"What do you do on the weekend?"

I met up with a lot of my friends while I was home over Winter Break, and invariably they would ask me, "What do Mudders do on the weekend?"

This isn't really an unreasonable question. As I've said before, Mudd is a small school. You would think being around the same 700 people all the time would put a damper on the local social life. There also exists a rumor that Mudders, being scientists and self-proclaimed nerds, don't enjoy parties. (This rumor is completely unfounded. One Mudd dorm in particular is legendary amongst the Claremont Colleges--the 5 C's--for the parties it throws.)

If you like parties, one of the benefits of the 5C's is that, on any given weekend, there's probably a party on both Friday and Saturday night. These are usually "parties" like the ones you see in movies, where you and several of your closest friends are talking, dancing, and listening to music in an open space. It's crowded, it's loud, and it can be terribly fun.

There are also smaller weekend gatherings, usually dorm-specific. For example, East Dorm, where I spend most of my time, shows a movie at midnight every Saturday and has some sort of small party every few weeks, with themes ranging from fondue to Halloween. At any given time between 9 AM and 4 AM on the weekends, you can find someone willing to play board games, card games, or video games somewhere on the Mudd campus, generally in either their dorm lounge or the lounge of their suite. Each dorm also offers something different on the weekend, ranging from board and video games in East to a typical college party (music, lights, and so on) at West Dorm. Suites--a collection of student dorm rooms with their own lounge--also throw their own parties, with themes and activities that vary even more widely than those of the individual dorms. With so many things going on, I usually find myself facing difficult decisions like "Do I want to watch a zombie movie with my friends, go to the formal party, or play another round of this board game?"

In short, unless you're only interested in extreme underwater glow-in-the-dark salamander basketball, there's always something to do at Mudd on the weekend.