Based in the Eastern Cape town of Grahamstown, Rhodes University is more than a century old. The university has around 6 000 students, of which a quarter are international students from 57 different countries. Nearly half the student body live on campus, in residences.

Rhodes offers a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the faculties of humanities, science, commerce, pharmacy, law, and education. It boasts the highest academic staff to student ratio of any university in South Africa and is perhaps best known for its journalism and media studies department.

Rhodes owes its unique character among South African universities to a combination of factors some historical, some geographical, some cultural and some architectural. An important influence in this respect is the University's smallness which, together with its residence system, allows unusually close contact between students and their lecturers, in surroundings that foster fellowship and learning. Small classes mean more personal attention and encourage greater involvement of students in their work. The end result is that successive generations of Rhodes graduates have had an influence on southern Africa and world affairs out of all proportion to their small number.

Over the years the campus has grown - today there are about 150 buildings, including 39 residences. Graced with lovely grounds, 203 hectares in extent, an abundance of sports facilities and nestling in the hills of the beautiful and historic city of Grahamstown, the University offers an ideal physical environment for studying. You will live, learn and play in elegant plaster and stone-under-tile buildings, several of which are National Monuments. Others are of considerable historic interest. The campus, long considered one of the most beautiful in the country, is situated in the `Festival City of Grahamstown', the home of the National Festival of the Arts, SciFest and other festivals. The University's landscaped grounds and flower-filled gardens invite students to study outdoors and often tutorial groups are seen under the hundred-year-old trees on the St Peter's campus. A year-round moderate climate lures students outdoors for jogging, walking and cycling as well as for a large variety of sports, art classes or recreation.

Rhodes lies in what is historically one of the most important areas of South Africa - at the first point of major contact between black and white. The challenge of poverty, urbanisation and education - indeed the challenge of South Africa - is to be found in the community of Grahamstown, providing invaluable material for scholar and humanist alike.

The city is also situated at the meeting point of four different climate zones, offering botanists, geographers, geologists, hydrologists, entomologists, zoologists, and limnologists an amazingly wide spectrum of conditions right on their doorstep.

The campus is small enough for students to make walking a way of life. Owning a car is agreeable but not necessary, Grahamstown is some fifty minutes from the sea and an hour-and-a-half from the Winterberg Mountains. With the Karoo to the north and the coastal plain to the south, it is ideally situated for a great variety of research and recreation opportunities.

Today Rhodes has just under 6000 students, with some fifty-five percent living in the University residences. Students come from all over southern Africa, including Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. A number of overseas students enhance the cosmopolitan character of campus life. At the same time, Rhodes could also be described as a most `South African' university, drawing students from all the provinces of the country. Size has much to do with the warmth and friendliness at Rhodes. With a student body of less than 6000 and an average of one lecturer to fifteen students, friendships develop easily - over breakfast in one of the nine dining halls, during a conversation in a professor's office, or while taking a late night study break at Kaif (the student cafeteria).

Rhodes has students from rural and urban settings, from private and government high schools, and from families at every economic level. The characteristic these individuals hold in common is the ability to achieve. Many have already proven themselves outside the classroom as well: on the sports field, in music and drama and in student affairs. About fifty-five percent of the students live on campus in residences. But even those who live off campus experience the community atmosphere for which Rhodes is so well known. Both those in residence and Oppidans (students who live in town) participate in common events sponsored by the University and the Students' Representative Council.