<p>Impartial opinion needed from unrelated folks:</p>
<p>Caltech vs. Cornell (in random order!)</p>
<p>Major = Chemistry</p>
<p>Career goal = Researcher / academician</p>
<p>What kind of college experience do you want to have? The two schools are VERY different.</p>
<p>If you are a hardcore science person and want to be a hardcore scientist (which is likely to be the case as you want to be a researcher) then Caltech is probably better.</p>
<p>although caltech was my first choice, i ended up rejecting it for stanford although i am a math/science person and inclined towards academia.</p>
<p>i would say caltech if you want to be challenged beyond anything you can even fathom by some of the most brilliant students and professors in the world.</p>
<p>cornell if you want to lower your standards.</p>
<p>i'll say it again though: caltech is hard. you have to have a certain mindset to survive there. i believe i would have survived there but i didn't believe it would have been worth it in the long run.</p>
<p>I was in the exact same position as Iversion, and I also ended up matriculating at Stanford for pretty much the same reason. Caltech scared me away.</p>
<p>That said, you'll get an absolutely unbeatable education at Caltech. And the weather there is much nicer than Cornell. :)</p>