<p>My daughter, who is a high school senior, was admitted last week in early action at MIT, Caltech and the University of Chicago. She is withdrawing her applications from the other colleges and is currently very much in doubt whether to go to MIT or Caltech. Although we would much rather have her go to MIT (because we live on the East Coast as well and because she is only 16), we try not to have location influence her one way or the other and we would like to see her go to the school that is best for her. Would there be somebody who can share their experience with MIT or Caltech (or MIT versus Caltech) with us? Is there a big difference in pressure? My daughter is not so much into Engineering but much more into Physics: would that play a role in her choice? Thank you very much for your insight and advice.</p>
<p>Welcome to the Parents Forum and congrats on your D's acceptances! My S, who is also interested in physics/math, applied EA to Harvard and will be going there. Texas137's has also been weighing Caltech vs. MIT; Thoughtfulmom's D, currently at Harvard, also weighed MIT, Harvard and Caltech and a few others.
My own reasons for promoting MIT over Caltech is that, if a student were to change majors--that happens very frequently--, it would be easier to do so at MIT and take advantage of cross-registering at Harvard. When we went to the MIT info session, a young man told of taking great government classes at Harvard. No doubt, Texas137 and perhaps Thoughtfulmom will be able to give you a more detailed answer.</p>
<p>One difference--MIT has a much larger female population than Caltech, also has one female only dorm. Also, because your D is only 16, I think location closer to home is a much more important factor to consider. Caltech will always be there for grad school.</p>
<p>I don't know how far afield from the physics/math core your d. hopes to travel, but besides the Harvard connection, MIT has some humanities offerings in its own right that are better than Harvards, ranging from Chomsky and co. in linguistics, to Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison who teaches freshman music courses.</p>
<p>MIT's physics department is amazing, but Caltech is THE mecca for physics. MIT would be better for a more liberal education, as i think you can cross register at harvard, but i would think the lifestyle and physics education would be much better at caltech. Caltech has beautiful weather and is right next to many colleges and LA, if she wants to get away from the people tech schools seem to attract. and, wow, your daughter must be a genius. congrats, getting into those schools is quite an accomplishment. plus, i haven't heard much about caltech's humanities classes, but i know they keep them very small- 10-15 students a class.</p>
<p>My vote is CalTech for Physics. MIT does offer a broader education, though, imo.</p>
<p>Congratulations! All 3 of those are great schools! I take it U. Chicago is already crossed off? </p>
<p>I think that your considerations with a younger-than-usual daughter are going to be a little different from most people's. I don't think either school is particularly nurturing. Has your daughter grown up in a big city? If not, sending a suburban or small-town 16 year old to a big city to live unsupervised might be a minus point for MIT (or U. Chicago, for that matter). If she doesn't have a lot of big-city smarts, you might feel more comfortable having her in Pasadena. Unless you live within a couple of hours of Boston, I wouldn't attach a lot of significance to your living on the East Coast. You are not going to really "be there" in any sense. She will be close to major airports in either place. If you are looking at a direct flight home from Caltech vs. a 5 hour drive home from MIT, it may come out a wash. </p>
<p>Have you had a chance to visit both places yet? How comfortable you feel with the surrounding community and how well she feels like she fits in at each place should be an important consideration. If she could visit some time outside of the accepted students' weekends, that might give her more representative impressions.</p>
<p>Marite raises a good point about having other options. It's hard for someone that age to know for sure what they want to do with their lives. Many, many students who start off intending to major in engineering or one of the hard sciences end up changing their minds. If that happens to someone at MIT, they can still stay there and be a humanities major or cross register at Harvard (and I think, Tufts). If that happens to someone at Caltech, they basically have to transfer.</p>
<p>The only female member of the US team to the 2003 Int'l Physics Olympiad is at Caltech and might be a good person for your daughter to try to contact to talk about Caltech. (for whatever it's worth, the sole female member of the 2004 team is at Harvard.) You can PM me for the name if you don't already know who that is. (my son may even have her email address)</p>
<p>Is cost a factor? She is much more likely to receive significant merit aid at Caltech, which costs a little less than MIT to begin with.</p>
<p>With my child, those two schools were also options - and while she chose to apply to neither of them, as she wanted a more liberal arts education, I was surprised when she told me she preferred Cal Tech. Maybe coming from the Northeast she found something special in a science school located in beautiful California. She also found the advertising of Cal Tech ingenius, and still believes they do a great job of attracting that certain type of student who would excel there.</p>
<p>Either way he has two incredible choices. Good luck!</p>
<p>My brother went to Caltech and an uncle taught there, and I've visited a number of times.</p>
<p>Caltech's undergrad program -- I mean the size of the student body, not just the curriculum -- is much smaller than MIT's. This has some advantages and disadvantages. But if you dream physics, that's the place to go (that's what my brother studied, both as undergrad and grad there -- and took his Physics 1 course from Richard Feynman).</p>
<p>Caltech is pretty much a world unto itself, given the way L.A. is laid out. While Pasadena has some charms, there isn't the kind of ready access there to things to do when you're not studying (which you would be most of the time) as there is in Cambridge/Boston, where you're just a T-ride away from all kinds of interesting places to escape to.</p>
<p>Students at MIT can cross-register at Wellesley as well.</p>
<p>I'm stunned that you don't go for Uchi. I know undergrads at MIT who said it was not the best experiece for undergrad work. I guess I can't imagine sending a full-on versitile kid to either. Unless your kid is one-dimensionally heavy on math/science, then send him/her as far away as possible so that they can be a person of great perspective. Other parts of country = better than < known part of country.</p>
<p>My son applied to MIT and CalTech (waitlisted at CalTech and chose not to pursue it) and is now a sophomore at MIT. He started at 16.</p>
<p>MIT is a larger school in a pedestrian-oriented college town, where there are lots and lots of students; CalTech is somewhat isolated and also smaller. MIT focuses more on engineering than on science, although their UG science is still excellent. CalTech students have 5 semesters of required physics, MIT students have two.</p>
<p>I think any of the three schools would provide excellent UG physics or sciences. But Boston is far and away the better city of the three.</p>
<p>My son maintains that MIT students don't go for the courses, they go for the rest of the experience.</p>
<p>Your D has plenty of time to do some overnights, if that's possible.</p>
<p>What a wonderful decision she has to make!</p>
<p>My S is responding:
Hey,
I'm a student of Caltech who went there after my junior year of high school. I can tell you that Caltech is regarded as the physics capital of the world. Your freshman physics instructors will include the man responsible for "The Mechanical Universe", the most popular physics educational tool in the country. Another freshman physics prof is a noble laureate. You can start physics research from the summer before you enroll throughout the school year for every term you are here, virtually guarenteed. By junior year you can take physics classes with grads. In addition, everyone takes nearly two years of physics so everyone is physics-competent.</p>
<p>Also, the small student population mean that many classes, once you go beyond the required ones, are quite small. I took a class with only 12 people in which we regularly conversed with the professor regarding the class material and his own work. </p>
<p>As for the housing, there is no "female dorm". Every dorm is completely coed. There is a dorm for every personality type so you can be comfortable whether you enjoy an extremely social, party atmosphere or a more transquil, isolated one.</p>
<p>DMD made a great point about MIT. It is in a fantastic city that is (assumingly) close to home and full of college kids. This, in my opinion, provided great opportunity. I wouldn't worry about him being in a larger city, if anything, I would find it a comfort. The more DMD talks, the more I am convinced that MIT might be the better option for your daughter. Though I am not entirely familiar with the curriculum/academics of each, I can comment that socially, Boston provides a great back drop to a college education.</p>
<p>I spent many years in Cambridge/Boston, and love it there. For a young person, Caltech can be more comfortable. The 7 houses are right on campus, each has its own dining room, and there are several types of cafeterias. nearby restaurants accept the Caltech card. Weather obviously is good. Many study groups are scheduled for 11 pm, and then the kids walk 50 feet and are home.
Obviously, overnights will be helpful. both great choices.</p>
<p>Hi, what I noticed in this thread was the issue of a sixteen-year-old going off to residential college. I'm curious about this issue and how to resolve it, because it may pertain to my son. (He is interested in some of the same colleges, but hasn't focused at all yet on which colleges he will apply to when the time comes.) What factors prompted you, Kingske, to have your daughter apply to college at her current age rather than at age seventeen or eighteen? </p>
<p>Yo! Marite, what's your take on this issue?</p>
<p>Tokenadult:</p>
<p>My S will be 17 next spring; I was only a few months older than he when I entered college, and I had to contend with change of culture (both academic and social) and a different language. My S has experienced living away from home at summer camps; he can do his own laundry very well :). Because of his unusual curriculum, he has learned about course selection and scheduling, unlike many high school students who have their schedules prepared for them by their GCs.
We won't be worrying about issues such as driving and he is not one to drink. My S has become quite comfortable being in classes with college students. Only half of his math class knew that he was a high schooler. He may be socially a bit "young" but not unduly so.
Colleges are not particulalry concerned about students coming as 17- years old. They begin to be a bit concerned about 16 year olds but their greatest worry is about even younger students. How old do you expect your child to be when he is ready for college?</p>
<p>Tokenadult
My S was also 17, only skipped senior year. He can do laundry and shop for fruit, but is messy. I doubt this trait will change in a year. Summer programs, living with a working mother who was also caretaking grandparent, speeded up his maturity. He bought a bkie at school, which is as much as he needs now. He has met others like him and younger at college, so never felt young. Once accepted, people tend not to share age or SAT scores.
S had taken 13 courses at CC. It wAs a far cry from Harvard, and essentially taking all classes theree or at state U would have been a waste.</p>
<p>"My S will be 17 next spring; I was only a few months older than he when I entered college." </p>
<p>Bookworm and Marite answered in similar terms about their son's ages on college entrance. That was also my experience. I have a spring birthday and had one grade skip, and I started my college program in the summer immediately after graduating from high school. So I was a young seventeen-year-old as a first-term freshman. That doesn't sound radical at all to me, to go to college at that age, but I was commuting to the state university in my town from home to go to college. </p>
<p>My intense residential experience came AFTER my undergraduate degree, when I studied abroad. I was dealing with new culture, new language, new cuisine, and new climate at age twenty-three-going-on-twenty-four. That nice girl I met over there and I are about to celebrate our twenty-first wedding anniversary. </p>
<p>As I think I have related in other threads (I know Texas137 is aware of this from a Brand X discussion board), I am curious about competition programs in math, computer science, and physics for my son. The Olympiad-style competitions are tough enough that one has a strong DISincentive to declare a grade skip if participating in them, and participants seem to get plenty of intellectual challenge. I don't know, personally, whether my son's preference will be to enter college at the earliest warranted age (he has asked about college already, at age eleven) or to stay the course until age eighteen before entering (which of course would mean applying at age seventeen, his "natural" twelfth-grade age after his summer birthday). I also don't know if his preference will be to do his undergraduate degree at the state university in town or to apply to far-away colleges. That's why I'm asking: because our plans here are not fixed in stone, I like to hear people's been-there-done-thats. This thread particularly caught my eye because we attended the local information meetings for both Caltech and MIT this year, and are now getting mail for Princeton after attending its meeting.</p>
<p>Mine went off at 16 - other side of the country (where she is currently stranded in an airport.) She already had 66 college credits, and had attended composing institutes meant for adults beginning at age 14, and attended Quaker conferences across the U.S. beginning at that age, and had been to Europe twice (once without us.)</p>
<p>I would have loved to have convinced her to take another year (though, on the other side, we had considered having her enter Earlham at 15 (after "9th" grade) - but we know lots of folks there), but she felt she had already been waiting for 3 years. (The Smith adcom asked me if she had problems, as a young former homeschooler, budgetting time, etc., and I reminded her that this was d.'s fourth year in college, and in the previous year she had been on 3 different campuses and an Indian Reservation, and had to keep her own schedule straight, so this was a piece of cake!)</p>
<p>Are there maturity issues? I imagine. But then I had them at 20!</p>