[ STRATEGIC VISION THEME III: Excellence and Diversity ]
we strive
WE STRIVE FOR EXCELLENCE AND DIVERSITY at Harvey Mudd. Our students, who are in the nation’s top two percent academically, could go to any college or university in the world. Yet they’ve chosen a small liberal arts college, where skateboards and unicycles coexist with robotics and multivariable calculus. From our earliest days, we’ve attracted students of extraordinary ability. We enroll more National Merit Scholars than nearly any other U.S. undergraduate college, and the median SAT scores of our entering students are in the top five percent in the nation. Our faculty members, many of whom have established national and international reputations in their fields, continue to excel and garner awards and honors. A number are recipients of National Science Foundation CAREER Awards and Dreyfus Awards, and others hold prestigious posts on national boards or organizations and receive recognition for teaching excellence. Because we believe excellence and diversity go hand in hand, we are committed to continuing the programs we’ve developed in recent years to significantly increase the diversity of our community while maintaining our commitment to unsurpassed excellence in all that we do. We believe that only when there is a diversity of voices at the table—people with unique and varied backgrounds and life experiences—can we truly begin to solve the world’s most challenging problems.
For the past seven years, Harvey Mudd has sent students to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference to attend conference sessions, network with women leaders and meet with prospective employers.
Sophia Williams is on a mission…
to mentor and inspire future leaders Participation in Harvey Mudd’s Summer Institute (SI) program inspired President’s Scholar Sophia Williams ’15 to seek opportunities to help others. “There are such high academic expectations and an intense curriculum at Harvey Mudd, but in SI, you struggle through it together, and that creates such a strong bond within the SI community,” Williams said. When she was a rising junior, Williams was chosen to serve as the program’s head mentor. In that role, she trained mentors to become leaders and good communicators and led a community outreach program that brought a day of science activities to a group of 7- to 14-year-old students. “The experience was so much fun, and it taught me so much about leadership,” she said. She serves in a variety of other leadership roles across campus, including as an aide for the Future Achievers in Science and Technology program, as a mentor for Atwood Dorm and as a Dean of Students (DOS) Muchacho. As a Muchacho, Williams helps plan fun, relaxing student activities to balance the rigors of academic life.
HMC’s Society of Professional Latinos in STEMS (SPLS) student group introduces 9th- and 10th-graders to the sciences and shares what life is like for Latino students who major in STEM disciplines.