<p>theendusputrid: I never said they weren’t smart. I said Caltech would not have any use for them.
Caltech is not a liberal arts school. Caltech is a specialty research school with strengths in the math/science/engineering department. The coursework at Caltech is extremely rigorous and requires wholehearted devotion to the sciences. Like you said, Caltech does not have a golf course. If Tiger were to spend 8 hours a day playing golf elsewhere instead of studying, he would have flunked out of Caltech no matter how smart he was. Emma Watson is extremely smart and very good in the arts and drama. However, Caltech does not care for a top of the line arts program, so Emma Watson would not have been happy with Caltech’s math and science bent (notice she applied to Yale, Brown, Oxford and Cambridge, not MIT, Cornell, or Caltech). I see no point in Caltech choosing Emma Watson over a USAMO qualifier or an Siemens/Intel finalist just for prestige reasons.
BTW, Harvard has one of the most competitive ballroom dance team, and most top schools also have competitive/profession dance organizations. Please don’t say that Ivies don’t have opportunities for dancers before doing your research.</p>
<p>Tiny school with ridiculously renown professors like Feynman and Gell-mann. Damn you Caltech.</p>
<p>I have no clue how Caltech got the contract to operate and manage the Jet Propulsion Lab. Any Caltechies care to chime in and provide me with a history lesson :D</p>
<p>^ Could be because they have the smartest group of physicists in the world.</p>
<p>third after Stanford and MIT :-P</p>
<p>As an Asian girl applying to college this autumn, I am very pleased to know that I won’t have a higher chance of getting into Caltech because of my gender, or a lower chance because of my race.</p>
<p>JPL actually started as a Caltech research lab associated with GALCIT. It’s a good deal older than NASA. However, during the war it became a good deal more associated with the government as weapons research was done there and eventually, it became a government facility run by Caltech.</p>
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<p>That’s just opening up the inter-institution rivalry con of worms, there’s no way to really measure it, so let’s just agree that they’re all up there, 'kay?</p>
<p>^weapons research here means missile research. Caltech’s contract to run JPL for NASA now has an upper limit on the percentage of JPL work that is weapons-related. </p>
<p>There are a lot of smart groups of physicists in non-academic environments. CERN or Fermilab, for starters. Industry for solid-state physics. No need to stay within the US, either.</p>
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<p>Please - schools like Duke and Rice play the admissions game as well.</p>