Harvey Mudd is one of the five Claremont Colleges (the other four are Claremont-McKenna, Pitzer, Pomona and Scripps). These five schools are within walking distance of each other in Claremont, California—and students can take classes and join organizations at any of the schools in the consortium. Claremont serves these five schools with a college town atmosphere. It’s about 30 miles east of downtown L.A. and features an area called The Village, with stores, boutiques, art galleries, offices, and restaurants. Though Claremont was once a series of citrus groves, it’s now primarily residential, with many large homes. There’s also a wilderness park that spans 1,740 acres.

Harvey Mudd’s small campus of 33 acres is only a block wide and about 10 blocks long. The academic buildings sit at one end, the dorms occupy the other, and the dining hall and Joseph B. Platt Campus Center are in the middle. The campus features two fountains, a koi pond,and a small waterfall. Edward Durell Stone designed the campus’s original buildings, which are covered with thousands of “warts,” or concrete squares. (In fact, Harvey Mudd’s unofficial mascot is “Wally the Wart,” a concrete square with appendages and a face.) Warts serve as shelves for unicycles and skateboards—popular forms of transportation among Mudders. The concrete buildings—the Libra Complex—house computer labs and classrooms in their basements. These are all connected underground.

Harvey Mudd has no Greek life—instead, students self-segregate based on dorms. Each dorm has a specific personality, ranging from the jock dorm to the party dorm to the raver dorm to the computer-gamer dorm. Most juniors and seniors can secure singles if they wish. Mudd’s dorms include Mildred E. Mudd Hall, or “East Dorm;” West Hall, or “West,” which throws a tequila-centered party known as TQ Nite; North Hall, or “North,” which throws an annual formal called Long Tall; Marks Residence Hall, or “South”; J.L. Atwood Residence Hall, or “Atwood”; Case Residence Hall, known variously as “Case,” “Seventh Dorm,” and “Pink Dorm;” Ronald and Maxine Linde Residence Hall, or “Linde;” and Frederick and Susan Sontag Residence Hall, or “Sontag.”

Harvey Mudd students join with students from Claremont McKenna and Scripps Colleges to compete as single athletic teams. This intercollegiate athletic program is known as Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, or CMS. Male teams are the Stags; female teams are the Athenas. All 20 CMS teams compete in Division III of the NCAA and in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Intramural sports are popular at Harvey Mudd—in fact, these teams often have more fan support than the varsity teams. Intramurals draw on the rivalry between Harvey Mudd’s dorms, which compete in sports including inner-tube water polo, flag football, ultimate Frisbee, and floor hockey. The Claremont Colleges also collectively offer a number of club sports, from ballroom dancing to rowing.