<p>Well, for those who wanted to, but couldn’t make it, here’s what happened:</p>
<p>10-11:55 - Introduction to HMC (including a great talk from President Klawe, she didn’t try to hide that some people won’t fit in at HMC: “if you can’t stand living with people who love math and science for 4 years, we don’t want you” or something along those lines, in a nice way), including extra bits about what you’ll be doing in Humanities and clinics/reasearch.
12-12:30 - Lunch: really nice sandwiches w/ Lay’s, brownie, apple, pasta salad, and a mint. Not bad for free 
12:30-2 - Major field information sessions with a department head honcho. I did engineering and mathematics (only really interested in Eng, but Professor Castro was still pretty cool).
2-3 - HMC student Q&A session. Nice and fun and relaxed, and the 6 Mudders we got to interrogate were really diverse and actually interesting people. Not everything we heard in that room can be shared, but in case anyone was in the A-L group, I was the one who asked to show us what to do with a passed out drunk person.
3-4 - Admissions and Financial Aid presentation. In case sme of you are unfortunate enough to have never heard Peter Osgood (Director of Admissions), he’s fricking hilarious. And not in a bad way, but he looked and sounded like John Hodgman (PC in the Get a Mac ads). Those of you who get to meet (or even better, interview) with him, get ready to laugh. Anyway, Peter talked about the usual “what we’re looking for” stuff, you know the drill (he had tons of funny anecdotes to keep it going, like the applicant who took the SAT 13 times, or the one who submitted 25 supplemental letters of rec). Les Butler also appeased the parents and explained aid, nothing much new there.
4-5(5:30 in my case) - Walking tour. I was with 10 or so others following our sophomore, who was also pretty funny (noticing a trend?). We went to each end of campus (not too hard ;)), including by some Eng/CompSci labs, the library, rec & student centers, and in his dorm (East). This is where I really got a better understanding of HMC - our tour gide had loaned his room key to someone else, but some guys who were just hanging out outside offered to let us in their dorms, without notice. That says something about kind, accommodating, and cool students.</p>
<p>Overall, I got a different (but even better!) feel for HMC from spending 8 hours at the place. It’s hard, but there’s a real community there that just doesn’t exist at Caltech or MIT. There’s plenty of hardcore math/science/engineering people, but if you get sick of them, there’s more than 4,000 other smart but different people to hang out with. I really got to like the idea of the Claremont system, and the options it gives you: don’t like the HMC food? Go over to CMC for breakfast, Pitzer for lunch, and Pomona for dinner, if you want. Want to take something more interesting for your Humanities requirement? Take a psychology class at Pitzer or Shakespeare at Pomona.</p>
<p>Oh, and in case you’re still reading at this point: everyone in funny. No, really, I was able to work on practicing spontaneous laughter. It may not be surprising that students 2-3 years older can crack jokes that I can relate to, but the administrative staff and profs were great as well. I don’t want to tarnish their humor, but one humanities prof used a drawing of 2 guys smiling at each other, while they prepare to stab or hammer each other, to show what we would be learning, for example. The little side notes about each dorm were great as well, like West: ‘you’ll see them at night, having fun with fire’. Overall, if you’re interested in HMC, try to get out there. If you’re spending any significant amount of time to get out there, try and spend the night there .</p>