<p>Any advice for parent about to take CALTECH campus visit with d? We plan to go this summer. Thanks</p>
<p>There's not much to see here during the summer. If you talk to the admission office, they will no doubt be happy to issue you the nearest available drone, who will show you the cleanest student housing he or she can find, feed you the party line about academics, research, and the Honor Code, and send you on your way.</p>
<p>If you really want to understand what Tech is about, I recommend that you drop "d" off with a camera, cell phone, and sleeping bag near a chunk of student housing and tell them to find some Caltech students. We're pretty friendly folk, undoubtably someone will find a place for "d" to sleep and show them around a lab. Meanwhile, your task as a parent is noninterference. Go see a movie or wander around campus and look at the buildings. When "d" resurfaces in a few days, they will have gotten a much better tour than any admissions drone could have given.</p>
<p>As one of the "drones" at admissions, I object. For one thing, we all show our own houses, not the cleanest housing we can find. (I'm perfectly willing to lead my tour groups through my house which has an "Enjoy Crack" mural that all the parents love so much.) Furthermore, admissions doesn't tell us what to say -- we get to decide what to put on the tour, and admissions encourages us to be brutally honest when necessary. After all, no one wants students to come here without knowing exactly what their getting into.</p>
<p>As wonderful you think your advice may be, I seriously doubt Answers33ker would be willing to just leave his/her daughter by the student houses and go off to see a movie. (In fact, I'd seriously doubt the intelligence of any parent that did so.) Call up Admissions and ask them what they can arrange for you. If nothing else, there are tours every weekday at 2. Every tour goes through the houses, and I do encourage you to return to the houses afterwards to talk to people -- it's always best to get as many people's opinions about the school as possible. The admissions tour guides are an admittedly self-selecting group of relatively happy people.</p>
<p>If your daughter has been accepted, Admissions can arrange an overnight visit for her with a current student. I don't know yet, though, whether this is available over the summer. You can definitely call Admissions up and find out.</p>
<p>Other than that, I'm not sure what kind of advice you want -- do you need the name of a good hotel in the area, or ideas of places to eat?</p>
<p>SteelPangolin is trying, this time less successfully than usual, to be funny. He doesn't seem to know that one of the tour guides Admissions employs to show around prospective students is the <sarcasm> always peaceful and drone-like </sarcasm> president of Ricketts House, Arturo Pizano. You see, the joke falls flat when everybody knows many tour guides are quite, um, laid back and fun-loving members of our community.</p>
<p>But more importantly, SteelPangolin seems to have crowned himself the paradigmatic Caltech student; obviously any lifestyle that deviates from his own is illegitimate and unrepresentative.</p>
<p>The truth is, some students at Caltech (like anywhere else) like to get drunk, set things on fire, and occasionally act like fools. Others, like the USAMO champion Po Ru Loh, are so smart they can break sticks just by thinking about them the right way but prefer more "boring" ways to relax that don't involve pyromania or possession of illicit substances. I don't pass judgment on either lifestyle; I truly respect people's choices. I'll just say that it's the Po Ru Loh type of people that make Caltech an important place in the world, as opposed to a large frat.</p>
<p>In any case, you can have either lifestyle and see almost nothing of the other. You can also partake of both. But you should ignore childish attempts to get attention (see above), and you shouldn't let anyone tell you that theirs is the only "real" Caltech lifestyle. That's just silly.</p>
<p>I know Arturo is a tour guide, which is a step in the correction of what I believe to be a serious imbalance in the representation of campus life to tour groups. However, he's still being paid by the administration to present the view that they would like presented. I maintain that sneaking around the admissions office will give a prospective student a better view of campus life, regardless of what Houses that student may end up in. I'm not going to sit on Holliston catching prefrosh with a drift net. They can always get the official package later.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I love your condescending attitude, Ben. I'm just a lowly CS major and can't possibly understand that actual work is important at Caltech. In addition, I'm apparently a frat boy. You, on the other hand, seem to believe that the monkish genius is the reference incarnation of the Caltech student. Docility has no correlation with genius: to give the usual Caltech example, Feynman was always making trouble. I don't claim that I'm anywhere near his league, but your tarring of the whole "drunken pyromaniac fool" sector of campus with the brush of illegitimacy is both unproductive and inaccurate. For every Po Ru Loh, there's a counterpart Alan Rubink or Rumen Zarev.</p>
<p>... neither of whom is quite as good a student at Caltech as Po Ru is (cf. math department awards, Axline scholarship), though at least one is surely brilliant. The point is that there are some advantages to the less rowdy lifestyle.</p>
<p>But that's not the point. I never undertook any
[quote]
tarring of the whole "drunken pyromaniac fool" sector of campus with the brush of illegitimacy.
[/quote]
In fact, if you were to read my post, you would note that I explicitly pointed out that
[quote]
I don't pass judgment on either lifestyle; I truly respect people's choices.
[/quote]
In fact, all I was objecting to was your barrage of insults targeted at people who like clean housing and don't set stuff on fire.</p>
<p>So, along those lines, let's not get self-righteous:
[quote]
I love your condescending attitude, Ben.
[/quote]
I wasn't the one who, without provocation, called fellow students "drones" just for having the audacity to work with the admissions office (I'll add that you know nothing about many of those students). If you want to be unfair in a public forum to your colleagues, go ahead. But don't expect them to take the bull**** you spew docilely, and don't accuse them of condescension when they call you on your nonsense.</p>
<p>Thanks for the insights. To be specific, would a visit late in the week and into the weekend work? What would you recommend seeing? We have been to the web site and are aware of the tour. (We are from the east coast; the area of interest is engineering...have not applied yet.)</p>
<p>The campus is pretty but it's nothing you haven't already seen if you've ever seen a movie set in southern California. Since you're interested in engineering, I recommend talking to a prof in that field and asking about a quick lab tour and an overview of the research they're doing: we have a wind tunnel (GALCIT, <a href="http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/%5B/url%5D">http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/</a>), several robotics laboratories including some really neat swarm robots (a few of my friends have worked on those, I think with this guy, <a href="http://www.cds.caltech.edu/%7Emurray/%5B/url%5D">http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/</a>), some interesting materials science stuff with cool-looking lab equipment; although I don't remember who's doing what with that, that's one thing the administration will know. Unfortunately, it's difficult to arrange a JPL tour due to heightened security or I would recommend you go have a peek at the rover yard.</p>
<p>Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get hammered and set a couch on fire.</p>
<p>Answers33ker,</p>
<p>I am one of the multiple parents that enjoy visiting (lurking?) this site. In particular the Caltech board since my son attends the school (we are also starting the college search process for our daughter, which as I am sure the sun will come out tomorrow, will not attend Caltech.) If you are interested in a (limited) parents point of view of life at Caltech drop me a line at <a href="mailto:APN1258@aol.com">APN1258@aol.com</a>. We are also from the East Coast.</p>