Of course, any humanities or social science major at any of Caltech, Harvey Mudd, or MIT has to take substantial math and science general education or core requirements that humanities or social science majors at most other schools do not have to take.
Engineering in Caltech is said to be more theory-oriented than in MIT and other engineering schools. I don’t know about Mudd. Have you considered EA in Caltech and ED2 in Mudd if he doesn’t get into Caltech?
Honestly I think the biggest difference between the two is the presence or absence of the other consortium schools. At Mudd, there are a lot more activities available that achieve their critical mass via students from the other schools, and probably wouldn’t get off the ground if Mudd were free-standing. Mudd offers a funny middle ground, because it is not a place for kids who might have second thoughts about a STEM-centric course of study, but it does give the option to focus one’s extracurriculars completely outside of that umbrella, if that’s what appeals.
OTOH, a student-athlete at Mudd is not exactly going to have much time for swanning around the consortium exploring random clubs and activities. So it could easily turn into a case of “water water everywhere nor any drop to drink” in terms of the extracurricular allure. Academically, though, there’s definitely the opportunity to take a wide range of social sciences and humanities classes through the other consortium schools. (Although CMC Econ, mentioned above, is the one department that is for all intents and purposes closed to cross-registration. Pomona, Pitzer and Scripps have fine econ classes, though.)
To look at Mudd Engineering specifically, do a Google search on the E4 Intro to Engineering Design class. This is the gateway intro class that’s required for all engineering majors, and it’s a bit of a rite of passage. (Among other projects, they fabricate their own hammers in the machine shop - generations of Mudd engineers have these keepsakes. They also do group projects addressing problems posed by local nonprofits.) Caltech has more formal specialties within engineering (for example, if your C wanted ChemE then choosing Caltech over Mudd would be a no-brainer), so there’s that aspect, but I’m figuring you’ve already passed that point in the decision flowchart.
@intparent I’m only repeating what we were told on the tours about the emphasis of the programs. Caltech emphasized its research while HMC emphasized industry collaboration.
That doesn’t really match reality, for whatever reason. Maybe your tour guide at Mudd happened to be more focused on industry, and gave that impression. Those aren’t big percentage differences anyway.
How much do Mudders actually interact with the kids from the other schools. I am sort of getting the impression that the Mudders stay more to with Mudders than the other students - either because they are working so hard or they just social a bit different than the kids at the other schools. Is that accurate? Happy to just know if that is correct or incorrect?
I also am wondering about grade deflation - people have said don’t come to Mudd if you want to go to med school, but what about business or law school? Is that true at Caltech? I would say, for example, that MIT does not have grade deflation and haven’t heard that about Caltech, but not sure. I have a better feel of the social life of Caltech kids and the workload. What about Caltech and someone not committed to going into academia or research for life, but still loves research at least through undergrad, maybe grad or first few years out of college.
My C is a hard worker, STEM all the way, loves research, will enter either school (if lucky enough to be admitted) with a very solid background, but also does well in humanities and is serious, but socially very mainstream and friends mean a lot. So I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts on (1) social aspects (2) grading (3) intensity of work - is it that overwhelming and (4) getting into Bus or Law school after working as an engineer for a few years.
@aquapt
I just noticed your comment about not being allow to take Econ at CMC? I had not noticed that before - what is that all about? Could you PM me?
Harvey Mudd offers introductory and intermediate micro and macro economics, as well as some potentially interesting electives (e.g. “political economy of higher education”), but not econometrics. It would not be surprising if the Harvey Mudd versions of similar courses were more math intensive than those at other Claremont colleges.
FWIW, the only other student from my D’s high school to attend the 5C’s in the past decade was a Mudder who is now at a T10 law school after working for a few years. (One is not a trend, of course, but proof of concept.) I don’t think the grade deflation is quite as much of a concern for law and business as for med school - med schools are notoriously insistent on near-perfection and indifferent to the context in which the GPA was achieved.
Re: the CMC econ department… I’m not aware that it’s written anywhere in stone that consortium students can never register for CMC econ classes, but it is well known that they are almost prohibitively difficult for non-CMC students to get into. Econ is the most popular in-house major for at CMC - more than 25% of CMC students major in econ - so the issue is some combination of demand exceeding supply, and wanting to keep their biggest draw exclusive (no insider knowledge here, just how it appears to me). I’ll touch base by PM but I’m not sure I have a lot more insight beyond that.
Socially speaking, I think some Mudders lead happily Mudd-centric lives while others participate more in pursuits that cross college lines and thus acquire a more mixed group of friends. But at least both options are there; if a Mudder enjoys having some friends who have never heard of Fourier, they are out there! The work is intense, for sure, but there are many who thrive on it and have fun as well. I just think that there’s a limit on how many significant non-academic commitments one can make, though of course there will always be those who seem like they can do it all.
One of my sons visited and applied to all three – MIT EA, Caltech EA and Mudd RD. Mudders have a large math requirement, Caltech has a similarly significant physics requirement.
S1 was a math/CS guy – didn’t like the vibe at Caltech; he sat in on a liberal arts class and didn’t like it at all. Felt the students and prof were disengaged. The folks he knew who went there were very intense and S likes balance between classes and nerdish fun. When we visited Mudd, the profs came out of their offices (in the dead of August) to talk to him. Mudd seems into integrate STEM and humanities better. He really liked Mudd – the classes, the students, the profs. He would have spent two years doing independent study math because he had already completed half of the UG math sequence, and that was not the way he wanted to go. My sense is that engineering is a bit more generalized than at Caltech, but my info may be outdated. MIT would have required lots of engineering courses in the CS major, and he was more of a theoretical CS guy. He also wanted to avoid bio and chem core like the plague. He found his peeps on East Campus in late April, but by then he had pretty much decided.
When he got his decisions, he made a matrix of qualities and factors that were important to him, weighted them by importance and ranked them by strength. Was hard to dispute his decision making process.
He wound up at UChicago! Top math, great theoretical CS, great humanities (even if it kicked his tail). They were generous with placement, he took a bunch of grad courses, and his feeling was that if he was ever going to study humanities, UG was the time and Chicago the place. He had some regrets about not going to MIT and some about going to Chicago, but he spent two summers at MIT and that seemed to strike a balance.
There is lots of cross-pollination between Mudders and other consortium students. Literally. One Mudder I know just married a CMC grad.
Mudd is known for having really good food, which draws students from other schools. There are plenty of Mudders who find time for extra curriculars, and those often include the other schools.
My only knowledge of CalTech is from 30 years ago. But then my impression was there wasn’t time or mental space for anything else but stem. I think of CalTech as wanting the specialist deep-divers in one Stem area. My impression of Mudd is that they seek out students who are explorers and connectors - people who are open to multiple fields of scientific study rather than prepping for one narrow major since birth. That is probably an over generalization for both schools, but you get the idea. It is not industry v graduate school so much that separates them, because deep divers and explorers can be found in both career paths.
The Mudd required course load is really intense and part of what makes Mudd Mudd. But the administration is really trying to figure out how to address the anxiety that permeates all college (and high school) campuses and maintain that rigor. Not sure about CalTech.
Academically, Caltech is probably the most intense (harder courses and quarter system, etc.) of the three schools (Caltech/MIT/HMC), especially after Mudd relaxed its curriculum after the incidents a couple years ago. The students who go to these schools are naturally focused on STEM. Both MIT and Caltech have much more extensive humanity and social science requirements than they did 30 years ago, and more so than Harvey Mudd. Another big difference from 30 years ago is all three schools now are dominated by CS majors. Even with large portions of their student bodies, both MIT and Caltech place no restriction on class registration at all (and even without enforcing prerequisite rules), unlike HMC. Doing more advanced research is also easier at Caltech/MIT, compared to Harvey Mudd. For economics/finance/business, MIT offers Economics, Finance, and Business Analytics majors. Caltech offers Economics, and the more popular BEM (Business, Economics and Management) major (which combines economics, finance and business. It’s designed to be a second major for some adventurous students. Harvey Mudd doesn’t offer an economics major but interested students must take those classes on the other campuses, but as pointed out above, may run into class registration issues at CMC.
[I mentioned that C is not into video games, programming (although has gotten A+ in programming classes), math competitions, etc. I get the impression that Caltech kids spend much of their free time doing that. Is that correct or is it just a subset of the students? What about at Mudd?
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I know my son doesn’t do math problems for fun (I know his friends dont either), though he does enjoy playing video games socially now and then. He really likes the house system. The food at Mudd is good; that said, the one shot I’ll take at Mudd is that it had the ugliest campus of all those we toured!
Mudd does offer its own economics courses; a Mudd student need not go elsewhere to study introductory and intermediate economics plus some electives, probably with more math than at the other colleges. S/he would have to go to one of the others for econometrics, though.
CMC economics appears to have a more “business” leaning than a traditional liberal arts leaning.
DS is a freshman at Caltech now. He also played video games occasionally as a social thing in HS. He doesn’t do math problems for fun, he has enough in his homework. He doesn’t have a lot of free time now but partly because of “hurdles” which are problems you need to solve to get into the famous Ph11 class. Most students don’t bother with them, so I guess that may count as programming/doing math stuff in your free time. He does have a group of friends, and their house organizes some fun activities on weekends. He played table tennis, badminton, other sports as recreation. Others may spend their time differently but it’s easy to meet people and find someone who shares your interests. Drinking does happen but is easily avoided. Pranks are popular and encouraged. Generally I think he found out other students at Caltech are all very intelligent but not necessarily off-the-charts geniuses who do nothing but STEM (as he probably imagined).
Caltech very much encourages undergrads to participate in research. Collaboration and honor code are also big deals. Most homework is done with others, and all tests are take-home. One thing I imagine may be better at Mudd is teaching quality. At Caltech you can have a freshman class taught by a Nobel winner, but the general teaching quality is hit or miss as far as I can tell. DS enjoys most of his classes though.
I would not be surprised in ECON 153 and 154 at Harvey Mudd used more math than the intermediate economics courses at the other Claremont colleges, based on expected math preparation.