<p>really an add-on to the previous piece of advice:</p>
<ol>
<li>Do not be antagonized by others' accomplishments. Comparing yourself to others is probably unavoidable. Still, try hard not to find reasons to resent or be intimidated by others. (Unfortunately, some people will never read piece of advice #2 above.) The truth is that the world is very unpredictable. Some people who are unbelievably accomplished coming into Caltech end up burning out or losing all interest in academic pursuits. (Trust me, I've seen it more times than I'd like to think of.) Others who weren't particularly established as 18 year-olds become Nobel Laureates. It will hurt – perhaps intensely – to find yourself seemingly in the middle of the pack after being the smartest person you knew for much of your life. Try to realize that this feeling itself is a more common source of failure than actually being intellectually average at Caltech. (The latter, I assure you, is not a very serious liability from the perspective of these</a> people or these</a> people or these</a> people, as salaries seem to indicate.)</li>
</ol>
<p>There are reasons other than Ben's to come to caltech;
they include among many others...
1. Plenty of people with whom to play Warcraft III.
2. Various types of legal, quasilegal and illegal drugs available.
3. Copious opportunities to build, burn, and explode large objects.
4. Having interesting conversations with interesting people.
5. Relatively high student participation in some policy/administration decisions.
6. Ease of getting involved in a variety of non-academic things due to the institutes small size and accesibility of these programs.
There are people here who are hardworking, gifted, and enfatuated with math and physics who nevertheless don't like any of these "other" things about caltech and end up transferring to other top places like stanford although academically and research interest-wise they fit in at tech perfectly.</p>
<p>There are also people who after a year find out they hate math, science, and anything tangential, who get hooked on these other factors, and love their time at tech, even if it takes them 6+ years to graduate and their "professional" interests would have been served better by transferring somewhere else.</p>
<p>Ben expressed his reasons for coming here, and is rightfully happy with the results.
But many people DO come to caltech for reasons (a)-(e) and in a year realize they love or hate caltech for reasons completely unrelated to their "thirst for knowledge", metaphorical boot camp fetish, or desire to win the nobel prize.</p>
<p>Yay. Post #22 is why I started this thread. No doubt my narrow opinions and interests will encourage others to express that life at Caltech is much more varied than it might seem from talking to me.</p>
<p>May I also underscore my enthsiasm for Ilya's reason 4.</p>
<p>Since it seems that there's some debate, I will second Ben on his first point of advice. These are points that I have come to realize after coming here and have given a decent amount of thought to, especially since I'm an engineering major.</p>
<p>By the way, this seems as good a time as any to note that Ditch Day is tomorrow.</p>
<p>Joe, remind me to tell you about the time they moved the "bouncy castle" into one of the House courtyards... my eyes were scared afterwards, is all I'll say. Ben, remember that post-hot tub day? It was that group we used to hang with.</p>
<p>I'll add the reason I came to Caltech (foolishly): To be close to JPL. I love engineering, taking things apart and seeing what makes 'em tick. I thought I'd have access to that at Caltech. I have found that they primarily want code-monkeys (and smart ones at that) from Techers. As a caveat to the above, I know of some people have found their way into nifty (ion thrusters) projects.</p>
<p>I've found other reasons to stay, but that was my reason for coming here. It was shot to pieces around week 2 of first term or so. I was pleasantly miserable to be around, which I think Ben would agree with.</p>
<ol>
<li>Do not rely on collaboration any more than you really have to. A big focus of frosh camp is how you will have to learn to work with others to get things done, and how you won't be able to go it alone anymore like you did in high school. There is a sense in which this is good advice, but it nevertheless tends to be given and taken the wrong way, with bad effects for learning.</li>
</ol>
<p>Let me explain what I mean a little more fully. To drive home the point about how good collaboration is, people often tell prefrosh and frosh that the Core problem sets are way too hard to do alone, and that they have to be done as a team effort. I confess to having used this rhetorical trick to drive home the point about collaboration.</p>
<p>However, this is a lie. For most students, the Math 1, Phys 1, and Chem 1 problem sets are not too difficult to solve alone. Anyone who leaves about seven or eight hours for a set spread over three or four days will work out almost all the problems. Nor does it take superhuman time management to arrange your schedule in this way. (More on that in a later post.)</p>
<p>Telling frosh how wonderful and necessary collaboration is has the perverse effect of encouraging many of them to rely solely or mostly on collaborative effort to do the homework. Realistically, the collaborative groups never begin working before the night the homework is due. (Really "morning the set is due" is closer to the truth.) Thus, those who take seriously the advice about how the sets are too hard to do alone end up doing them in a sleep-deprived, confused, and rushed way. They also don't get the intellectual exercise that comes from going down the wrong paths and figuring out what is right on your own.</p>
<p>It's much better for your brain – and just more fun – to solve a lot of the problems yourself. Collaboration (or talking with a TA in section) is great for getting the last insight to help you solve a particularly hard problem. Too many people use it, instead, as a crutch to severely reduce the number of problems they conquer by fighting it out one-on-one. That deficit of experience builds up and hurts you in the long run.</p>
<p>Develop some pride and consider it a small defeat to get help on something you could have figured out yourself. Be ready and willing to ask for help on a problem, but only after you've given it your best on your own for at least an hour. You deserve nothing less.</p>
<ol>
<li>Collaborate when you should. Don't develop too much pride. After you've fought with a problem for enough time that no useful insights seem to be coming (perhaps in several sittings), give it a rest. Think of a person or group of people that you think will be able to help you get the crucial idea. This might be a study group of friends in your House, a TA, a professor, an upperclassman, whoever. Think carefully about how you would formulate the question and what precisely is stumping you. Practice asking it in your head. </li>
</ol>
<p>Why so much thinking and practicing? It turns out that about half the time, this is exactly when the answer will come to you. Once you think about posing it coherently to someone else, your own brain will tell you the answer.</p>
<p>But if not, go ask. Talk about it to a few people. Some will have thought about the question, some not. (More will have thought about it as the deadline approaches.) It often takes just a little bit to get you on the right path. The "unproductive" time you spent getting nowhere often turns out to be quite useful once you get the missing ingredient. You will also find that this collaboration is much more pleasant than staying up all night desperately trying to do everything all at once.</p>
<p>I also hope it's clear that there is no honor in handing in no solution or a bad solution just because you were too proud to ask for help to push you past the difficult parts. The smartest people I know are fiercely determined to figure things out, but if they don't, they would much rather defeat the problem with someone else's help than to be defeated by it.</p>
<p>With the above said, I'm told things are easier than they used to be at Tech, in decades past. The purpose of sets was not necessarily to finish them, but to stretch your brain. It was also to show you limits in that some things are still beyond you... but you should be reaching out to understand them, which is where the prof came in, at that time. You spent your time trying to figure things out, then discussed them in class. Even the smartest people here weren't expected to finish everything. But then I suppose grade inflation has infected even here, somewhat.</p>
<p>These days, expect to get first principles thrown at you. Essentially, you reinvent the wheel in every class with almost every problem. Figure out the homeworks? Good, the tests have nothing to do with them, aside from basic principles. It's trial by fire in learning how to think. This is how collaboration is sometimes useful, sometimes not. Use other people to help you develop your thought processes, not /as/ your thought processes.</p>
<p>Just want to thank Ben Golub for post #2. I'd been seriously considering Caltech, and I even visited the campus last year. But now, rather sadly, actually, I realize that science, for me, isn't the all-consuming passion required of a techie. I also realize that my motivation for applying was rather muddied by the lure of Pasadena and other social factors. So... I must resist the temptation to read this board in future and continue the search for another school. I remain, however, very grateful for Ben's post as it did force me to examine more closely my reasons for applying -- I'm amazed at how cavalier I was in approaching this whole college app. exercise!</p>
<p>I should note that I never said all-consuming. Just sufficiently consuming that you are willing to make sacrifices for it.</p>
<p>I am always torn about advice like that. On the one hand, whenever I emphasize how much commitment and effort are required to succeed and be happy at Tech, I worry about scaring away some people. On the other hand, if we pretend it is a fuzzy place where everybody can be happy, then we risk creating quite a few unhappy people. Sooo...</p>
<p>(One prefrosh changed her mind from MIT, so it is 29% now.)</p>