshires. While technically a college, Williams also has tiny little grad programs for development economics and art history. Williams is also a member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), and competes in D3 sports with Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Tufts, Trinity, and Wesleyan. Approximately 35% of the school competes on a varsity or club team and interestingly enough, they also compete D1 in skiing and squash!
If you’re interested in Williams and are a top-notch athlete in your sport, you might think that your athletic talent will give you a leg-up on the competition. Maybe??? It’s a bit more complicated than that, so let’s talk about it.
So here's the deal with Williams being a D3 school: they're all about prioritizing the student part of being a student-athlete. D3 teams don't have huge budgets, shorter seasons, and no athletic scholarships. But don’t assume D3 = slacker athletes. Less than 3% of all high school athletes will play a varsity sport at any level at all. It takes serious talent to make it, even at the D3 level. So, if you've got the ability (plus all the other stuff we'll dive into soon), getting recruited to Williams might sliiiiiightly help your application.
Williams has 15 men’s and women’s sports teams, including everything from basketball and baseball to crew and skiing. Each sport has their own guidelines when it comes to recruiting, which is super annoying. There are limitations on who can email/call/talk in-person first, when that happens, and lots of other little rules. Learn the regulations for your sport, register with the NCAA Clearinghouse, and if you get confused you can reach out to the governing body of your sport for guidance.
So you want to be a Purple Cow (look, we don’t know why so many of the NESCAC schools have weird mascots, but we definitely think they should tone it down), and you might have the athletic talent, but can you actually get into Williams? In order to be competitive as a recruited athlete, your stats and resume should be enough to get you in on their own. NESCAC themselves feel very strongly about the student part of student-athlete:
“All NESCAC member colleges enroll students who will enhance and enjoy the intellectual, social, and extracurricular communities our campuses provide. We seek students who are interested in the wide range of rigorous intellectual experiences offered, and value the role that extra-curricular activities, such as music, debate, theater, political action, and athletics, play on campus.”
If you want to go to a top-tier liberal arts school, you need to be a top-tier liberal arts student! Let’s dive into what that looks like.
Grades
For the class of 2027, Williams boasted a 9.8% acceptance rate. When you get into the single-digit acceptance rates, you’ll need amazing grades in order to be a competitive applicant. Williams doesn’t publish the average GPA of admitted students, but based on that acceptance rate and some speculation online, we’re pretty confident you need as close to a 4.0 as possible. Remember that a 4.0 in all regular classes is not as strong as a 4.0 in the hardest classes your school offers, so make sure to load up on those honors, AP, or IB courses.
Scores
Like GPA, Williams also does not publish the average data of incoming students. However, again, we know they have a single-digit acceptance rate, we know they’re one of those “Little Ivies,” and we know that you need a 4.0 to really stand out. From that, we can estimate that you need really good test scores. Third-party sites estimate between a 33 and a 35 for the ACT and a 1460 to 1560 for the SAT. In our experience, you would want to have an absolute minimum of a 34 or 1500 to be competitive, and we’d feel a lot safer with a 35 or 1550.
Extracurriculars
There’s another piece to the application puzzle, and that’s extracurriculars. We know you’re busy being a nerd-jock (why else would you want to go to a NESCAC school), and you’re probably loaded up on practices, tournaments, meets, and classes, but to be competitive, you need to build out a niche extracurricular profile.
Williams, in a pretty unusual move, has the average distribution of majors over the last four years on their website. From this, we know that their most popular majors are Economics (108), Mathematics (56), Biology (55), Political Science (54), and Computer Science (50). This is pretty on par with the top majors at other top-tier schools. This also means that if you want to major in one of these, you probably have some stiff competition. You need to build out a unique extracurricular profile that proves you’re interested in what you want to do. Biology club is cool, but doing research is cooler. Debate might help with poli sci, but you know what helps more? Working on a campaign.
Great Essays
In addition to great grades, great scores, and great extracurriculars, you also need great essays. A compelling Common App essay is the best way to set yourself apart from the crowd. We prefer stories about small moments that reveal things about your personality. We don’t love cliche essays about ‘learning a lesson’ or ‘overcoming an obstacle,’ nor do we like essays about your sport or grandparents.
You also need a good supplemental essay. The Williams essays tell us a lot about their culture, and if you like them, you’ll probably like the school.
Athletic Talent
Like, duh. If you want to get recruited, you need to be like, super good at the sport. We encourage you to take a long, honest look at where you are in your athletic career and see if you’re really cut out for recruitment. If you come to the conclusion that playing sports may not be in your future, we suggest quitting and redirecting that energy into making the next Facebook or inventing a new water filtration device.
Williams is a challenging school. It’s hard to get into, it’s hard academically, and they have top-tier D3 teams. Their academic standards won’t lower just because you’re an amazing runner. But, since you’re here, we are going to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you believe you have the academic and athletic talent to get in, we say go for it.
If you need help strategizing for college admissions, navigating the process, or writing your essays, reach out to us today.