Caltech grad school advantages

Colleges and Universities A-Z California Institute of Technology
1

<p>I was frankly surprised to read the following on Greg Mankiw's blog on June 1, 2006:</p>

<p>"This spring I talked with a Harvard senior who, because of a weak math background, was rejected by every econ PhD program to which he applied. At the same time, he had a strong academic record overall and was accepted by several of the very best law schools."</p>

<p><a href="http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/love-econ-bad-at-math.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/love-econ-bad-at-math.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>This is entirely anecdotal, but I can't imagine a Caltech econ major with a decent -- not great GPA -- who took only the minimum math requirements at Caltech NOT getting into at least one good grad program. Thus the quality of Harvard's superstar econ department doesn't seem to translate into guaranteed grad school admissions for its excellent undergrads.</p>

<p>I found this surprising because I thought somewhere along the line the student would have been clued in by someone like Mankiw about what he needed to do to get a PhD.</p>

2

<p>I will back that up, for what it's worth. A Caltech student who takes core math and maybe one more course will be conversant in the mathematics necessary to speak intelligently the language of any science except theoretical physics and pure mathematics (you need a little bit more for that). You can go to an econ seminar, a biology conference, an applied physics lecture, and the math will make sense. I think it's easy for Techers to take this for granted (while whining about core) but being so comfortable with the toolkit of so many disciplines is an immense advantage -- in applying to grad school as well as many other things. There is also no other place which gives every single undergraduate that kind of background.</p>

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<p>Caltech was a huge, huge, huge advantage for getting into PhD programs. I will definitely vouch for that. It seemed to be true for most of my friends too.</p>

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<p>Ben and Joe, do you have some examples of the advantages of Caltech for grad school? It's not that I don't believe you, I'm just curious :-). I'll be going to Caltech this fall, but at this point I'm not sure about going to grad school. Also, how much does grad school usually cost? Is it, generally speaking, less than undergrad?</p>

5

<p>In general, graduate students in the sciences get fellowships that make going to school essentially a (low-paying) job. (This is particularly true coming from a school like Caltech.) So the only "cost" is the failure to go directly into industry, and depending on circumstances you could probably be working to pay off any loans used for undergrad.</p>

6

<p>Yeah, grad school is going to be free for virtually any Caltech student going into a math, science, or engineering field. Really the only variable is going to be whether you're sweating out a $12K a year stipend TA-ship at a stingy school or land one of the big fellowships like NSF, which will pay you the comparably luxurious sum of $30K or so, with no work required.</p>

<p>It's hard to quantify or give you some sort of data about the advantages of Caltech for grad school admissions. I can only say that I don't know of a single person who wanted to go to grad school and didn't get into at least one good program in their field. This even includes the other <em>history major</em> from my class who was admitted to a top-10 medieval history PhD program.</p>

<p>Just anecdotally, of my immediate group of friends from the Class of '04:</p>

<p>1) In the Physics PhD program at Harvard.</p>

<p>2) Went to Columbia for some sort of financial engineering master's; now works on Wall Street.</p>

<p>3) Started the Stanford EE PhD program, leaving this year with his master's to go work on Wall Street. (Money is tempting.)</p>

<p>4) Went straight to work in EECS at MIT Lincoln Labs; intends to go to grad school eventually.</p>

<p>Of my immediate group of friends from the Class of '05 and '06:</p>

<p>1) Deferred admission to Harvard Planetary Science PhD program to go work in London and DC for a year. Starting the PhD this fall.</p>

<p>2) Mechanical Engineering PhD program at Berkeley.</p>

<p>3) Physics PhD program at Berkeley (this one and number 2 are in a relationship so they needed to stay together).</p>

<p>4) Joint MIT/WHOI PhD program in Oceanography.</p>

<p>As for me, I started the Aerospace Engineering PhD program at Michigan (there were some personal factors involved, and I had an understanding with my advisor that I might leave after just a year because I hoped to go overseas; I had outside funding so I wasn't a burden on the department, and they were pretty OK with that), left with the master's to come here to Oxford for a couple of years to get another master's for fun and enjoy Europe, and I'll probably be back at Caltech to finally get that PhD starting in 2007, knock on wood. Maybe Stanford, Michigan, or Princeton, but likely Caltech. It's between those four anyway.</p>

<p>I felt like I had every option in the world open to me coming out of Caltech and I quite honestly have to give the school a large portion of the credit for that. I was able to develop personal relationships with some of the top people in my field, get really great research experience, and had instant credibility. In my particular field (fluid mechanics) it so happens that a good fraction of the current professors at the leading universities came out of the Caltech right around the same time (several staying right there), so through them I pretty much had an entree into whatever lab group I would've wanted. Now, I personally feel pretty lucky that what I like to do lines up so specifically with what Caltech was so good for, but I've heard enough similar stories from friends to believe that it's a reasonably common experience.</p>

<p>In my class, there were 7 Aeronautics majors. 6 went on to PhD programs (2 to Stanford, 2 to MIT, 1 to Purdue, and then my wild ride through various institutions) and 1 had no interest in that and went straight off to... Lockheed, I think.</p>

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<p>Thanks Kim and Joe! Haha, I didn't know that grad schools actually pay you to attend. I think I may have equated PhD programs with things like law school, med school, or business school.</p>

8

<p>Yesh, the pre-professional vs. grad school distinction escaped me for a while also.</p>

9

<p>


Joe is being very modest here (as any good Techer would be!).</p>

<p>I think I'll just leave it at that.</p>

10

<p>Not that modest! Certainly there are many people in my class who got various fellowships and other funding. I'm not special. :-) I actually applied for like 5 of them and only got the Department of Defense one. I know a few people who managed to pull down that <em>and</em> NSF, which is pretty impressive--and also adds up to 5 or 6 years of really nice funding.</p>