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Tours

1. Tour Harvey Mudd College

   Find out what makes us unique on a tour of our campus facilities.

   Stops

   1. R. Michael Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning

      Transcript of Stop 1: Shanahan Center and Department of Mathematics

      Lynn: Hi my name is Lynn and I'm a senior here at Harvey Mudd College. I'm a physics major and also a tour guide.

      Charlie: And I'm Charlie. I'm a software engineering major and today we're going to be showing you around campus.

      Lynn: Right now we're in front of the R. Michael Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning. It's our newest academic building and it was finished in 2013.

      Charlie: This building houses most of our classrooms, our biggest lecture hall, the math department, a classroom known as the SkyCube, which students got to name, the admission office, financial aid, the president's office—all that is located in here as well as tons of other things that you'll find over your time here.

      Lynn: This is our math department. You might be wondering why am I taking you through the entire hallway of professors' offices. Actually professors' offices is one of the most important places where you will be learning as a student. So we have something here called the open-door policy, which means that if a professor is not teaching a class or in a meeting and they're just sitting in their offices that they're going to leave their door open and as long as a professor's door is open anyone can just walk right in and ask them questions whether it's about what happened in lecture, or a problem on the homework or about life in general or a hobby that you guys have in common.

      Charlie: Downstairs in this building we have the recital hall and there's a big courtyard in the middle which we used for our annual outdoor Shakespeare play. We also have an outdoor classroom on the roof.

      What I think students might care most about is actually that there's also The Cafe in this building and Academic Excellence is also housed here, which is a tutoring program for all students at Harvey Mudd.

      And that's all housed here in the Shanahan.

   2. Parsons Engineering Building

      Transcript of Stop 2. Parsons: Engineering and HSA

      Charlie: Here we are in front of Parsons which houses engineering and the humanities, social Sciences and arts department.

      If you decide to be an engineer here at Mudd, know that you'll be very busy because you have the most requirements for your major. But don't let that scare you. It just means you'll experience a wide range of things before you get to go ahead and specialize in your depth.

      Every engineer has to take an engineering math class, a mechanical, electrical, chemical, computer engineering, a course that introduces you to design principles, working in groups and manufacturing and a course which introduces you to signals and sensors.

      Basically after completing the engineering core you'll have experienced a lot of breadth but don't worry you'll still get to be able to do your depth and focus into whatever field you want whether it's electrical, chemical, mechanical etc. You specialize by taking the higher level elective classes and by doing Clinic projects.

      This is the Clinic space and Clinic is when a company will pay Mudd forty to fifty thousand dollars for a team of students to work on one of their real-life projects. So the team will get a company liaison, they'll get a budget and they'll get a deadline and by the end of that deadline they have to come up with a deliverable just like if they're working at that company. Companies that have worked with Mudd in the past include Amazon, Google, SpaceX, Mazda, Genentech, Intel, Honeywell—all the big names you can think of and tons of smaller ones.

      So really this is real-life work experience that you get as a senior or as a junior and you have to do it if you're an engineer or a computer scientist. For everyone else it's optional but highly recommended. If you decide not to do Clinic here at Mudd, you instead finish off your academic career with a big research paper called Thesis.

      This is the main machine shop at Harvey Mudd and in your first engineering class you actually learn how to use the machines in the shop and your final assignment in that class is actually to make this hammer.

      This is the humanities, social sciences and arts department at Mudd, or HSA as we call it. So even though Mudders come here because they're good at math, science, engineering, etc., they also come in because they have a passion related to the humanities that they want to explore or maintain. So that's why even though one third of your time here is spent doing classes in the core, another third is spent doing classes in your major, the last third is spent doing courses in the humanities, social sciences and arts.

      Within that there is a breadth and a depth requirement. So breadth is when you take a bunch of different courses in different departments. It lets you see what's out there and then depth is when you find out what you like you go ahead and take more courses in which will eventually become your concentration here at Mudd.

      You can take courses in history, literature, media studies, psychology, anthropology, economics, music, religion, philosophy and photography. You can take more subjects at the other Claremont colleges. So when you graduate from Mudd, you'll have a major in STEM and a concentration in something humanities related. You will spend a lot of time exploring things that maybe you haven't done before and then if you find something you like you'll end up specializing in it by taking that certain number of courses in that department. Or if you've always been interested in something humanities related you can go ahead and specialize in that. Either way just know that you'll be doing a lot of humanities and or arts if you decide to come to Mudd.

   3. F.W. Olin Science Center

      Transcript of Stop 3. Olin and Biology and CS

      Lynn: Welcome to the Olin Science Center where you'll find our faculty offices for the biology and computer science departments, as well as some of our biology labs.

      The first biology course that you will take is an introduction to the principles of biology. So instead of looking at things like how DNA gets turned into RNA to protein or how populations evolve from the generic textbook perspective, our professors take a mathematical and computational perspective. The reason why they do that is because mathematical and computational tools have become much more important to research in biology and also because Harvey Mudd College is the first college to offer a mathematical and computational biology major. So we like to include some of these principles starting from day one.

      Charlie: No matter what you end up majoring in here at Mudd, you're gonna take bio, because it is part of our core curriculum. The profs in biology know that by the time you're gonna take their course in the spring, you've already taken your intro computer science course, which you take in the fall. So your homework for the course most likely isn't gonna be, what's a mitochondria? And then you say, 'oh it's a powerhouse of the cell.' It's gonna be more like, write a Python program to simulate population dynamics over time and visualize them using MATLAB. If none of those words sound familiar to you, don't worry they will be after a semester or two at Mudd.

      If you decide to be a bio major after that, know you have a lot of options for interdisciplinary study. You can be a biochem major, you can do bio-computer science, you can do bio-computer science math and if you are an engineer, you can specialize in bioengineering. There's a lot of options for interdisciplinary study.

      Lynn: Harvey Mudd College offers a computer science major which I would like to distinguish from a programming or coding major. And the reason for that distinction is because while the students are learning how to program in different languages and how to write code and how to make software, they're also learning some of the theory behind computer science. So they're taking courses in algorithms. They're also learning about how computer hardware works and how that all comes together.

      Along the way you'll also be doing tons of group projects. So for example we have a course where you'll make an app with a team of students so while your programming you're also learning to document your code properly and how to communicate that and how to debug as a team and it's a lot of fun.

      Charlie: Here at Mudd, computer science is obviously one of our strengths but one of the ways we do that is by making sure everybody has equal access and feels just as strongly if they have no experience in computer science coming in as someone coming in with a few years of computer science. That's why even though there's only one core computer science requirement in computer science, there's three different levels of it you can place into.

      If you have little to no experience you are going to be placed into CS 5 Gold automatically. Awesome course. Everybody who takes it loves it. CS 5 black - you might place into that if you have a little bit more experience--maybe you've taken one or two years of computer science. And then if you have way more experience you can place into CS 42.

      But there's no need to worry about placing in are up or out or any of that because every course in computer science here has a huge emphasis on theory rather than the details of learning a specific language. So you will learn to program in Python in your intro courses and assembly language as well a little bit. You'll delve into various languages but more important than the itty bitty details of each of those languages are the concepts that are at the heart of computer science. So what it means to sort through a list. How your hardware might limit your software capabilities, your run time of certain operations. Things like that that are at the heart of computer science. You get to know them really well and then you can apply them to any language you need to later down the road. That's kind of the philosophy behind the computer science department here and what makes our department so successful.

   4. W.M. Keck Laboratories

      Transcript of Stop 4. Keck and Physics

      Lynn: This is the Keck building where you'll find our physics faculty offices as well as lab spaces.

      The first physics course that you'll take as a part of the core curriculum is actually a half semester of special relativity. And what's so cool about this course, in addition to the fact that most people haven't had it before in high school, is that you start with really simple, totally intuitive assumptions and by the end of the half semester course, so just in about seven weeks, you get to talking about things like why does my clock run slow if I'm moving close to the speed of light? Or, if I'm going really really quickly, why do I actually get shorter? And all sorts of strange, seemingly paradoxical things like that.

      My favorite moment when the power of physics really struck me was on the last lecture when my professor came in all dressed in black, very somber, and explained that today in class we were going to talk about why atomic bombs were so destructive and how all of the physics that we had learned up to that point explains why just a couple of bombs can take out a whole city and more. For me that really hit home because I felt like I not only knew why science was powerful but also that I, as a scientist, had power and had to think about how to use that responsibly.

      You will also take a physics lab which is all about taking seemingly simple experiments and getting results that are not quite ideal and trying to figure out how do I analyze this data, what conclusions can I actually make from them and how am I going to explain all these weird things that I never expected. It's a really cool lab course because it really teaches you to talk about what you saw rather than talk about what you think you should have seen.

      One of the big misconceptions that I get on my tour is people say 'you're just a small school you must not actually do any substantial research.' And that's a huge misconception because we do a lot of research. Every single one of our faculty members whether in the STEM fields or in the humanities, social sciences and arts has their own research projects going on as well as student researchers who help them with that.

      If you're an undergraduate here fear not you will do plenty of research. Our research programs here are very teaching focused. So what that means is that instead of saying, 'okay I'm running a huge lab with this hierarchy of post-docs and grad students and then undergrads and I need to get this data quick so I'm gonna give all of the cool jobs to the postdocs who can can get that data faster" it's about teaching that undergraduate okay, this is how you form a research question, this is how you use the equipment, this is what our data looks like and this is how you analyze it. And now let's write it up, we're going to take it to a conference and present it. And that's really cool because for students who haven't had the opportunity to do real research in high school, here's your chance.

   5. Jacobs Science Center

      Transcript of Stop 5. Jacobs and Chemistry

      Lynn: This is our Jacob Science Center which houses our chemistry department faculty offices as well as lab spaces.

      As a part of your core curriculum you'll be taking two semesters of chemistry courses as well as a chemistry lab. Within those courses you'll be learning the fundamental principles of chemistry by examining contemporary applications such as energy, medicine, technology and materials.

      In the core chemistry lab you'll have a chance to synthesize compounds and use instrumentation like infrared and NMR spectrometers to characterize chemical structure and composition. On the first day of lab you'll carry out a series of reactions to recycle aluminum cans into alum, which is used in the paper making industry. You'll even learn to use computational chemistry to predict the structure and properties of molecules.

      The chemistry department, like all of our other departments, does a great job of getting undergraduates involved in research. For example, last year the chemistry department took about eight students to the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, which is pretty much the biggest chemistry conference you could go to and our students were presenting at the normal sessions not the undergrad-only ones and they had a lot of fun.

      Some of the cool research that happens in the chemistry department includes Professor Hawkins research on atmospheric chemistry. We're in southern California, which is a great place to study dirty air so she actually has a lab with a hole in the roof so that she can be pumping in air from the atmosphere to put through her sample analyzers.