I may be overthinking this..

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvey Mudd College
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<p>Hey Muddslinger, you’ve made this comment a few times before – that the social aspects of Mudd leave you cold. It’s a fair statement based on a full year of personal experience, and you present it even-handedly – bravo. I don’t take issue with you over it, but I’m curious as to what makes your experience so different from my (frosh) Mudder’s experience so far.</p>

<p>There’s no question that he’s working like a dog on the academic side, but he also seems to have found a few comfortable circles of friends and a dizzying array of fun things to do outside the workload. From what I see on Facebook, it looks like he seldom eats alone. He plays intramural sports, RPGs, and video games with his pals. He has fun with other Mudders in pursuit of a wide range of shared interests – I won’t go into great detail, but there are so many choices, from volunteer work to Div3 sports to juggling to music performance to ballroom dancing, and even a club dedicated to eating bacon. There are movies in the dorm lounge every week, and regular parties both wet and dry. The proctors and sponsors set up group outings into Claremont Village for pizza, frozen yogurt, &c, and every week there seems to be a range of organized/subsidized outings Mudders can choose from if they want to go into town for a concert, show, or sporting event.</p>

<p>All this seems to be pretty fulfilling (possibly overwhelming at times) to my Mudder, but not so much to you. I know that he’s well matched in terms of roommate and suitemates (and they’re all frosh), and it sounds like you might not have been. Could that be the difference? Do you think your dorm itself wasn’t a good fit? Or do you feel that your personality doesn’t mesh with <em>any</em> of the subgroups at Mudd – and if so, looking back, do you now see any signs of this that you didn’t notice or shrugged off during the application process? Or did you go in thinking that it didn’t really appeal to you socially, but the academics were worth it? Or do people just have to give up all semblance of social life in order to make the sky-high GPA you managed in the freshman core? (If that’s the case, then is the sky-high GPA worth the trade-off in social life?) Is it trite to sum it all up as, “Grades, fun, sleep: Pick any two”?</p>

<p>Did room draw help you find a better suite match this year? For any reason, does this year seem more promising to you than last year? And if it never gets any better in the whole four or five years… do you think the academic benefits alone are worth it?</p>

<p>Again, I’m not criticizing or challenging your comments – quite the opposite, I think you’ve been consistently honest and fair about your experience. I just wonder what makes the difference between my son’s reaction and yours, and I think your reflections may be very helpful to prospective Mudders trying to evaluate “fit” for themselves.</p>

<p>Edited to add: Best wishes to you this year, and I hope you’re enjoying some downtime over the Fall break. :slight_smile:</p>

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<p>If you are not a complete genius with excellent high school preparation, don’t go to Mudd. Mudd takes smart students and destroys them. If you get sick, you will be terribly behind and fail everything.</p>

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<p>It is hard to go to graduate school if you are thrown out of college before you finish freshman year. If you can’t already teach calculus and college physics, and find it easy, forget Mudd. They do flunk you out and you can’t just switch to a different major like you can at a big university.</p>

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<p>I’ve thought about this problem quite a bit. There’s definitely a lot to do here, it’s just a matter of me finding people to do it with. My roommate is great. If he weren’t my roommate, then I don’t have any idea who could replace him! I just can’t seem to find a group of people that I fit in with at all. There are so many different groups, and I’ve tried socializing with several of them at lunch and dinner but I’ve never left feeling like “wow, I should talk to these people more often.” Usually I count the seconds until it’s socially acceptable to leave.</p>

<p>The age distribution could have something to do with it, because the only people in my suite that I talked to were my roommates and the seniors. I lived in Atwood, which has a reputation for being pretty quiet and isolated since the outer dorms don’t have reputations as specific as the inner dorms. I also don’t feel like my personality meshes well with most Mudders, and the people that I do mesh with have sufficiently different interests that it’s difficult for me to relate. All things considered, I have the best roommate possible. Even we don’t mesh well on activities and interests, but being roommates kept us in contact long enough for us to become friends.</p>

<p>There is one thing that tipped me off. I was sitting in class (still during high school) wondering what kind of people might be at Mudd. I sat there and thought “Well, everyone will be like the handful of other people here sitting in calc III with me.” Then I realized that I didn’t really care for all but one or two of the 10 people, and that all of my friends were majoring in art, English, Japanese, etc. But I convinced myself that there would be a lot of people at Mudd (relative to 10 at least) so I would inevitably find at least a small group of people. Oops! My parents half-joke that this sort of situation runs in my family. My mom and dad talk about how they really didn’t have that many friends in college, and my little brother has similar problems in middle school. Maybe I can blame all of this on poor genetics!</p>

<p>So I’ve all but completely made up my mind to stay, so I really, really hope this is all worth it, but there’s no way to know until after I’ve graduated. Even then, it’ll be hard to distinguish whether I could have done any better or worse given a different college education. </p>

<p>What I do know is that after all of this, a 40 hour/week job will be a joke :D</p>

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<p>“There is one thing that tipped me off. I was sitting in class (still during high school) wondering what kind of people might be at Mudd. I sat there and thought “Well, everyone will be like the handful of other people here sitting in calc III with me.” Then I realized that I didn’t really care for all but one or two of the 10 people, and that all of my friends were majoring in art, English, Japanese, etc.”</p>

<p>Muddslinger, this is the first time I’ve heard someone else say this, so thank you! I’m in my senior year, and it’s the first time that I’ve taken mostly math/science courses. A few weeks in, I realized that I actually actively disliked a lot of the kids in all of my classes, and that the people I’m close friends with were all off somewhere else doing History or languages or something. More and more now, I’m realizing that it’s going to have to be a big factor in the admissions process, although I’m still hoping that all the math/science people at my school are somehow a nonrepresentative sample.</p>

<p>//tangent</p>

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<p>Muddlslinger - Thanks for your thoughtful, honest posts. </p>

<p>If you or others could add more about Claremont consortium, that would be helpful. My son loves math/science, but many of his IB friends are more into liberal arts and music. How common is it to have friends at Mudd but the other colleges too? It seems that the shared classes and clubs would be a big advantage… but I’d love to hear more student perspectives.</p>

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<p>Thank you, Muddslinger, for your thoughtful elaboration. Your observation about your calc 3 classmates is interesting. The outer vs inner dorm thing is interesting too – my son spent the night in an outer dorm during pre-frosh, but ended up spending most of his free time at one of the inner dorms because he felt more welcome there. But his personality and interests are very compatible with at least some of the geeky stereotypes.</p>

<p>I think your experience points up the need for visits and overnight stays, the chance for a prospective student to just hang out with Mudders for a while and see how it feels to be among them. And yes, maybe it doesn’t work so well to be suitemates with seniors. If the suite provided most of your social network last year, I wonder if you missed out on some of the bonding that happens when frosh are thrown together and all have one thing in common – being a little nervous about where they’re going to fit in.</p>

<p>I’m glad your roommate is a friend. So sorry to hear that you haven’t found “your people” yet. It sounds like you’re doing the right thing, getting out and spending time with different groups of students. I hope this will pay off and you’ll find a comfortable circle of friends in the coming years. Maybe once you’re done with the core and into upper-division classes, you’ll have more time to venture out further, perhaps off campus.</p>

<p>
[QUOTE=Muddslinger]

What I do know is that after all of this, a 40 hour/week job will be a joke :smiley:

[/quote]

Ha, well said!</p>

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<p>“What I do know is that after all of this, a 40 hour/week job will be a joke”</p>

<p>I work 50 hours a week and it is still a joke compared to Mudd. I feel like I have so much freedom…</p>

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<p>Muddslinger’s comment about his Calc III class is definitely a valid concern. I loved the people in my calc III class, and I love the people here, so I suppose its not a half bad measure…</p>

<p>On the other hand, don’t give up on Mudd just because none of your current friends are math/sciencey. Of my friends from home, only one can relate at all to going through engineering school (she’s at CU-Boulder), and only one other is getting a B.S. (Chemistry) - the rest are majoring in some sort of liberal artsy thing. When I was a senior in H.S. I thought that I was going to miss the diversity of passions a lot more than I actually do now that I’m here - when I visited I was convinced that I was going to spend all of my lunches speaking German at the Oldenborg Center on Pomona, and that I would make at least half of my friends down there. As it turns out I don’t have a single Pomona friend, since I ended up loving the nerds up here on Mudd after all (nothing’s wrong with Pomona, but its a lot easier to hang out with people on campus…and if you’ve found your niche on campus then there’s no reason to leave). I do have friends at Scripps though, which is admittedly kind of nice. I guess I’d just recommend joining some sort of intercampus club, especially if you’re worried about being friends only with Mudders.</p>

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<p>Miru - Thanks for the interesting posts. My son will go to CU Boulder Engineering Day tomorrow… but so far it seems that Mudd that has most captured his interest. Many of his pals from his IB classes and music activities are non-geeky, so it is good to hear that you are liking Mudd. </p>

<p>In general is there a lot of interaction among the Claremont campuses? To me it looks like a great setup, especially to get a bigger set of students for bands, clubs, etc. But I’ve begun to wonder if there a lot of geek vs prep attitudes?. Are there many intercampus friendships?</p>

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<p>There’s a lot of interaction between Mudd and Scripps since they are right next to each other. I wouldn’t say there’s a whole lot between Mudd and the other campuses unless you participate in cross-campus extracurriculars (of which there are a lot), but I’m sure there are exceptions. The dining halls are all shared so you can go and eat at any one. I’ve never noticed any geek vs prep attitudes.</p>

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<p>^besides the fact when i visited some random guy yelled “nerds!” at us… I don’t even know how he knew we were coming from harvey mudd since we were on scripps campus next to the library… whatever haha.</p>

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<p>colorado_mom - My little brother was at CU engineering days this weekend as well!</p>

<p>In <em>general</em>, there isn’t much interaction between the 5Cs. In other words, most people don’t just randomly make friends on other campuses; for the most part people stick to their kind. On the other hand, within clubs there is plenty of cross-campus interaction. In the clubs that are either small (A capella groups) or have a potentially large time commitment (the ballroom dance company), the friendships are especially close. In other words, cross campus friendships don’t just happen on their own - one has to make some sort of effort (even if that effort is as small as joining a club you planned to join already).</p>

<p>It is quite true that Mudd and Scripps have the tightest relationship. The complementary gender ratios helps a little, and we often host parties that we only invite Scripps to. Due to the proximity we are also more likely to visit eachothers dining halls and be on eachothers campuses in general, so this is the one case I can think of where cross campus friendships do regularly spring up outside of clubs.</p>

<p>I would say that there isn’t any serious geek/prep attitude, at least not on the level of high school. Most Mudders I know feel the least close to CMC, which supplies most of the athletes for the CMS athletic teams. Many of us have a default negative attitude towards CMCers because they can be jerks (too belligerent in IM Sports, too drunk at our parties), but we certainly don’t feel at all socially inferior to them, and they generally respect us (if only because they wouldn’t be able to come to our parties anymore if they screwed up too badly).</p>

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<p>^ Blackroses post 32 ^ Someone REALLY needs to get a life! He’s been there for at least three months and he’s that excited about seeing nerds?</p>

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<p>GeekMom63… we all know how exciting nerds can be. ;)</p>

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<p>Mudd students/grads - Was Claremont Colleges a big factor when choosing Mudd, or just an extra perk? Did your opinion change once you were on campus? </p>

<p>When comparing Mudd to CO School of Mines (and other similar small techie schools) , I know that academic intensity is a plus for Mudd (at least for students that want that). I’m trying to guage the importance of other factors too.</p>

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<p>I don’t think I considered the other Claremont Colleges very heavily when making a decision, but they are definitely a good thing. I don’t know anything about CO School of Mines but eating at Mudd’s one dining hall quite frequently for over 3 years is definitely unpleasant so I’m glad for the other dining halls on the other campuses. Being able to take half of our Humanities courses at the other colleges is definitely a plus as well, since there’s a much much wider selection. For party people having CMC is probably a plus and for guys Scripps is probably a plus as well.</p>

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<p>^^^ Geek mom, it was more of a derogatory comment than excitement haha.</p>

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<p>Suin - That’s a good point. If you are going to be on campus for 4 years (which I think makes things more convenient logistially for long-distance students), it would be good to have a variety of dining hall choices. </p>

<p>A variety of class choices across the colleges would be a very good thing too. I appreciate the answers. Mudd is a lot more expensive than some of our choices, and it is good to know that factors we thing are value-add are valid.</p>

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<p>My kid would NOT have gone to Mudd if not for the consortium. The consortium classes in other subject areas have been a sanity-saver because they balance the tech-intensity and grinding p-sets of Mudd, and help connect with a much less academically stressed group of kids for other social opportunities. My kid is more well rounded in interests than many at Mudd–for example, did not even apply to strictly tech schools (like Caltech and MIT). In fact, the complaint is that there is not enough time in the schedule, what with required core classes, to fit in more classes on the other campuses.</p>