The University of Rochester is one of the country's top-tier research universities. The campuses are home to 200 academic majors, more than 2,000 faculty and instructional staff, and some 10,000 students approximately half of whom are women. Learning at the University of Rochester is also on a very personal scale. Rochester remains one of the smallest and most collegiate among top research universities, with smaller classes, a low 10:1 student to teacher ratio, and increased interactions with faculty.

The university is home to more than 6,000 full-time undergraduate students in the College and the Eastman School of Music. Students come from all 50 states and more than 70 countries. Most undergrads live on campus for all four years of their college experience, and take full advantage of the more than 250 student clubs and organizations to choose from. There’s always something happening every day and every night, on-campus and off at the university.

The Eastman School of Music offers on-going world-class concerts in the heart of Rochester's downtown cultural district. River Campus is a regular stop on the arts circuit for travelling theater, dance, comic, and other performers. Year round, the University brings the best and brightest poets, authors, activists, and thinkers to campus, from writer Margaret Atwood to civil rights leader Andrew Young.

The University of Rochester envisions itself as a community that welcomes, encourages, and supports individuals who desire to contribute to and benefit from the institution’s missions of teaching, research, patient care, performance, and community service. In a pluralistic culture, that community includes faculty, students, and staff who represent important differences.

The University has been a pioneer in fields as diverse as geology, optics, medicine, economics, political theory, and human behavior. A compact campus works as an advantage. All units of the University are within a 10-minute walk or drive, facilitating a highly collaborative, multidisciplinary research environment. Beside this, university has the state-of-the-art technology such as a Blue Gene Q supercomputer, capable of more than 200 trillion calculations a second or an Omega 60-beam laser that can deliver up to 40,000,000,000,000 watts of power onto a target less than 1 millimeter in diameter for approximately one-billionth of a second, tools like these are crucial assets for faculty and student research.

The 154-acre River Campus, the main campus of the university is located about two miles south of downtown Rochester, New York, by a bend in the Genesee River. The centerpiece of the River Campus, the Quad, is the academic home of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences and Engineering, defined by the original River Campus buildings including the landmark Rush Rhees Library that were opened to students in 1930. The River Campus is also home to Simon Business School and the Warner School of Education.