Each day the Wellesley College shuttle arrives at Johnston Gate, bringing bus-loads of students to campus who made a choice different from that of women at Harvard.

Wellesley students chose to forego co-ed classes and dorms to learn, instead, in a single-sex environment. There are women here at Harvard who faced a similar choice, one whose importance was magnified by their single-sex high school experience. Having attended all-female high schools, (and even, in some cases, elementary and middle schools) these students came to Harvard looking for a change of pace.

Here they found that despite the transition, classes really aren't all that different from what they might have expected at an all-women's college. And neither is the rocky first-year adjustment period. In fact, the biggest difference these student say they encountered at college is the task of adjusting to and interacting with male peers on a daily basis--some for the first time in their lives.

A Firm Foundation

Before they chose between applying to Wellesley or Harvard, Smith or Amherst, many women students already had to decide whether or not to go co-ed--in elementary and secondary school.

Women at Harvard who attended all-female schools at home say this decision was largely made by parents and guardians. However, in many ways the environment in which they grew up--the availability of educational resources and the quality of comparable co-ed schools--also influenced this choice.

"If there had been a co-educational school of the same quality, I would have gone there--there just wasn't," says Gillian L. Chesney '01, who spent nine-and-a-half years at St. Mary's Episcopal School in Memphis, Tenn.

But many Harvard undergrads who, like Chesney, attended single-sex women's high schools, say the educational environment provided unique preparation for the challenges of college life. And challenges at Harvard abound.

"I think the concentration in my high school was a lot more on academics than [in] many co-ed public high schools," Jacqueline C. Hamm '01 says. According to Hamm, who spent four years at the all-female Georgetown Visitation High School in Washington D.C., learning can appeal more to women when they don't feel like they have to worry about appealing to men.

"A lot of girls feel like they're always trying to impress the guys. They feel like they can't show how smart they are," says Hamm. "It made our school more of an intense and focused environment."

But according to a report released to the New York Times yesterday by the American Association of University Women, "Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls," the same-sex atmosphere does not have a significant effect on women's ability to learn. The report, based on several past studies of same-sex Catholic, foreign and independent schools, says that although female students feel more confident in the single-sex classroom, the environment offers them no added academic value.

But college admission figures for students from some women's high schools support Hamm's view that single-sex schooling not only fosters women's self-confidence but also facilitates their classroom interaction. According to Karen S. Andrews, director of College counseling at Boston's Winsor School, 23% of Winsor's graduating classes during the past three years, have attended Harvard, Brown, Stanford or Yale.

While quick to point out that Ivy League admissions should not be the only measure of success for a given school, Andrews also notes that Winsor graduates tend to excel at a variety of top flight schools. She attributes this success to the self-confidence Hamm observed in her ownclassroom at Georgetown Visitation.

"They have become so accustomed to speakingtheir minds, they just assume its their right todo so," Andrews says of Winsor students.

According to Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70, directorof admissions at Harvard and a graduate of WinsorSchool, the single-sex experience plays no role inadmissions committee decisions. McGrath says theoffice has no evidence that all-women schoolsbetter prepare female students for college thanco-educational schools, or even that theireducational environment has a different effect onstudents.

But many female graduates of single-sex schoolshere at Harvard say they gained invaluableconfidence and interpersonal skills during theirhigh school years that they may not have found ata co-ed institution.