By the time I graduated from Mudd, I was completely burnt out. I hadn't wanted to be there for most of my last semester, and all I could think about was getting out and never going back.
That mindset stayed with me for a long time. While most of my friends returned to campus to visit at least once in our first year out of college, I didn't even consider it. I avoided calls and emails, moved without officially changing my address so the college wouldn't know where to send me stuff, and refused to go to Alumni Weekend. I wanted nothing to do with the college or any of the people there.
Eventually, that feeling began to fade. I reconnected with a lot of the friends I made at Mudd. Kevin and I brought Halloweiner to the East Coast, and we started traveling to see other Mudders. I began to look forward to the five year reunion and finally gave Mudd my current mailing address. It helped that I was finally enjoying career success, a lot of which I could attribute to my education at Mudd. It also helped that, as an alumna, the president's sweeping changes at the school started to make a lot more sense.
Recently, I started to become more active as a Mudd Alumni. We went to a dinner a few weeks back where we heard about some of the current goings-on at Mudd. The panel included a couple of professors and a couple of current students. I didn't really learn anything new, but it was nice to be reminded of the reasons I fell in love with Mudd in the first place and spent four mostly great years of my life there.
This past weekend I attended a college fair as an alumna representative to speak to prospective students about how great Mudd was. I ended up working with an older alumnus, one who had veered away from science and into law. We had very little in common other than Mudd, but it was still fun to reminisce about the school with someone who had a an experience that was so different and still very similar to my own.
The fair was at an IB school, so the students we met were all very smart, and most of them had heard of Mudd. Unfortunately they also seemed to be so concerned with numbers and test scores that it felt like they glossing over the things that I found so special about Mudd. Then again, that's mostly the culture we live in today, where SAT scores seem to matter more than anything else. I lost count of the number of times I had to explain that IB students didn't get special treatment or consideration in the application process because there were just so many of them, that they probably wouldn't be able to test out of any classes, that they could expect to be among intellectual peers (and left unsaid was that this experience would be so much more important than continuing on as the smartest person in the room).
There was one girl who seemed like a perfect fit, though. And perhaps out of the 20 or 30 students I talked to, one who seemed like a good fit was the best I could really hope for. She was smart, interested in computer science, but also passionate about music. She hung around and asked deeper questions about the culture and opportunities at Mudd. Meeting her reminded me of myself ten years ago, and I really hope that she applies and gets in.
I'm more excited about Mudd now than I have been since I first started there. A lot of that is having enough time and distance from the school to appreciate everything it did for me. Part of it is seeing President Klawe in the news and learning about all the cool things she's doing at Mudd, particularly for women in computer science. And part of it is getting actively involved again. I don't know when I'll have time to go to another college fair, but I definitely think it's something that I want to do again.
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