WELLESLEY - To many women, he is simply "the boy." They know who he is, even if they do not know his name. They know his story, even if they have never spoken to him.

In the small, all-female world of Wellesley College, Mohammad Usman is famous in this way. He is literally a man among women - about 2,300 women. Usman, 19, is the only man attending Wellesley College this fall.

"A lot of people don't know his name, really," said Johanna Peace, a Wellesley junior and the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Wellesley News. "They're aware that there's a boy on campus. And if they see him, they'll say, 'Oh - there's the boy.' "

The boy in question has been living in a dormitory on campus since September, showering in his private bathroom, and, perhaps predictably, becoming something of a folk hero among his male friends.

But do not get the wrong idea here: Wellesley College, known for educating such top female minds as presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, is not allowing men to become full-time students like many other local women's colleges. Usman, who grew up in Bronx, N.Y., has come to Wellesley on a semester-long exchange program, and he maintains his motives for wanting to be here are pure.

He wanted to come for the educational experience. (And the women.) He was looking forward to living near Boston. (And lots of women.) To him, this was a chance of a lifetime.

"I thought it would be really fascinating to be the only male at an all-women's college," said Usman, a government and geography double major at Dartmouth, who has been taking two classes at Wellesley this fall and two at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology due to a partnership that Wellesley has with the Cambridge school. "I like to believe I'm curious."

"I want to try new things, and the greatest part of a liberal-arts education is experiencing a wide variety of things. It's important to me to get the most of my 50 Gs."

Under an agreement among 11 New England institutions, students can apply to spend a semester at another school. A classmate of Usman's mentioned this about a year ago, and the pair decided to apply to spend a term at Wellesley - a decision that surprised one Dartmouth staffer so much that she informed Usman that it was not possible.

As it turns out, though, it is. Men have attended Wellesley via the exchange program in the past, although not recently, said Jennifer Thomas-Starck, who oversees the program at Wellesley. Usman and his friend were accepted. But then Usman's friend backed out, leaving Usman to go at it alone.

"I was committed," he said.