Harvey Mudd College

Harvey Mudd College Introduction

Harvey Mudd College is a highly selective private coeducational undergraduate college of engineering, mathematics, and science that could well be billed as “one of the best colleges in America that most people have never heard of.” The college does not show up in the Final Four or try to market itself as the Harvard of anywhere. What it does do is attract some of the nation’s brightest students and offers them a unique, rigorous, and liberal technical education that is as good as or better than the more famous colleges that some turn down to matriculate here. There are three key aspects of HMC that set it apart from other top colleges and give the school its often touted “one-of-a-kind” status: Harvey Mudd College is an intensely small college; it has a narrow academic focus on engineering, science, and mathematics, and it prides itself on having humanities and social sciences requirements that it hopes will produce “leaders with an understanding of the impact of their work on humanity.”

For most prospective students Harvey Mudd College seems like a big enough place engulfed in the larger Claremont Colleges Consortium. In reality, HMC is a close-knit community, a place where everybody knows your name, or at least everyone recognizes your face. The entire student body of around 730 “Mudders” is smaller than the high school graduating class of many incoming students. With ninety-six percent of the school living in the eight dorms (and the other four percent often crashing with friends on campus), getting to know your fellow Mudders is not difficult. The core math and science curriculum ensures that most freshmen are taking a nearly identical set of classes. All of this community interaction means that the same group of people you sit with in class in the morning will be eating with you in the dining hall at lunch, dropping by your room to work on homework that evening, playing intramural inner-tube water polo with you later that night, and going out to have a good time together on the weekend. And it stays that way for four years. With this amount of inter-campus intimacy, Mudd is a good place to make great friends and a terrible place to make any enemies.

With no graduate students, no TAs, and a faculty dedicated to a high level of student interaction, few Mudders fall through the cracks or blend into the woodwork. Even the administration and staff take an active role in campus life. The chef in the dining hall and the building attendants on the night shift are some of the best-liked and most well-known personalities on campus, regularly chatting with students. Faculty/staff/student interaction is supported on all levels through “Friday Forums” (where all are invited to discuss current campus and world issues) and the Activities Planning Committee (APC for short), a student group that sponsors trips to cultural and fun events throughout Southern California that are open to all members of the HMC community. It is common for a student—any student—to be seen working out with the president of the college, playing Frisbee with a professor, or dropping in to the office of the dean of students to talk about which campus policies need to be reformed. This camaraderie and immediate access to the people who make the college run (from the maintenance staff to the professors to the president) gives Harvey Mudd College a sense of community unthinkable in the large research-oriented institutions that most Mudders turn down to come here.

Some students find HMC’s small size a bit smothering, and most students need to take a break from the college every now and then. For these Mudders, the other four undergraduate colleges in Claremont provide a convenient distraction from the unique culture and atmosphere that make up HMC. Within the five undergraduate colleges and two graduate institutions in Claremont, there are innumerable clubs, organizations, concerts, art shows, sports teams, and coffeehouses to take your mind away from the academic rigor of a small engineering and science school. Anyone with a car has the unlimited distractions of Los Angeles just a quick freeway drive away. Students looking for nationally televised football games, fraternity/sorority parties, and large government-funded research laboratories, however, will be sorely disappointed if they come to Harvey Mudd College. What can be found instead are afternoon pick-up football games, impromptu dorm parties, and small well-stocked labs where talented faculty involve their undergraduate students in every aspect of their research.

Harvey Mudd College is a distinctly small school where some of the top undergraduates in America come together to study engineering, science, and mathematics in an academically rigorous, but extremely fun, environment. The technical curriculum is broad with an emphasis on the humanities and social sciences as well as core science, math, and engineering principals. The residential campus is vibrant with a student body that is widely talented, dynamic, and eccentric in addition to being academically gifted. HMC is bolstered by its participation in The Claremont Colleges Consortium, which gives Mudd students access to academic resources, course offerings, athletics, and other opportunities that could not otherwise be supported by a small technical college. The student-run Honor Code demands integrity and honesty from every student. In addition, the general pace and atmosphere of the college demands a healthy sense of humor in addition to a healthy work ethic and a strong affinity for engineering, science, and math.

Harvey Mudd College Academics

Although Mudders tend to be extremely talented and have widely varying interests and hobbies, everyone’s course load at HMC revolves around a heap of rigorous courses in engineering, science, and math. The core curriculum demands that every student take courses in physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, engineering, and a lot of math. Coincidentally, these are the same six fields that you can choose to major in at Mudd. Students with a distaste for one of these fields will find themselves sitting in tough classes with high expectations, a motivated professor, a steep grading curve, and a room full of classmates who are engrossed in the subject matter. Almost everyone suffers through at least one such course during the freshman or sophomore year before settling into more comfortable classes required for their chosen major.

Humanities and Social Sciences

The significant humanities and social sciences requirement (around one-third of the total graduation requirements) makes the curriculum at Harvey Mudd College far more interesting and challenging than the typical tech school. Mudd has been described as “a liberal arts college of science and engineering.” Indeed, the educational approach at Mudd is to provide young scientists and engineers with a broad, liberal education including courses in a variety of technical and nontechnical fields. Although no one without a strong affin- ity for the sciences and engineering should enroll at HMC, those who cannot stomach reading books and writing papers are well advised to stay away as well.

Few Mudders can fill the requirements for their technical classes anywhere other than HMC, but it is common for students to take advantage of the vast course offerings in the humanities and social sciences at the other four undergraduate colleges in Claremont. The Claremont Colleges Consortium provides Mudd students with a wide array of course offerings including music, fine arts, and foreign languages, which would otherwise not be available at HMC. The strong academic programs at the other colleges in Claremont allow Mudders to study nontechnical fields in depth and even double major if they so desire.

One of my classmates double majored in chemistry at Mudd and literature at Scripps College; another was the concertmaster for the Pomona College orchestra and double majored in music. Next to them I felt like an academic slacker completing my physics major from Mudd with an economics concentration.

Some of the best and most interesting “HSS” (humanities and social sciences) professors in Claremont, however, teach right at Harvey Mudd College and every Mudder is required to take several of their classes from the HMC Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Although students lament the limited selection that the on-campus HSS department can offer in any given semester, there are several extremely popular HSS courses at HMC, including an annual Shakespeare seminar, The Media Studio (a course in media production), and an economics course entitled Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. At the end of each semester the computer labs are filled through the night with as many students writing humanities term papers as students running computer simulations of chemical processes.

Majors

After three well-regimented semesters of the core curriculum, students complete their career at Harvey Mudd taking classes in their major and completing the humanities requirements. The six majors at Harvey Mudd are all academically broad in their own right. The most popular major, engineering, shuns the specialization seen in other top engineering programs for an emphasis on core design principals, mathematical modeling, and a cross-disciplinary “systems” approach to the ever-broadening field of engineering. The chemistry, physics and biology majors are largely focused on producing top-caliber graduate students who will go on to become career scientists, although in recent years more and more Mudd science majors are studying and pursuing applied fields. A math and computer science joint major and a mathematical biology major are widely recognized by top undergraduate programs, and a new “chemistry and biology” joint major leads students into an exciting and evolving new area of study.

All students at Mudd must have a concentration in a humanities or social sciences field in addition to their technical major. This concentration (which may as well be termed a minor) may be in any nontechnical field from dance to political science to religious history. The vast array of course offerings in Claremont gives Mudd students a lot of options in choosing their HSS course of studies, although students must take about half of their nontechnical courses from HMC faculty members.

Projects

During the junior and senior years, students are required to get involved in either a research or a Clinic project. The faculty at HMC has a variety of ongoing research projects, especially in chemistry, biology, and physics, in which students can get involved either as a summer job or toward a senior thesis. Many students, however, opt to organize their own research project for their senior thesis with a faculty advisor providingguidance and advice. Faculty and student research at Mudd ranges from analytical modelingand computational projects to field observation of wildlife and measurement of seismic activity. Laboratory and computer facilities at Harvey Mudd College are unrivaled among undergraduate institutions, and students have access to these facilities around the clock via pass-code protected locks and the strength of the HMC Honor Code.

The Clinic Program (pioneered by HMC more than forty years ago) brings blue-chip corporate sponsors to campus to “hire” teams of four to six HMC engineering, math, physics, and computer science majors for one-year projects that solve a problem or fill a need for the company. The Clinic projects, both domestic and international, give students at Mudd the opportunity to deal with the real-world issues of working with a client, facing deadlines, writing reports, presenting and defending their work, and finding solutions to problems that do not appear in a textbook. The nature of the Clinic projects varies widely both in scope and in subject matter. Conceptual designs, research projects, detailed analysis, and software development are all common in Clinic projects that may incorporate mechanical, electrical, structural, or chemical systems, depending on the problem as defined by the Clinic sponsor. Biology, chemistry, and physics majors who are oriented toward professional careers often elect to participate in a Clinic project in lieu of a research project. Numerous patents have come out of work done by HMC Clinic teams over the years, and many companies return to sponsor Clinic projects year after year.

The Honor Code

The strong, student-administered Honor Code at HMC has broad implications on the academic aspect of the college. Cheating of any kind is not tolerated, but there is a high level of trust between the faculty and among the students due to the Honor Code. Open-book, proctorless, and take-home exams are all common at Mudd. Students are encouraged to study and work in groups, but are also instructed to acknowledge their classmates who help them on homework assignments. The horror stories that come out of some institutions of sabotaging lab experiments, classmates refusing to share lecture notes, and stealing homework assignments are foreign concepts at Mudd. Mudders scorn the cutthroat attitudes that mark some highly selective colleges, preferring cooperation and camaraderie.

Course Load

Atypical course load at Mudd is five courses per semester. At least one lab per semester and one or two HSS classes per semester is the norm. Those who choose to double major often enroll in six classes each semester. Those who can get away with taking four classes (through summer school, advanced placement, or sheer luck) are teased by their friends for slacking off. At the other four undergraduate colleges in Claremont, and many other private colleges, four classes per semester is the accepted norm.

Grades

The grading scale at HMC can be brutally harsh, although most Mudders exaggerate the cruelty of their grades. GPAs average around 3.3 at graduation, although many freshmen and sophomores suffer through much lower GPAs before pulling them up during their junior and senior years. Counter to the notoriously high grade inflation at some prestigious schools, at Harvey Mudd College students who do not perform in the classroom receive the appropriate grade—and that does not mean a B+!

Struggling through freshman physics was one of the best things that ever happened to me at Mudd. Although it was a real blow to my ego at the time, it forced me to get serious about my homework and not let things slide until an exam came along as I had in high school. The study habits I adopted in order to get through physics became part of my routine for every class and helped me keep my grades up for the rest of college—although to this day I still hate physics.

Midterms and finals, always administered proctorless under the HMC Honor Code, can be three-hour nightmares, designed to ensure that there is a broad range of scores and that no one aces the exam. Class average scores of fifty to sixty percent on an exam are common with some students who had 4.0s in high school scoring in the twenty to thirty percent range. Fortunately, most of the faculty at HMC grades on a sliding scale and there is an abundance of academic tutoring resources available for students who fall behind in their studies.

Freshmen at Mudd do not receive letter grades for their first semester classes in order to give incoming students a chance to adjust to the raised academic expectations of a fast-paced and demanding college course load. A new joint faculty-administrative position ensures that every freshman at Mudd makes it through the year without slipping through the cracks.

Students at Mudd are expected to work hard, study hard, and do an abundance of homework each of their four years at HMC (and few take more than four years to graduate). The work load is heavy, but the competition between students is not. Studying in groups is standard, peer tutoring is widely offered on both a formal and informal basis, and the faculty keep long office hours and offer extended review sessions before exams.

Harvey Mudd College Admissions

Getting into Harvey Mudd College can be as much fun (and as difficult) as graduating from the place. Over the past several years, HMC’s Admission Office has worked hard to put a human face on the sometimes cold and judgmental world of college admissions. The school’s clever “Junk Mail piece” (a satirical mailing introducing Harvey Mudd College to prospective students), adds much needed levity to the college recruiting process, poking fun at the way most schools try to market themselves, while at the same time drawing in the type of savvy but not humorless student that Harvey Mudd seeks to attract.

I got way more personal attention from the Admission Office at Harvey Mudd College than any other college I applied to. I liked the fact that every letter I received was signed in ink, not laser printed or photocopied. Any time I had questions I was able to talk to someone directly and not just get brushed off in favor of some pamphlet dropped in the mail. I felt that I was a welcome part of the college before I ever saw the campus.

Harvey Mudd College is a highly selective college and the applicant pool is dominated by students in the top ten percent of their high school class. Each year around one-fourth of the incoming class is made up of National Merit scholars. As opposed to some larger schools, the HMC Admission Office avoids hard-and-fast admission minimums or formulas. Instead, the staff at HMC favors reading each application and determining if the individual applicant is the sort of student who will thrive at Mudd. The staff does, however, insist that every incoming freshman at Mudd has had chemistry, physics, and calculus as part of a rigorous and successful high school career.

SAT scores among applicants tend to be extremely high. Aptitude in math, as demonstrated by test scores and grades, is an important admissions criterion, as the science and engineering curriculum at HMC is, by necessity, very math-intensive. Verbal scores, however, are not neglected in the admissions process. The college seeks to educate scientists and engineers who can think, write, and express themselves, as well as perform laboratory research and engineering calculations.

The college has been successful in adding more diversity to its student body in the last several years; for example, the class of 2005 is made up of about thirty percent women students. Extracurricular activities, unique talents, interests, hobbies, and a diversity of geographic and cultural backgrounds are all taken into consideration in the admission process, although academic aptitude remains the essential component in each admission decision. Interviews are encouraged, although visiting the campus and experiencing its unique atmosphere is highly recommended for prospective students.

Harvey Mudd College Financial Aid

Harvey Mudd College is, unfortunately, an expensive place to go to college. The school is young (founded in 1955) and has an impressive endowment for its age, but does not bathe in the financial resources that much older institutions enjoy. However, most of the students (around eighty percent) receive financial aid of some form. As at other prestigious private institutions, students and parents alike often accrue a sizable debt over their four years at HMC. The consistency of Mudd graduates being placed in high-paying jobs and prestigious graduate school programs, however, makes all of this debt a little easier to stomach and faster to pay off.

Fortunately, HMC is the type of small institution that can give students personal attention, even in financial aid matters. It’s common for parents to call and discuss their child’s financial aid package with the college’s Financial Aid Office or with the college vice president overseeing the financial aid office. Mudd will work with parents and students to adjust financial aid awards and to establish payment plans that help ensure that any student who has been admitted to HMC has every opportunity to attend the college.

Harvey Mudd College Students

Dorms

Social life at Harvey Mudd revolves around eight on-campus dorms in which nearly the entire student body resides.

Each dormitory at HMC has a distinct personality and set of traditions. The social atmosphere in any given dorm (and indeed on the entire campus) evolves somewhat with every group of new students, but there is a surprising amount of continuity in the types of students found hanging out in certain dorms at Mudd year after year. Dorm stereotypes are plentiful: West Dorm is rowdy, Case is secluded and quiet, South is eclectic, Atwood dorm is where the athletes live, etc. Mudders often identify themselves by which dorm they live in and hence what sort of people they socialize with. The dorm images are (like all stereotypes) only partially grounded in the truth. HMC is small enough (and homogeneous enough) that students are generally comfortable regardless of which foreign dorm they end up in for a review session, study break, or weekend party. Of course, many students take up residence in a dorm that is not their first choice, and Mudders tend to have friends scattered across multiple dorms; most students at Mudd reside in more than one dorm over the course of their four years.

The dorms are all coed and include a mix of students from all classes. Freshmen are required to live on campus with a roommate and are placed in all eight dorms. The quad dorms, the four older dorms on campus, are named for the four points of the compass although in a Mudd-esque twist of logic, South Dorm is north of West Dorm and west of North Dorm. The quad dorms are each constructed in the 1950s vintage cinderblock style that dominates the architecture on the campus. The atmosphere tends to be more social in the quad dorms, even if less aesthetic and less air-conditioned than the newer dorms, where suite arrangements are typical and students are more likely to stick with their closest friends and less likely to wander throughout the dorm. All of the dorms have central lounges with TVs and VCRs (perfect for weekend movie festivals), and all of the dorm rooms are hard-wired into the campus computer network for modem-free access to the central file servers and the Internet.

Proctors (seniors trained in first aid, crisis management, and handing out candy) are placed in each dorm. There is little non-student presence on campus after hours, except for one faculty member in residence and the bike-pedaling Claremont College campus safety force, and the campus is therefore largely egalitarian. There are a host of official and not-so-official student government organizations on campus that set student policy, organize events, discipline those who step over the line, and promote the general welfare.

Parties and Competitions

Parties of all sizes, from small spontaneous gatherings to well-hyped five-college extravaganzas, take place at frequent intervals in the dorms on the HMC campus. Mudd parties are reputed throughout The Claremont Colleges to be the biggest, most creative, and most fun parties in Claremont. As on all college campuses, alcohol is a part of the social fabric, although drinking and driving is not, since all of the parties are within walking distance on campus. In truth, HMC’s rigorous academic curriculum ensures that students who do not understand when to stop partying and start studying will not last very long on the campus.

There is a sizable portion of the student body at Mudd that does not drink at all and there are always a myriad of nonalcoholic events at HMC including regular movies, concerts, and off-campus trips. “Jay’s place,” an on-campus pizza parlor and pool hall, is a popular hangout seven nights a week, occasionally offering up live music and other events. Mudders are as good at coming up with creative and unique extracurricular activities for themselves as they are at throwing parties. The Etc. (extremely theatrically confused) Players produce original plays as well as old standards as often as they can get a willing cast together (three or four times a year). Other Mudd clubs plan outdoor events like the Delta-H (which means “change in height”) club, race the school yacht Mildred (a nineteen-foot class boat named for Mrs. Harvey Mudd), and coordinate volunteer opportunities for Mudders looking to use up the last remaining ounce of their valuable spare time.

The four-class competition is an annual event with little or no redeeming value besides being a great time. The event is a giant relay race that crisscrosses the campus with representatives from each class performing in such events as whistling with peanut butter in one’s mouth, computer programming under pressure, running a seven-legged race, and stuffing a textbook into a milk bottle. Faculty and staff serve as judges for the events, although stretching the rules is a time-honored tradition. After the race is over (it takes about thirty minutes), the entire campus settles in for a picnic and celebration of all things great about being at Harvey Mudd College.

Dating

The dating scene at Harvey Mudd is as unconventional as the rest of the school. Students at Mudd frequently lament “the ratio,” referring to the fact that Mudd is roughly two-thirds male. The Claremont Colleges Consortium is the saving grace that takes the edge off the ratio. Scripps, a women’s liberal arts college, is literally across the street from HMC. Naturally, many Mudd men find dates at Scripps and Mudd women enjoy choosing from the men at Mudd or from the rest of the Claremont Colleges population.

Sports

Despite the emphasis on academics, Mudd is a very athletic campus. Many Mudders achieve in varsity sports, although for some students it is difficult to find time to participate in the NCAA Division III athletic program HMC shares with two of the other Claremont schools. Intramural sports are popular and help promote dorm rivalries. Pick-up games of volleyball, basketball, soccer, and softball are daily occurrences at Mudd, as most students are looking for any chance to put aside their homework, soak up some sun, and release some stress. HMC is near Mt. Baldy, one of Southern California’s highest peaks, which means that quality mountain biking, hiking, and skiing are less than a half hour away.

Trips

Claremont is well located for weekend and spring break road trips. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Joshua Tree National Monument, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Tijuana are all within three hours by car. San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, and resort towns in Baja are all popular locations, well within the reach of road-tripping HMC students with a few days break. Perhaps the most popular road trip among Mudd students, however, is to DonutMan (a.k.a. Foster’s), home of world-famous strawberry donuts. Mudders make the fifteen-minute drive nightly, bypassing numerous other inferior donut shops along the way. This is the popular eating spot for Mudders who are studying late (or taking a break from studying late).

Harvey Mudd College Alumni

Perhaps the greatest testament to Harvey Mudd College is the success of its alumni body. Although the average age of the alumni body is between thirty and forty, Mudd has produced a greater percentage of graduates who go on to receive Ph.D.s (nearly forty percent) than any other undergraduate institution over the last several years. A respectable percentage of HMC alumni own their own businesses and alums litter the faculty ranks at top colleges across the country (including six who teach at HMC). HMC alumni have been astronauts, another produces the James Bond films, and still another currently serves as U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Not bad for a college with around 4,500 total alumni, fewer than many universities produce in a single year.

About forty percent of the students at Mudd step directly into the top graduate programs in the country. Students from all majors regularly make the choice to go immediately to graduate school out of Mudd, but the chemistry and biology majors are especially valuable commodities and generally can write their own ticket into the graduate program of their choice. In the past several years, numerous highly prized NSF fellowships, Churchill scholarships, Thomas Watson fellowships, and two Rhodes Scholarships have been handed out to Harvey Mudd College graduates.

Due to the HMC Clinic Program and the continuing success of Mudd alums in the work force, dozens of companies come to campus each year to recruit HMC engineering, physics, computer science, and math majors. Most of these companies are located in Southern California or the Silicon Valley although Mudd is gaining increasing national exposure in the professional world. HMC graduates leave college with a set of skills and experiences that are unique to the Mudd philosophy of education, and invaluable to employers. These experiences include working in randomly selected teams of peers, tackling open-ended problems with no clear solution, exploring the intersection of different technical fields, and generally working hard with limited resources under tough deadlines and related stress.

In my first year out of Mudd working for a big Silicon Valley software firm I was amazed at how most of the guys I started with would complain about the long hours and difficult project assignments that they felt were way over their heads. All I could think was “this stuff is fun and interesting and a hell of a lot easier to manage than my clinic project back at Mudd was.” I was certainly challenged in my new job but I wasn’t overwhelmed like the other new guys.

A few Harvey Mudd College graduates go on to business, law, or medical school, although most pursue more traditional careers in engineering, science, and math. Medical school applicants from HMC often face the disadvantage of a lower GPA than most of the competing applicant pool who have not endured HMC’s rigorous curriculum and take-no-prisoners grading curve. A growing number of Mudd students are pursuing volunteer service appointments upon graduation including programs in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorp, and Teach for America.

Prominent Grads

• Richard Jones, Ambassador
• Stan Love, Astronaut
• Michael Wilson, Film Producer

Carnegie Foundation Classification

Baccalaureate Colleges — Arts & Sciences

General Characteristics

Highest offering	Bachelor's degree
Calendar System	Semester
Years of college work required	N/A
Variable Tuition

Special Learning Opportunities

Distance Learning
ROTC — Army / Navy / Air Force	— / /
Study Abroad
Weekend College
Teacher Certification