<p>Sarah's hot. Don't deny it, lizzy.</p>
<p>Also, Caltech isn't that well known to a lot of people. I get "... Cal Poly?" or "ah... that's nice" a decent amount when replying to "what college do you go to"</p>
<ol>
<li>Don't be a reactionary or a patriot. Being proud of a place does not mean being slavishly committed to defending everything it does. Don't love Caltech (or America or anything else) like a five year old loves her mommy, exalting everything the mommy is. Love it like you would love a good friend — criticizing and correcting it when necessary.</li>
</ol>
<p>You will (at pretty much all places) see some extremes. There will be people who have a knee jerk impulse to criticize anything that the powers do. I was like this in high school, so I understand the tendency well. But I still can't stop laughing at the Techers who despised the evil President Baltimore and his tyrannical ways, right up until the moment he retired, whereupon, sight unseen, they began to wail about the abominable new president and how bad he was in comparison with the accomplished, scholarly Baltimore. This state of mind is silly and also gets nothing done because it is intemperate and gets little respect.</p>
<p>Then there are the patriots, who will be incapable of seeing any wrong in the place. (I guess some people think I am like this, but I'm not. I just restrict my criticism to venues in which it can do some good, as opposed to shouting it from the rooftops.) These people are useless because they could potentially help fix some problems, but don't let themselves see that there are such things.</p>
<p>If you tread the middle ground between hysterics and adulation, you will see things during your time here that you'd like to fix. One thing I can promise you is that there are few university faculties and administrations who have as much respect for students as Caltech's faculty and administration have for Caltech's students. If you see real issues and want to help, there are real ways to do so. Talk to professors and administrators, who are very accessible. You can often get both power and money to do something you feel would make the place better. (Small example: if you think admissions does a sucky job, you can be on the admissions committee and fix it.)</p>
<p>So be a reasonable person, neither hating too much nor loving too much. It is the easiest way to be happy and leave a positive mark when you go.</p>
<p>Ben,
I love reading your advice to the prefrosh. Any chance you'll print it up in booklet form and hand it out to the prefrosh when they arrive on the 17th?</p>
<p>Hahaha. I am not that presumptuous, nor do I buy that much ink. But I'm glad if it's of some use.</p>
<p>Yes, Ben, it is useful, I email your advice to my son on a regular basis. Will you be around on the 17th? I've really appreciated your advice over the past several months and would love to say thanks in person.</p>
<ol>
<li>Make time to spend time with fun people. Don't hole up and work all the time. While I'm glad Caltech isn't like some schools at which the primary purpose is networking, don't take this to mean that forming relationships with your incredible classmates isn't important. </li>
</ol>
<p>Even if it isn't immediately natural to you, spend at least an hour a day (other than dinner) doing something social. It'll be fun and you'll learn more than you will in class.</p>
<p>If you are a real intellectual, know that it will be reasonably hard for you to keep yourself from doing the things you need to do to learn a lot and get good grades. So don't worry about "wasting time" on interacting with people or becoming too involved in social activities. It's not likely that you'll let yourself waste that much time anyway, and your success will always be your main priority. By making yourself get out more, you will gain a lot, and (if getting out enough is a problem in the first place) you're too committed to your main work in life to let that slip.</p>
<ol>
<li>Don't make too much time to spend with fun people. Don't act as if meeting people/partying/becoming well known in your house are the most important things you do in life.</li>
</ol>
<p>This might seem to be slightly puzzling advice, given that connections are the most useful things some people will get at Caltech. (In particular, this is true of people who just aren't destined to be academic stars and therefore are destined to make much more money than tall the rest of us.) But actually, that's what makes the advice overwhelmingly reasonable. If you are a natural social butterfly, you will come out of Caltech with dozens of close and valuable friendships almost no matter what you do. You really can't help making lots of friends. </p>
<p>Since you don't need to really work at that so hard (it's natural, after all), work at the other thing. Make yourself set aside some sacrosanct time during which you ignore everything and work. A modest degree of discipline can turn you from a typical student into a really good one. And a really good student from a superb school who also has social talent has twice the doors open to him than either type of narrower student.</p>
<ol>
<li>Do not play video games. This is unequivocal advice. You really should take it.</li>
</ol>
<p>I have seen more promising careers ruined or seriously damaged by World of Warcraft or online poker than by all other problems combined. Of course, people who become hopelessly addicted to a multiplayer game have other underlying problems, but that doesn't stop this from being a particularly insidious opportunistic addiction. </p>
<p>When you are in middle or even high school, your time is very cheap. You can tell because you would probably have jumped at a 10 dollar an hour job in eighth grade and you wouldn't now (the one of you who would has bigger problems). Anyway, it wasn't that big of a deal to waste hours and hours on video games in middle and high school, as lots of us did. While you could conceivably have been becoming Terence</a> Tao, you might not have known that, so the time at least seemed cheap — it didn't seem like you had that much to replace the video games with that was more valuable to you.</p>
<p>Your time is not cheap anymore. As a rough guideline for the opportunity cost of your time, the Social Science Experimental Laboratory regularly offers $20-$30 an hour to participate in experiments, but undergrads don't sign up in droves. I've seen people turn down $80 dinners at the faculty club (to which they were invited as guests) because they were too busy. So a couple of hours are clearly quite valuable nowadays.</p>
<p>It may seem tempting to pick up an old hobby now that you are free from parents bugging you and have lots of friends nearby who play games. Do not do this.</p>
<p>Video games eat time and make it likely that you will find it hard to resist giving up more of it. They are incredibly costly. If you are a person prone to addiction, they can cost you a college education. (If you fail a few terms completely, as people who get addicted to WoW are seen to do every now and then, the next best school to take you won't be MIT or Stanford or Berkeley, at least one of which probably took you out of high school. It'll be Pasadena City College.)</p>
<p>It is unlikely that you really know whether you are prone to video game addiction. (The hardest working person I've ever known was.) You are in a risk category. Techers are very good at committing themselves to technical challenges, and video games are designed to be extremely engaging technical challenges. They are more immediately entertaining than problem sets, too. And the only financial incentive of video game manufacturers is to maximize the games' addictiveness.</p>
<p>Sure, some people can play harmlessly for a few hours and go on with their lives. Some people lose the most valuable thing they ever had. Since the payoff in the first case isn't that big and the loss in the second case is catastrophic, don't gamble in this particular way. If you want to gamble in a relatively harmless way, drive to Vegas and bet $1000 on black.</p>
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<p>ouch =P<br>
.</p>
<p>Ben and Flierdeke, I find it amusing that this thread can be read by millions of people and yet you're making inside jokes. </p>
<p>I <em>bet</em> you find it funny too.</p>
<p><em>laughs</em> I do not engage in betting. But it really is not so easy as it might sound to get a $10 (or rather, $6.75) /hour job.</p>
<p>I engage in betting!</p>
<p>I once knew a guy who betted against himself. It was a dumb bet.</p>
<p>Lol, only at Caltech do students get lectured on video game addiction and not drug addiction</p>
<p>*him*self, lizzardfire?</p>
<p>Yes, flierdeke. Has he lost the money yet? I assumed that would be his eventual choice.</p>
<p>There was just a gender issue. i do wish I had its hair.</p>
<p>I don't care what anyone says. He is NOT a girl.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I once knew a guy who betted against himself. It was a dumb bet.
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<ol>
<li><p>I highly doubt you knew Stephen Hawking.</p></li>
<li><p>Your failure to understand the logic behind the bet just demonstrates that yes, you are the dumb waitlist kid. </p></li>
<li><p>Your refusal to accept women as friends also suggests that you're sexist. I would say that we can't be friends anymore, but we were never really friends in the first place.</p></li>
</ol>