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Live freely & design your future

Mars College is a three-month educational program, R&D lab, and off-grid residential community dedicated to cultivating a low-cost, high-tech lifestyle.

🏜️ Live in nature

Located in the scenic California desert with gorgeous sunsets and frequent high winds, life at Mars College is inspiring and challenging.

🛠️ Develop self reliance

We build our campus from the ground up each year, setting up the shelter, solar, internet, and water systems we need to thrive.

💻 Harness technology

Martians explore emerging technologies and develop projects to present at a midterm and final showcase.

😎 Find your joy

Make art, spin fire, do yoga, shoot bliss out your third eye. Take the time to find what makes you happy, and play an integral role in a small community.

Apply to Mars College

Applications for 2025 open through December 1st.

Programs

Camps & Programs

Mars College is organized into camps that offer educational programs to the community in an open format. Some camps also offer artist & research residencies.

Mars Research is home to the Creative AI program on Mars. Learn how to adapt your artistic or creative process with AI. Research and develop workflows and fine-tune models. Incubate and develop AI products. Participate in our yearly film festival. We support participants who are new to AI as well as experts and researchers.

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Institute for Insurrectionary Ecology (aka Tool Camp) is the makerspace and R&D arm of the Mars Campus. The primary goal and programing of this camp will focus on designing, prototyping, testing, and documenting experimental low-cost, off-grid and open source infrastructure modules. 

The Mars Bodywork Residency program offers educational experiences in bodywork and meditation. The three month, eight cycle program is focused on Thai and Shiatsu based bodywork and is open to anyone interested in developing a bodywork practice.

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Freeside is a residential community without a particular academic focus. Think of it as an "undeclared" major. Freeside constructs a residential building with make-your-own apartments, workspace, a kitchen, and other community ammenities.

Natural Intelligence Camp is a small camp that supports analog-based programs, bringing Martians together for community-building through creative endeavors, services, workshops and curious experiments.

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Sun Lab is a place for accountable creativity, focused or explorative. Working alone is hard, and working on a vision while having to afford the high cost of living is extra hard. Affordable places in the US are mostly not where creative communities can be found — but Bombay Beach is an exception!

One more thing... we really love electric unicycles.

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