<p>Another noticible difference is that there are many new threads on the MIT fourm daily but very few in Caltech's.</p>
<p>My son assures me it has been about 80 degrees lately in Pasadena, so maybe it is more fun to be outside or better to be getting your work done than starting threads here. I think he is just rubbing it in since we had -50 degree windchills today in the midwest. Meeting the people actully on both campuses will give you a better idea than judging the schools based upon people on these boards.</p>
<p>The weather was nice today, but Monday and Tuesday were a little warm for my taste. I also live closer to the ocean, so it was probably a little cooler.</p>
<p>You can say Dartmouth is small, but it still has 4 times the number of undergrads as Caltech. Back when I was a Caltech student, there were more graduates every year from UCLA than had ever graduated from Caltech in the history of the school. I would assume Caltech has passed that mark in the last few years, but it is still very very small. That is why no one has ever heard of it.</p>
<p>To all you Caltech students, just let me tell you that I work in a physics lab and since graduating, I have never again heard the line 'Oh, Cal Poly?' Everyone I have mentioned it to since graduating has been more than familiar with Caltech.</p>
<p>Caltech was my favorite college growing up. But I didn't apply, because I knew my high school education hadn't got me ready for it. A lot of people apply to other colleges because their non-techy teachers know how to get their students ready for liberal arts curricula but don't know how to get them ready for technical curricula.</p>
<p>omg are you kidding me?? when i mention caltech to ppl, they're all like, "omg that's even better than MIT!!" </p>
<p>i used to think it was just a west coast thing until this one elderly man I met over on the East Coast told me, "Caltech is pretty much the Harvard of all those techy schools, right?"</p>
<p>so seriously, from what I've seen, Caltech has quite a stellar reputation. i'm pretty sure it's right up there with all those other elite colleges.</p>
<p>personally i wouldn't go so far as to rank it over mit, but others will.</p>
<p>also size may have something to do with it too, i would agree. i know kids who were accepted to mit or caltech and chose olin over them. i used to think it was this random school in massachusetts until i found out it was this super-competitive, small, all-expense paid tech school with amazing academics.</p>
<p>I always thought of Caltech as being stronger in pure math/science than engineering.</p>
<p>Eh, people kinda always make generalizations =] Caltech is a great undergrad program, but there are great reasons to choose MIT over Caltech even if pure math and science are your goal, and great reasons to choose Caltech as well.</p>
<p>When I mention to people that I'm applying to Caltech, and they say they've never heard of it, I tell them it's like MIT, only smaller, and in California. </p>
<p>My dad, however, thought that Cal Poly and Caltech were the same thing. Yeah...</p>
<p>"I always thought of Caltech as being stronger in pure math/science than engineering."</p>
<p>That's the impression I used to get too, but it's not so. Aeronautics is my specialty, and to employers and grad schools, there's no question that MIT, Caltech, and Stanford are tied for #1 in the world in this field. The difference is in the philosophy. MIT Aeronautics & Astronautics is extremely hands-on and vehicle-oriented, which gives them good connections with industry. Caltech GALCIT is more theoretical, with a preference toward experimental science. Stanford Aeronautics & Astronautics is like this too, but has a preference toward computational science.</p>
<p>So even if MIT can wow more high school students than Caltech or Stanford in aero, it doesn't make MIT better... it just has a different focus.</p>
<p>In the words of a very sarcastic Caltech aero professor, with regards to why we don't have a flight dynamics course anymore: "... we DON'T DO airplanes here!!!" He then proceeded to compare aircraft to school buses--"Sure, you can make a school bus better, but why should anyone care?" I believe he went on to rant about how people who want to work on something as boring as airplanes should go to MIT.*</p>
<p>I think Caltech's other engineering programs are ranked just as highly as our math / pure science programs.</p>
<ul>
<li>Perhaps he has the license to say this, because he's Caltech's explosions and detonations expert. I heard that a lot of incoming grad students want to work with him.</li>
</ul>
<p>Great story, G2sus4m6aug11b15. I can see it.</p>
<p>I think what G2sus4m6aug11b15 is very true. All of Caltech's programs are top notch, but their focus might be a little different than what you'd expect from traditional departments in that field.</p>
<p>I'm in Materials Science here, and it's certainly nothing like what you'd find at any other college offering a similar program, but that doesn't make it any worse (or necessarily better). If you want to do metallurgy, well, Caltech's not such a great MSE school. If you want to do a really physics-intensive materials project it's possibly the best place in the world.</p>
<p>To #21:
It's partly because there are simply fewer people at Caltech, and probably more importantly that there's something interesting about the culture here that tends to produce less "collegeconfidential"-type people. I don't mean to offend anyone, but honestly most people (in my hovse, at least) have pretty negative opinions of collegeconfidential in general. The only reason I'm even here is because I was procrastinating on a set, googled something about caltech, found a rather eye-catching "caltech for MIT rejects?" result, read through the thread, and realized that it hadn't been posted to in a couple months. I did come across a thread (<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/california-institute-technology/450969-caltech-mit-rejects-7.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/california-institute-technology/450969-caltech-mit-rejects-7.html</a>, #102) which seems to REALLY accurately describe most of the Caltech student body (certainly jumped out at me when I saw it):</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think the more accurate view of the yield situation is that there are certain personal qualities which make Caltech a good fit and even among admits those personal qualities are pretty rare. That's not a perjorative remark about the people who turn us down. Since Caltech is so focused in both its offerings and the people there, to get the most out of Caltech you should be in one of two categories:</p>
<p>(i) quite committed to a techie career (scientist or engineer), focused, and not interested in getting the polish required to date an ambassador's daughter, or in interacting much with fuzzy people in general. happiest around very nerdy, very smart people and wanting a place where "no politically correct compromise" is a founding principle. turned off by the slickness of MIT and its unquenchable yearning to be Harvard. perhaps irrationally committed to various kinds of purity and wanting to be at a place, for once, which is not political and which is filled with wonderfully naive, nerdy people like yourself.</p>
<p>(ii) already polished and broadminded; happy and comfortable with fuzzies but willing to take a four year break from them to experience the world's most intense academic bootcamp. confident that you are already pretty smooth around the edges and that you would be inspired and motivated more by people of type (i) than by the fuzzies whom you know and love.</p>
<p>
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I perfectly fall into category one. I could care less about prestige or how much money you'll make out of college or really anything but SCIENCE. I'm here to learn and understand how the world works, and I'm very happy with the fact that everyone around me feels the same. There isn't a single person here who's here because of special circumstances, or looked good on paper. I don't know how, but I feel that the admissions process (including things like prefrosh weekend) are very good at making sure only people who fit in will want to come to Caltech. I feel that the low yield ratio is actually part of the process--there is honestly a LOT to Caltech which can't be told in a bunch of brochures or numbers (both because it can't be expressed in words and because some of it. . .just can't, especially by the administration. . .you have to be here to understand). This is especially true of the house system, which completely changed my original beliefs of Caltech when I got here.</p>
<p>I must have gotten totally OT by now, but I really felt it necessary for there to be another voice on this board from a Caltech student--the sampling that is currently here is pretty misrepresentative, because there's only a certain kind of person who would bother posting here. I'm going to be honest--the last time most of the people I know at Caltech posted in CC was to start a flame war. I'm not going to comment further, but that should give you an idea of what I meant before.</p>
<p>It's nice to have new people talking on CC, but I think your statement that the current posters is "misrepresentative" is not quite accurate. First, misrepresentative implies a conscious act of deceit. Either you're implying that all of the current posters are deceptive, or you meant nonrepresentative. Even in that case, I don't consider the current posters to be "nonrepresentative" at least in the sense that they are as representative as less than five people can be of a population numbering about 900. Maybe nonrepresentative in the sense of not being apathetic, but it seem pretty obvious that apathetic people wouldn't post on this board (Caltech students or otherwise).</p>
<p>Additionally, your statement that "only a certain kind of person" would post here doesn't seem to jive with the actual posters. I'm not sure how many of us you know, but none of the posters I know are anything like each other at all...</p>
<p>Correct me if I'm wrong (which I very likely am), but I believe that Caltech is more science/math than engineering. It does have a lot of respect in the tech (and econ) world for being more hardcore, but not as "hands-on engineering" as other schools. It's probably the best place to be for pure research (JPL, the observatories down there, and, uh, stuff (LIGO!).)</p>
<p>Also, only about 1/3 of the student body is an engineering major (I can't remember where I found this. PLEASE correct this if it's inaccurate.), while about 1/2 of the students at MIT are engineering majors, so it's not as much of an engineering school as a research/academic school.</p>
<p>(random: Caltech's administration <em>encourages</em> pranking. I don't like that MIT's doesn't. bleah.)</p>
<p>I think MIT lumps Applied Physics with Engineering. If you look at our graduates from 03-07 you see a 38% engineering without applied physics included and 40% engineering with applied physics. According to MIT's website their percentage of students in engineering is roughly forty percent. It may be slightly higher, but it's definitely not 1/3 vs. 1/2. </p>
<p>When I was in high school I thought that "research" and "engineering" were totally different things and that there was this huge divide between the practical and the "theoretical". That's not really the case. It's hard to find purely theoretical engineering (maybe with exceptions in fields where there isn't a huge divide between theory and practice). You know what the difference between the "researchers" and the "engineers" is? The researchers come up with the product, design it, build it, test it. The engineers tweak it a little and sell it. (OK, that's not even close to always true, but it certainly happens a lot in my field--nanofabrication... which explains why my research advisor now has four or five spinoff companies based on his research). I guess my point is that a lot of what is considered the most exciting "engineering work" is in fact research. Even in industry, a lot the cool jobs are in R&D... and guess what that R stands for. The majority of engineers end up doing boring stuff like fixing minor bugs or stress testing devices, etc. </p>
<p>The difference between the practical and the theoretical, especially when we're talking about Caltech vs. MIT, is largely overblown. The social atmosphere will matter much more than splitting hairs over theory vs. practice. I would say though that there is one exception (not really related to theory vs. practice but more to size) which is that Caltech doesn't seem to have a huge robotics department. So if you're dead set on doing practical robotics you might want to go to CMU or MIT.</p>
<p>EDIT: Also worth noting that JPL is nowhere near "pure research".</p>
<p>Just want to say that I feel Caltech is way more of a math/science school than my undergrad school (Carnegie Mellon) is. CMU felt much more focused on engineering and what can be done with the theory than the more proof-driven nature of Caltech.</p>
<p>(Note I might be biased since I have to take mostly classes in APh, Ph, Ch, and ACM and almost none within engineering, even though I'm here for an engineering degree.)</p>
<p>This is interesting, yeah as lizzard seems to suggest, I do find quite a few people really a little less than clued in on what "theory" vs. "practical" is and sort of making huge generalizations. </p>
<p>Probably in the case of Caltech vs. another engineering school, the main difference is that everyone at Caltech probably HAS to take some more abstract work upon himself/herself. Maybe not so much at other schools like MIT. It probably is the social atmosphere. I don't know about Caltech, but MIT certainly has an INSANE percentage of students doing EECS. I mean, including all the other engineering, I wonder if Caltech students aren't on average [by percentage] more into the pure sciences. No idea if that's true though.</p>
<p>EE alone is the third largest major here, closely behind Physics and Biology. If EECS were one major instead of two it would easily be the largest at Caltech. As I said above, we have slightly under 40% into engineering vs. other things. I didn't count CS as engineering for that poll, either.</p>
<p>OK wow. ^ That definitely makes the distinctions wane. It really must just be the different nature of the schools -- small, more rigid, on average more intense system vs. the other.</p>