<p>On the question of graduating early:</p>
<p>If you’re worried about graduating early, you’re probably stuck in the middle of the awkward financial donut the financial aid system has created. The children of the rich enjoy 4 years and graduate without debt. Those whose parents haven’t the faintest hope of paying $60k/year get generous financial aid and also manage to graduate with little debt. Those in the middle are stuck with either depleting their parents nest egg or graduating with crushing debt.</p>
<p>If you’re in the middle, I would recommend against going to Mudd or any super high priced college, unless you’re trying to sell your soul and be an iBanker. The debt load you’ll graduate will close down many low paying careers that you might ultimately find more fulfilling. </p>
<p>The pressure to graduate early could lead you to taking absurd overloads and enjoying college very little. Plus, your grades will suffer as a result of the overloads. Why not go to a state school where you could enjoy yourself more and be the star pupil of your class? Just because a campus doesn’t have a worldwide brand doesn’t mean that it won’t have intellectually challenging programs.</p>
<p>To graduate a year early at Mudd, you’re going to likely have to pass out of 4 Core courses (12 credits) minimum. This is rather difficult because Mudd doesn’t accept AP/IB scores for automatic credit. My year, 3 or so passed out of a semester of Frosh chem, 5 passed out of Freshman Mechanics, and 10-15 passed out of a semester of physics. Even passing out of 4 courses, you’ll need 18.5 academic credits a semester, which is quite heavy, assuming you get 5 extra credits from seminar and PE.</p>
<p>On your plans:</p>
<p>I’d like to echo that Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Caltech aren’t the end-all be-all of grad schools, depending on your intellectual interests. Really obscure places can have really well-regarded programs within niches of some research fields.</p>
<p>If you’re interested in “financial engineering” to become an iBanker, stick to Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton blah blah blah. There are banks (Credit Suisse for instance) that hire interns exclusively from a small group of 10 schools. If this is your aspiration, you shouldn’t be setting your sights on Mudd.</p>
<p>There are Mudders who go into quantitative finance and do very well, however. Mudd Investment Fund has pretty good alumni contacts who will help out. Most years, a few people will head off to solid jobs in these fields. If you want to take numerous economics courses, do math or physics. These majors have lots of class space for electives.</p>