Mudd Frosh Taking Questions

atomicfusion
Tue, 19 Sep 2006 15:46:21 +0000

I’ve only been here for a month, but I’ll give it a shot…

“First, I’ve been getting some mixed messages about how much you actually interact with the other Claremont schools. You all (males) say that the girls from Scripps help to make up for the gender gap at parties, but other times people on this forum say that they rarely visit the other colleges. Do you feel that the school’s small size is made up for by having other schools next-door? Do you wish you had gone somewhere larger?”

No, Scripps girls DEFINITELY come to our parties. The ones that are pre-planned and dorm sponsored ones are full of kids from other schools. Most of the people at those parties I don’t even recognize. This weekend, for example, there are two official dorm parties going on at once and I assume there will be plenty of Scripps girls there. At those parties the ratio is definitely around even. There’s no problem meeting girls at all, trust me. But, the parties that aren’t official and just spur of the moment (these are the ones that go on ALL the time), don’t have too many people outside of Mudd. This is probably because they’re more private types of parties. But every week there seems to be at least one official 5 C party. Of course the ones that aren’t at HMC basically all suck, but still.

“I hear that Mudd parties hard (when it parties at all), and that the liquor flows. When we toured the campus, everyone said that there was little pressure to drink, but are there many people who do not drink regularly?”

There’s a ridiculous amount of partying that goes on here. I didn’t believe the rumers that Mudd partied hard, but it parties very hard indeed. You can get hard liqour whenever you want. There’s full bars in many of the suites (in the 4 non-quad dorms) and the dorm lounges (in the 4 quad dorms). You basically can get anything you want, any time you want it. Also a lot of the frosh have their own stash too now. There definitely is pressure to drink here, but if you don’t want to you won’t be forced to. There’s many many people who don’t drink at all. I would say over 50% of the frosh class does not drink. Some of those kids still go to the parties, but others just stay in their dorms and hang out. There’s also other things going on during the parties so kids who don’t want to drink have something else to do. Basically there’s a fine line here between those who drink and those who don’t. The ones who don’t drink literally refuse to drink any alcohol, while the ones who do drink get really wasted here.

The bottom is line don’t worry about the drinking if you don’t want to do it. You can still have fun here without drinking and a majority of the freshmen don’t drink. Also at parties at the other 4 Cs they card, so people there won’t really be drinking anyways unless they’re 21. You can always go to those parties if you don’t want to be around too much drinking.

About applying ED… There’s a saying that if you do research about harvey mudd and STILL want to come here, it means you’re the type for this school. Mudd provides an amazing sense of community, an extremely challenging curriculum, and totally awesome social experience. I’m pretty depressed right now from 4 hours of sleep the last two nights and tons of homework, but I still think Mudd is awesome. That’s how awesome it is.