Harvey Mudd College (HMC) is a private residential liberal arts college of science, engineering and mathematics, founded in 1955 and located in Claremont, California, United States.</p>
It is one of the institutions of the contiguous Claremont Colleges (the others are Pitzer College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences), which share adjoining campus grounds. Harvey Mudd College shares university resources such as libraries, dining halls, health services and campus security with the other Claremont Colleges, although each college is independently managed, with their own faculty, board of trustees, endowment, and admissions procedures. Students at Harvey Mudd College may take classes (acceptable for academic credit at Harvey Mudd College) at the other four undergraduate Claremont colleges. The Bachelor of Science diploma received at graduation is issued by Harvey Mudd College.
The college is named after Harvey Seeley Mudd, one of the initial investors in the Cyprus Mines Corporation. Although involved in the planning of the new institution, Mudd died before it opened. Harvey Mudd College was funded by Mudd's friends and family, and named in his honor.
Academics
Harvey Mudd College - Harvey Mudd combines the small class sizes and close-knit community of a liberal arts college with academics geared toward math and science.
HMC offers four-year degrees in chemistry, mathematics, physics, computer science, biology, and engineering, as well as interdisciplinary degrees in mathematical biology, and a joint major in either computer science and mathematics; or biology and chemistry. Students may also elect to complete an Individual Program of Study (IPS) made up of courses of their own choosing. Usually between two and five students graduate with an IPS degree each year. Finally, one may choose an off-campus major offered by any of the other Claremont Colleges, provided one also completes a minor in one of the technical fields that Harvey Mudd offers as a major.
Admissions
For the class of 2020, Harvey Mudd College received 4,180 applications and admitted 538 applicants (a 12.9% acceptance rate). Of the 216 freshmen who enrolled, the middle 50% of SAT scores were 740â€"800 in mathematics, 680â€"780 in critical reading, and 670â€"760 in writing, while the ACT Composite range was 32â€"35.
Harvey Mudd College, along with Wake Forest University, long held out as the last four-year colleges or universities in the U.S. to accept only SAT and not ACT test scores in their admissions process. In August 2007, however, at the beginning of the application process for the class of 2012, HMC began accepting ACT results, a year after Wake Forest University abandoned its former SAT-only policy.
Rankings
Harvey Mudd maintains the highest rate of science and engineering Ph.D. production among all undergraduate colleges and second highest (Caltech ranks first and MIT third) compared to all universities and colleges, according to a 2008 report by the National Science Foundation.
Money magazine ranked Harvey Mudd 79th in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. The Daily Beast ranked Harvey Mudd 78th in the country out of the nearly 2000 schools it evaluated for its 2013 Best Colleges ranking. According to U.S. News & World Report's 2017 America's Best Colleges rankings, Harvey Mudd College is tied for the 12th best liberal arts college in the United States and is rated 1st among undergraduate engineering schools in the U.S. whose highest degree is a Master's. Forbes in 2017 rated Harvey Mudd College No. 18 in its "America's Top Colleges" ranking, which includes 660 military academies, national universities and liberal arts colleges.
As of 2007, the median GPA of Harvey Mudd students was 3.35, behind other peer institutions; only seven students in the history of the college have achieved a perfect 4.0 GPA.
In 1997, Harvey Mudd College became the sole American undergraduate-only institution ever to win 1st place in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. As of 2017, no American school has won the world competition since.
In 2006, the Harvey Mudd College mathematics department received the American Mathematical Society award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department. Two of the department's alumni, Joshua Greene and Aaron Archer, were winners and honorable mention for the Morgan Prize in 2002 and 1998 respectively. The Morgan Prize is an annual award given to an undergraduate student in the US, Canada, or Mexico who demonstrates superior mathematics research.
Tuition and other costs
In 2016, Harvey Mudd was for the second year in a row the most expensive college in the United States, with the total annual cost of attendance (tuition, fees, and room and board) being $69,717. About 70% of freshmen receive financial aid.
Harvey Mudd College dormitories
The official names for the dormitories of Harvey Mudd College are (listed in order of construction):
- Mildred E. Mudd Hall ("East")
- West Hall ("West")
- North Hall ("North")
- Marks Residence Hall ("South")
- J. L. Atwood Residence Hall (Atwood)
- Case Residence Hall (Case)
- Ronald and Maxine Linde Residence Hall (Linde)
- Frederick and Susan Sontag Residence Hall (Sontag)
- Wayne and Julie Drinkward Residence Hall (Drinkward)
Until the addition of the Linde and Sontag dorms, Atwood and Case dorms were occasionally referred to as New Dorm and New Dorm II; Mildred E. Mudd Hall and Marks Hall are almost invariably referred to as East dorm and South dorm.
During the construction of Case Dorm some students decided as a prank to move all of the survey stakes exactly six inches in one direction.
South Dorm is in the northwest corner of the quad. "East" was the first dorm, but it wasn't until "West" was built west of it that it was actually referred to as "East". Then "North" was built, directly north of "East". When the fourth dorm (Marks) was built, there was one corner of the quad available (the northwest) and one directional name, "South", remaining. To this day "South" dorm is the northernmost HMC dorm.
The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth dorms built are Atwood, Case, Linde, Sontag, and Drinkward, respectively. They were initially referred to as "the colonies" by some students, a reference to the fact that they were newer and at the farthest end of the campus; these dorms are now more commonly referred to as "the outer dorms." The college had initially purchased an apartment building adjacent to the newer dorms to house additional students, but it was demolished to make room for Sontag.
Since any HMC student, regardless of class year, can live in any of the dormitories, several of the dorms have accumulated long-standing traditions and so-called 'personalities'.
College traditions
A student-led organization, "Increasing Harvey Mudd's Traditional Practices" (IHTP), works to revive college traditions that have slowly faded over the years, and also starts new traditions that the group hopes to see take root on campus. It hosts annual events such as the 5-Class Competition, Friday Nooners, Wednesday Nighters, Frosh/Soph Games, and the Thomas-Garrett Affair.
Athletics
The school's athletic program participates, in conjunction with Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College (other consortium members) and are named Claremontâ€"Muddâ€"Scripps. The teams participate in NCAA Division III in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The mascot for the men's team is Stag and the women's teams is Athena. The mascots are named Stanley the Stag and Athena. Their colors are cardinal and gold.
Athletics history
According to the Division III Fall Learfield Director's Cup Standings for the 2016-2017 year, CMS ranks 12th among all Division III programs, and first among SCIAC colleges. The Claremont McKenna golf team ranked first among NCAA Division III teams according to Golf Digest, and 17th overall (including Division 1 schools). The rankings are based on the "Balanced" category which is "for students who place equal emphasis on school and sports".
Sports
There are 21 men's and women's teams.
Men's sports
Women's sports
Athletic facilities
- Baseball â€" Bill Arce Field
- Basketball and Volleyball â€" Roberts Pavilion
- Football and Lacrosse â€" John Zinda Field
- Softball â€" Softball Field
- Soccer â€" John Pritzlaff Field
- Swimming and Diving â€" Matt M. Axelrood Pool
- Tennis â€" Biszantz Family Tennis Center
- Track and Field â€" Burns Track Complex
Architecture
The original buildings of campus, designed by Edward Durell Stone and completed in 1955, features "knobbly concrete squares that students of Harvey Mudd affectionately call “warts†and use as hooks for skateboards." The school's unofficial mascot "Wally Wart" is an anthropomorphic concrete wart.
In 2013, Travel and Leisure named the college as one of "America's ugliest college campuses" and noted that while Stone regarded his design as a "Modernist masterpiece" the result was "layering drab, slab-sided buildings with Beaux-Arts decoration."
Relations with Caltech
The California Institute of Technology, another school known for its strength in the natural sciences and engineering, is located 26 miles (42Â km) away (nearly the distance of a marathon) from Harvey Mudd College. From time to time, Mudders have been known to amuse themselves by pranking Caltech. For example, in 1986, students from Mudd stole a memorial cannon from Fleming House at Caltech (originally from the National Guard) by dressing as maintenance people and carting it off on a flatbed truck for "cleaning". Harvey Mudd eventually returned the cannon after Caltech threatened to take legal action. In 2006, MIT replicated the prank and moved the same cannon to their campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Notable alumni
Notable Harvey Mudd College alumni include co-inventor of SQL Donald D. Chamberlin (1966), astronauts George "Pinky" Nelson (1972) and Stan Love (1987), and diplomat Richard H. Jones (1972).
Notable faculty
See also
- Association of Independent Technological Universities
- Maria Klawe
- Claremont McKenna College Athletics
- Scripps College Athletics
References
External links
- Official website
- Official athletics website
- Harvey Mudd College at National Center for Education Statistics: College Navigator