In Hindsight: HMC

In hindsight, Harvey Mudd College has both its merits and its flaws.

For those of you new to this whole HMC thing, allow me to summarize its purpose: "Tech school with liberal arts emphasis".

Yeah, yeah, I know there's the whole missions statement that sounds much more official and all, but really that's what it all boils down to. Heck, 1/3 of our courseload is in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (they also get peeved if you leave out one of the 3). We also support coursework rigor on the same level as Caltech and MIT, have insanely huge Senior Projects, and have to take courses in all the disciplines so that we're "well-rounded" in both the technical fields and as an individual.

Overall, I'd say this mission and purpose is right on the money. I'm now doing graduate work at UC Davis and several professors there have also mentioned that "it's not how brilliant you are or how great your ideas are, it's how well you can communicate them to others". Industry members have told us this in seminars. I have anecdotal evidence from a variety of friends, colleagues, and family. Sure being a brilliant solver of the world is awesome, but you can't change the world with a blackboard full of scribbles that only you can decipher. Presentation skills, proper grammar, being able to relate via music and conversations, understanding politics and policy, heck even knowing proper etiquette are all equally vital to being able to thrive as a human being.

So, yeah, HMC rocks in that respect.


Plus, it's a school dedicated to teaching. I didn't realize how important this was until now. As a High School student I heard about it and decided I wanted to go to a place where teaching was a high priority. It sounds really good on paper, and makes logical sense. You're going to school to learn.

I didn't realize how important that was to me until I got to UC Davis.

Let me put it in perspective. At HMC, most professors teach two to three courses a semester and balance in there some research and other activities like sitting on boards, getting seminars organized, hanging out with students, the usual. At UC Davis, if a professor it teaching more than one class they appear to have a breakdown and can't function properly. Assignments tend to have errors or are incoherent. Grades get returned weeks after you turned the assignment in. They realize somewhere around 2/3 through the quarter that they haven't given enough work yet, and so pile it on for the last 1/3. And guess which class gets dropped if they have to pick between the two? The Graduate level class. Ugh....

Because I'm a grad student I have a bit more freedom to pick classes I enjoy and avoid professors who really can't teach. Still, the horror some of the undergrads have to go through is extremely rough. The vast majority of the professors are there to do research and teaching is an afterthought. As a result the quality drops precipitously.

Now, I can understand why the UCD professors can't perform as well as the HMC ones. They have to manage their own research teams, secure funding, wine and dine prospective grant givers and are always worrying about the next paper or fellowship deadline. Plus, your success is measured in the amount of research you can do. More students is good, but it also requires more money to pay them all to do research. At HMC, the professors get a fellowship placed under their name that will stay with them for years and they hand-pick enough students as they can handle. No wonder they can not only get better research (the students are more driven and self-selecting) and they can be better teachers (more time, hired specifically for teaching instead of research).

The difference really does matter. I was able to get help from the professors much more easily at HMC than at UCD. E-mail and office hours were common and frequent. Lectures were concise, well thought-out, and got us ready for the next homework. There was very little waste time so we learned in a semester what the UCD kids learn over the course of a year. Overall it was a much healthier learning environment.

Granted, there were some exceptions to this rule. There were definitely poorly taught HMC courses (and I've talked with the professors about them), and there have been some excellent UCD courses. But the overall trend still stands in my mind.

Of course, more learning means more homework. Ugh. That being said, I'm somehow being equally time eaten at times at UCD. Must be my own masochism.


Perhaps the weakest part of HMC is the lack of involvement. UCD has the monolithic administration, but if you compare HMC to other colleges like USC or Chapman (where my siblings have gone) it does extremely poorly at involving current students, alumni, and the parents.

There is a very strong chance you came to this blog via my older one where I was a blogger for the Admission Department. It was fun, I got to talk about my experiences and josh about the good, the bad, and the weird of HMC. However, as an alumni I've had 2 contacts back to HMC. One is a fairly drab e-mail newsletter that I typically skim then dump, and the other was a phone call that was a thinly veiled excuse to ask for money and keep my contact info up-to-date.

My mom has it even worse. Since we live only 30 minutes from the school, she was an active volunteer for several events and even sat on several panels. Some were for Q&A with prospective parents, and one was for helping decide on a new administrator. However, after the decision was made, she heard nothing for several months. Sure there were complications, but there wasn't even a whisper from the higher ups about what was going on. Even a simple "We're sorry, but complications have arisen" would have been nice to let those that helped with the decision feel like they aren't being ignored and left out of the loop.

HMC needs to exploit it resources. While you're in HMC you're taken very good care of and you develop great bonds with each other and the school. The huge failure of HMC to take advantage of it, even if it's just for the end of getting more money from us, is a real shame. Events need to be planned, information distributed, more ways to hang out and connect with other alums would be a huge boon to keeping an active community. Active community means more stay connected, means more resources to pull on for jobs and careers and networking, and more publicity.

Take a good look at the USC Family. Just flash your USC credentials and suddenly huge doors open up. They look out for each other, they build comradery, they keep in touch and sell you swag. They know how to keep their alums interested and how to get their alums to connect. They look out for each other and for the college. Being a Trojan means Trojans look out for you. It's a shame that even with all this talk about the internet and bootstrapping the social networking media like Facebook, many colleges including HMC aren't taking advantage of it.

They really need a better PR and Alumni/Parent relations team.


Anyways, if I ever had to do it over again, I'd totally pick HMC. Sure there were times I ground myself into a pulp over certain projects, and yeah sometimes there was stupid dorm drama. However, overall, it's an awesome place that has rigor and teaches you how to be relevant in a high-tech intellectual world. And really, that's pure awesome.