<p>I just graduated this May.
People do for fun: It's much mroe on-campus than being at NW. A practically non-existent bar scene, for example, but there's always parties. Thursday and Saturday are the big nights, while friday is strangely dead. </p>
<p>Competitive:
not very competitive. most people are doing something they really enjoy. there's of course some really ambitious people, but they do their own thing and are happy. i think it's mostly econ students gunning for ibanking jobs at the upper end of things.</p>
<p>How often do people go into LA:
I dunno. I would usually go in once a month. There's usually enough going on campus that it isn't worth it to just screw around in LA unless you want to visit a friend or see something in particular. There's four or five events a semester where the school buys 20 or 30 opera tix and takes people out to the Mark Taper Forum. </p>
<p>Social Scene: Um. The 5C social scene has lots of public parties which are dominated by no one-we're all one big frat. groups of friends usually throw parties, with some people having more parties than others. nothing is very exclusive and people are friendly. </p>
<p>5c relations: Pomona studentsget indoctrinated about their superiority from their freshman orientation onwards. The ones that believe it, or are really insecure east coasters who didn't get into Harvard are loathsome. There's good eggs among the lot, though (My friend from Pomona was on their orientation committee one year, so I snuck in. It was like Bohemian Grove or something. Every skit had an inane pomona injoke combined with a dig at one of the four other schools. Mudd, Pitzer, Scripps, CMC don't do this.) </p>
<p>Otherwise, plenty of CMC people in north quad are fratty and never see any reason to visit Pomona or Pitzer except to get drunk and be obnoxious, but equal amounts make friends. It's really a personality thing instead of an institutional thing. </p>
<p>Students are more conservative than other places, but half of the conservative wing are let-them-eat-cake libertarians from wealthy families, and the other half are solid conservative, Republican party operatives. Similarly, we have lots of Dem party hacks with some social liberal types who organize a lot of community service stuff and a stop genocide in sudan campaign that toured california schools. I'm sort of surprised that you asked if there's any political involvement on CMC's campus--did you read much about the campus? It's a specialty school for gov and econ people. The gov side do law, NGOs or work on the hill after graduation. So yes. Lots of political awareness.</p>