Juillet: Thank you so much for spending time to share your valuable suggestions! Caltech’s program was founded just 2-3 years ago and there are only 10+ or so current students! So there aren’t any track records department-wise, but the PIs I’m interested in working with have great reputation as both scientists and advisors.
The reason I used different rhetoric for JHU and Caltech comes from the fact that the ways I interacted with the POIs in two schools were very different, partly because of the way the interviews were structured. There were a lot more casual occasions and happy hours at JHU and I noticed some of my POIs wanted to make sure that I’m having a good time and getting as much information as I need about the program.
My stay at Caltech for the interview was much shorter and I didn’t have a great chance to accumulate as much evidence that the POIs will be very supportive. But my brief in-person casual conversations with the POIs on random stuffs and post-interview email exchanges with them gave me an impression they take great care of each graduate student and want to make sure they do well in the program.
It seemed to me that all the schools strategically recruit happy graduate students to host the interviewees (or only happy graduate students tend to volunteer to host), and it wasn’t so easy to make a good judgment about the current students. But I liked the extremely small student body at Caltech which seemed a lot more manageable for me than the much larger student community at JHU.