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The student club Survivor: Claremont has turned reality television into real-time fun. Based on the CBS hit series, the club incorporates mental and physical challenges, negotiations, and plot twists. Although a ɬ�﷬���� student founded Survivor: Claremont, the club has since grown to include students from all The Claremont Colleges, many of whom are science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students … and a cardboard cutout of TV host Jeff Probst to boot.

The “Survivor” television series leaves castaways at an isolated location to compete for a million-dollar prize. What does the competition look like in the student version?

“The prize is bragging rights, the joy of victory!” declared George Zhang ’25, a human biology major and the executive producer for the club. “We’re mirroring the ‘Survivor’ experience for the superfans who say, ‘This is something I’ve always wanted to do, except I don’t think I could last on an island without my bed.’” 

Instead of putting student participants out in the Claremont wilderness, the club focuses on challenges and team building.

Zhang joined Survivor: Claremont as a contestant after mathematics and statistics major Will Pakenas ’24 founded the club in 2022. Zhang soon made the club his passion project. It enables him to “take a step back from the academic sphere of numbers and graphs.” 

Zhang spends hours in the lab, and the club has allowed him to innovate in a different way. 

“It’s one of my creative outlets,” he said. “There’s a lot of creativity in science that I also appreciate, but this is a different type of creativity. It’s less about planning hypotheses and experiments and more about understanding how these people interact.”

Survivor: Claremont’s crew has many roles: writing clues, filming, organizing materials, and hiding immunity idols. The executive team members oversee these efforts, including biochemistry major Amber Mogg ’26. Most of the executive team are STEM majors, which Mogg said is unique compared to Survivor clubs at other universities that are run by film studies majors. Like Zhang, Mogg enjoys flexing her creative muscles. 

“It’s been nice to have a place where we can do lots of crafting and thinking on our feet and problem-solving to make our club as fun as possible,” said Mogg.