My son is seriously considering HMC. I am little bit concerned about the small size of the school (smaller than his HS). I know it is possible to take classes in the other colleges. But do students actually do it? Do students form groups with students from the other colleges?
Yes! It's actually quite common. Especially at Mudd, where the humanities departments are smaller than the other schools', your options are greatly expanded by the other schools.
Also, the Computer Science departments of Mudd and Pomona are very connected. When I visited Mudd, the CS class I went to was actually being taught by a Pomona professor. I don't know what your son's interests are, but I certainly intend to take a number of CS/math/science classes at Mudd.
A number of clubs are inter-college and your son can expect to make friends with people all over the 5Cs.
I think that most Mudders take classes at the other 5C's. My son has taken art courses at Scripps (they have a strong art program) and humanities and CS classes at Pomona. Given the significant humanities requirement at Mudd, I think it would be unusual for a Mudder not to take at least some classes at the other colleges. For example, if I am not mistaken the only language offered at Mudd is Chinese.
I agree from what I've heard. Only real difference I know of is that at Mudd students typically take 5 per semester and at the other schools they typically take 4 (but can take 5 I think). I have heard that the heavy load sometimes makes it more difficult to take electives in general because the Mudd core curriculum is pretty involved. So it might be worth it to check out the curricular requirements at Mudd. When we were there we met lots of students who were doing music or theater at 5C's. I think the environment overall is very rich and collaborative with the other schools.
Also - if you take classes at the other schools your first semester (year?) when you are on Pass/fail, remember that you do get grades from the other colleges.
Pretty much everyone takes an off-campus class at one point, if not several. In terms of forming groups with people at the other colleges, it varies a lot more.
Thank you everyone. Will you only take classes in the other colleges in the humanities? Or for example, could you also take Math and Physics classes at Pomana just because you are more interested in some of their classes or schedule? if a class requires a group project, is this totally fine to work with students from other colleges?
braden - you mention forming groups with people at other colleges varies a lot. Would you say most students do not form groups with people from other colleges or they do?
I can't speak for everyone, but most of the classes my son has taken in the other 5'Cs have been humanities classes, except for a CS class at Pomona. But, it may differ by major.
My son took his first non-Mudd course fall of freshman year, and will probably be taking a humanities course at one of the other four just about every semester. I think Mudders tend to stick together, but there are a lot of cross-college groups, particularly in music.
Yeah, your involvement at other colleges is pretty much up to you. You can stay on your own campus all 4 years, but you can also take up to 50% of your classes at the other colleges. The vast majority of students are somewhere in the middle of that, as you can imagine.
If students can take classes at Claremont, there's probably not much restriction on what. But I must say, what counts as a master's level class is pretty subjective. Classes at a school like Mudd can blur the lines, because you are taught classes with the expectation that you want to go into a lot of detail. The only thing limited as a small school to an extent is variety.
Definitely! I get the feeling that many of the u/g classes at Mudd are grad level-like. The financial engineering program at Drucker just looked really interesting to my son.
The CGU math Master's program requires Mudd courses. There are a couple math courses offered jointly between Mudd and CGU, and they are uniformly more challenging when offered at Mudd than at CGU. Pomona also has rigorous math courses available, however.
