Harvey Mudd College

Date: May 11 2004
Major: Computer Science (This Major's Salary over time)
It's been said, but Mudd will _kick your ass_. Hard. The trick is not to let it break you. To that end, the people are endlessly helpful. The professors are always around (the CS dept. has about 40 majors at any time; we've got nine professors, and are hiring another; talk about student-faculty ratio!) and have been known to answer e-mail at 4am. Furthermore, the environment is barely competitive at all; the workload is literally so hard that's it's nearly impossible to get it done by yourself, so everybody works together. Classes are almost never curved, so that doesn't encourage competition either. The mindset of the professors is something like

we're going to make it so hard you can't do it by yourself, and then we're going to let you work with your friends and be available at all hours to make sure you figure it out

Also, "hard" translates into "useful", which apparently isn't always the case; for the most part, the stuff they've got us doing (even problem sets) are directly applicable.

So, this is not the place for everyone; but I love it to death.