<p>Im currently a junior and im trying to decide whether i should apply to Stanford SCEA or to Caltech and MIT EA. I will most likely major in engineering, but i might double major in a science. How is caltechs engineering different compared to Stanford's and MIT's? Also, how much will applying EA boost my chances at getting in?</p>
<p>MIT EA has absolutely no boost. It actually has a lower percentage admittance last year.</p>
<p>Stanford is a different story.</p>
<p>At Caltech, our standards for EA are more stringent than for the regular round. An admit is one spot we won't get back, so we only admit students who are very sure about. This is a compliment if you are admitted EA, and it might save you the trouble of doing some applications, but it won't boost your chances.</p>
<p>As for Caltech engineering -- there's a lot more of a focus on core science (physics and math) and many people say that on average Caltech seems "harder" in science than its peer institutions. MIT engineering has more options and a more applied (as opposed to pure science) approach. Same with Stanford.</p>
<p>I have a different question regarding Caltech vs. Stanford vs MIT. A family friend with a Ph.D. in physics from Berkeley, now the owner of a successful technology devlopment company in CA, is encouraging my son not to apply to Caltech (son is currently a junior in high school and is most interested in pursuing a degree in chemistry or physics). The reason why the friend is discouraging my son from considering Caltech is that the friend feels that, from his experience in interviewing candidates for jobs, Caltech undergrads "are not given a throrough enough grounding in the fundamentals of science or in research--they dive too soon into higher levels of learning without an adequate basis." My son is very interested in Caltech, so I'm curious how students or others associated with Caltech would respond to such a claim. Thanks!</p>
<p>Crazy Glue: Go Stanford.....</p>
<p>filo895 -- good question. I'm a Caltech undergrad (a junior) and I don't feel that your friend's perception is reflective of the Caltech experience at all. The purpose of the Caltech education is exactly to give everyone a thornough grounding in basic science before moving on to anything else. </p>
<p>After all, we're the only school that takes students of top caliber and has them take single-variable calculus and classical mechanics (which all of them had in high school) a second time. Of course, these Caltech courses are really challenging -- people learn all the proofs, reasons, and derivations that their high school teachers skipped so they could cover more material. If that's not giving people a fundamental grounding, I don't know what is. (These two introductory courses are followed by four other coure courses in each of math and physics, to give students a thorough grounding in everything they will need to know to pursue a major in math or the hard sciences.)</p>
<p>It is true that some of the students who do less well here kind of slack off freshman year and don't learn everything as well as they should. By the time they wake up as juniors, they start taking high level courses -- so they can talk about quite sophisticated physics but not quite get all the details of rotational inertia. I have a suspicion that perhaps your friend wasn't really getting a cross-section of the student body.</p>
<p>Anyway, if you come to Caltech with a desire to learn, I firmly believe that you can get a better grounding in the fundamentals of math and science than you can get absolutely anywhere else.</p>