My daughter is a Mudder. She was also a specialist in literature, opera, and art in Quiz Bowl (and very highly ranked in it). She moderated a philosophy website for teenagers, and won awards for painting. The rest of her college list was: Swarthmore, Carleton, Mount Holyoke, Kenyon, Macalester, Lawrence, and UChicago. She got in everyplace she applied, and picked Mudd – smart people, strong in Physics (her area of interest), and it has an LAC flavor. The Mudd mission statement is:
“Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.”
So she didn’t overlap with Caltech or MIT – visited Caltech and didn’t care for it, thought it was too tech focused. And she didn’t get into Mudd just because of her gender, she had 2380 superscore SAT and 800s in her subject tests – in Math II and Lit. She will tell you that Mudd is an LAC, and that is one reason she decided to attend there.