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<p>Me too. But as the father of one of those hardworking normal-bright kids, I will say that she has benefited tremendously from being surrounded by a large group of some of the most gifted kids in the state, although at times it’s been a struggle for her. It’s certainly caused her to raise her sights as to what is possible for her life.</p>
<p>I have done some college consulting for LACs. Inevitably, their second concern (won’t go into the first one, not relevant here) is that students - with very high SAT scores, and SAT2 scores - can’t (or won’t) do the math. Not engineering or pre-med/orgo math. Social science math. They are getting more and more complaints from the faculty all the time (or so they’ve told me.)</p>
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<p>Is everyone just like your kids? Do you doubt that there could be a 100 kids per year in your state that might need, and importantly, want something more than that?</p>
<p>Xiggi - One of the reasons people repeat classes in Stanford is because they would not acknowledge AP credits on the transcript like Rice or some other colleges do in order to fulfill the premed credit requirements. I know a junior who walked in with something like 11 class waivers while enrolling but lost them one by one because he needed college credits in physics, chemistry, biology, math etc. and did not want to take harder classes just to meet those requirements. If he had gone to Rice for example, they would have given him a transcript acknowledging his AP credits meeting the premed requirements.</p>
<p>“I will say that she has benefited tremendously from being surrounded by a large group of some of the most gifted kids in the state”
Yup! nothing lights a fire under a truly gifted kid like finding their intellectual peers! You were very lucky to have this magnet school available for your D.</p>
<p>When one of mine was a first term freshman I forbade him taking more than the minimum number of courses allowed, so he could get adjusted to the whole being away from home thing. At the end of first term I found out he had taken one science course that was really an intensive 2 in 1 course and had talked his way into skipping a couple of prerequisites to take other more advanced coursework than one would have assumed he was qualified for.</p>
<p>he really likes a challenge </p>
<p>different kids need different things to be happy</p>
<p>I think that is okay</p>
<p>yep - bragging :)</p>
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lol - what is that other chemistry people take after orgo? what if you take them both at the same time? when does it get “hard”? :)</p>
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<p>I just think it’s funny that these people are furrowing their brows, bemoaning the fact that their students have trouble in their classes, even those that have high stats. At the same time, the most prevalent admissions philosophy at elite schools is that if you have high stats, you can “do the work” and therefore any ability beyond that is not beneficial (unless you can help their Putnam team.) </p>
<p>I’ll tell you what’s hard, or harder. It’s harder to cram everything in college than to spread it out over a few more years. Having taken CTY classes in junior high, I’m glad I didn’t have to repeat stuff for the umpteenth time in high school.</p>
<p>It’s nice to learn something new once in awhile.</p>
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<p>Are you saying it is hard to cram everything you want to study into college? That you need more years to do it? Or that you need to be able to get more accomplished before you reach college?</p>
<p>Caltech undergraduate is very different from other colleges and universities in the country (may be even the world). Two of most salient points are the graduate-level research opportunities open to ALL undergraduates and the extreme difficulty of its problem sets and tests. I think the research part had already been discussed up-thread, so I’ll focus on the latter. Caltech is hard, very hard. This level of difficulty is immediately thrust upon the students in their freshman year, starting with the core. The core classes are taught in great depth; even the first year “intro” classes go way beyond the AP equivalent to the point where the students cannot find much semblance to what they had learned in their AP classes. For example, quantum physics was taught at length in first quarter intro chemistry class, and two years of college math is taught over just three quarters – in proof-based fashion. Caltech does not grant AP credits at all, and most freshmen who had taken second and third year college classes elsewhere dare not try to place out of any intro classes, fearing that doing so would put them at an insurmountable disadvantage.</p>
<p>DW and I were incredulous when S1 told us that he had to stay up until 3 to 4 am EVERY weeknight (and most weekends) to work on problem sets and still not able to finish them. He said it’s not just him, it’s everybody. We still remembered he called us one morning at 4 am his time and when asked why he was still up, he turned the phone to the hallway and we heard lots of people talking and then he turned the phone around and said “nobody sleeps here.” This study-until-you-drop description was confirmed by three alums in a recent admission info session I went to with S2. Yes, 4 am is the norm. When asked whether Caltech was the hardest thing they ever did, all three said yes without hesitation. Two of the three alums are current STEM PhD students at Harvard and both said compared to Caltech, Harvard is a cakewalk and that many of their graduate peers were not nearly as well prepared. The third alum said his college buddy who studies dark matter physics at Stanford told him that the Tech was still harder. S1 summed up his first year experience in one sentence – “It felt like I just kept on doing problem sets after problem sets and a year was gone and I hadn’t slept!”</p>
<p>If you are good with math (as in AIME level at a minimum) AND passionate about science and engineering AND seeking to do cutting edge research with the best in the world AND not intimidated by the highest concentration of the brightest STEM minds on earth (a paraphrase from Feynman) AND – this is very important - you are willing to forgo sleep for couple years or more, than nothing come close to Caltech.</p>
<p>^^I personally know no one under 30 who sleeps. Sometimes they seem to nap.</p>
<p>And nothing extinguishes intellectual fire like being surrounded by mediocrity. My kids are normal bright in a small town with an undistinguished school with very laid back students. The weight of that environment has been the rock I have tried to roll uphill throughout junior high and high school. The allusion tells you what success I’ve had.</p>
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<p>So, is all of that truly necessary in order to learn this material? Or is this just hazing – kind of like fraternity hazing or more accurately, medical-school / residency hazing? Nothing wrong with studying hard, but also getting some sleep and having time for recreational activities. When you say things like this, I picture kids who are trying to out-cool one another by bragging how late they stayed up to do THEIR problem sets under the mistaken belief that the less sleep they get, the cooler they are. (And I wasn’t averse to all-nighters, either in college or now as an adult.)</p>
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<p>Why would I doubt it? Didn’t I SAY that my daughter looked at and seriously considered annasdad’s daughter’s school? The reasons we didn’t send her there had nothing to do with not thinking that the education and opportunities weren’t excellent.</p>
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<p>I hear you – I get that point … after all, my kids did do CTD (similar to CTY) and it did fire up some passions on both their ends. I guess I always saw it as - in college, they’ll bloom. I can hear the passion in my S’s voice in his interest area when, one month into the year, he’s already joined 3 clubs having to do with his interest area and is eating up his classes!</p>
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<p>Or perhaps playing video games until 11 p.m, then hitting the books?</p>
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<p>Well, for one, going to a place like Caltech or MIT is less brutal if you have seen some of the material. </p>
<p>But yeah, I probably wouldn’t have had time to take any advanced math classes had I not done so in high school. Engineering at MIT was pretty time-consuming. </p>
<p>Another thing it is nice to take classes before you have to make career decisions. For someone who wants to actually be a mathematician or a scientist, it’s nice to not have to make the decision of which path to choose based on one year of college. I had a friend who took orgo in high school and had planned on being premed, and while he liked orgo, he decided he was more suited to be a software engineer. It’s just nice to be able to explore.</p>
<p>I suspect it is like the old adage when looking for a fighter, you don’t want the one with scars all over. The rare kid at Caltech or MIT who can do excellent work and still manage a normal life are perhaps more exceptional than the ones who forego sleep to do the same thing.</p>
<p>Re xiggi’s quotation from David Oxtoby, that students may have taken AP chemistry, but be unaware that chlorine is a gas. This reminded me of a quotation attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, who flunked out of West Point: “If sodium chloride had been a gas, I would have been a major general.”</p>
<p>There are many reasons why a student who took AP might not know that chlorine was a gas, not the least among them that safety considerations in high school labs probably prevent the use of chlorine gas at all. Also, the coverage of WW I in history classes is not as thorough as it should be.</p>
<p>Due to increases in AP course offerings, many more students are able to take AP classes now than 35 years ago. Since many exams are released, AP instruction in the high schools can be closely tailored to the exams. This means that students who score a 4 in some of the subjects now are probably not comparable in their actual mastery of the material to students who scored a 4 back when the exam content was totally unknown in advance, many schools did not offer AP classes, and the students in those schools who took AP exams acquired their background by independent reading.</p>
<p>Agree about the not-sleeping-thing.</p>
<p>There is a very funny short clip on You Tube, about a student working on a problem set at Caltech. I haven’t been able to locate it so far, but maybe someone else will have better luck.</p>
<p>Son has two friends who went to Caltech. They have low gpa’s but will be fine and not hurt by that for what they want to do. Son was always considering medicine so didn’t think it made sense. Also, there weren’t enough girls there in his view.</p>
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<p>Yes, Dr. Octopus, as you call him, visibly does not understand the teaching of Chemistry nor knows how students fare at his institution. :(</p>