<p>It seems like a common theme among CalTech and other prestigious universities/colleges is that students have such rigorous work loads that they barely sleep. In fact, this is common in many forms of advanced education (i.e. medical residency etc).</p>
<p>This always seemed strange to me for a couple reasons</p>
<p>It seems unreasonable to have institutions where learning is the focus when a majority of the time students spend studying is in a altered state of health/brain activity, while they are sleep deprived. </p>
<p>I've heard numerous times from numerous places that sleep "encodes" information in the mind, and without sufficient sleep, such information cannot be properly received by the brain, or made accessible in the future.</p>
<p>Would sleeping more and doing slightly less work maximize an education by making the process more "efficient"?</p>
<p>I do not pretend to understand the lifestyles at schools like CalTech, as I'm still in High School, but I'd like to hear what anyone has to say on this subject.</p>
<p>First of all, it’s not like EVERY student at Caltech (and/or other universities) is sleep-deprived from having too much work. There are people that finish their work really fast and sleep 9-10 hours a day, and get perfect grades. And then there are people (about 90% of the student body, I would say) that would ALSO like to get perfect grades, but simply can’t do the work by themselves/it takes them much longer. So, this gigantic group basically splits into two subgroups - those who study 24/7 and those who say: “f–k the grades, I’d rather go to bed/socialize/etc”.</p>
<p>As you can see, sleep deprivation is simply a choice that some people make. Incidentally, this “studying 24/7” group is also the most vocal when it comes to complaining about their institution, saying how it’s too hard and how students would learn more if the workload were to be slightly easier. </p>
<p>Now, the problem with making the workload easier, especially here at Caltech, is that our “prestige” comes from Techers being constantly pushed beyond their limits to learn as much material as possible in as short of a time as possible. Lowering the school’s workload means our Caltech degrees would get devalued, which is not fair to the alums who had to persevere through four (or more) years of constant mental rape.</p>
<p>So, in conclusion 
Sleep deprivation is not as big of a problem as they [I actually don’t know who “they” are] say. It mostly comes from making [bad] personal decisions. As for “easing it up”, I am personally against it, although there have been talks about making Caltech a lot easier.</p>
<p>I sleep so much… seriously. I love sleep.</p>
<p>if you prioritize sleep over all else, you will get plenty of sleep. i got plenty of sleep when i was at caltech. of course, i never went to 95% of my classes (they conflicted with my sleep 
i get up at 2pm). but hey, i still graduated…</p>
<p>The way this problem is resolved at Caltech is that people don’t go to class all that often. It’s not uncommon to see a 30 person class dwindle to 10 or 5 by the end of the term. Heck sometimes I would stay up all night to finish a homework set for a class, go to the class 5 minutes before it starts to turn it in, and then go back to my dorm to sleep.</p>
<p>I think people also don’t go to class because they tend to…uhh…not be the best taught.</p>
<p>Sleep deprivation at caltech is never solely due to having too much work. I have a friend that goes to all her classes, does all her work, and still gets 9+ hours of sleep, but it’s because she goes to sleep at midnight every day.</p>
<p>I on the other hand, have gone to sleep at 4AM every day for the last two weeks, and slept until 10, missing my first morning class. This is okay because it’s recorded, and I can learn from the book anyway. I choose to go to sleep this late because in my experience, the prime hours for socialization are 12-2AM, and this often leads to fun diversions that keep me awake until 4.</p>
<p>I don’t consider myself sleep deprived, and I can modify my schedule to get more sleep if it starts affecting my schoolwork.</p>
<p>based off of my impression from PFW, the people at Caltech weren’t as smart as I expected them to be. Most seemed to be on t he caliber of some of the smarter kids that go to my high school (which I guess makes sense as they’re all pretty young as well) but the majority of students there are not the next nobel prize winners or anything. I think that most of the sleepless nights are due to poor prioritizing and a lack of discipline and maturity. I look forward to starting my year there to see if its really as tough as all the stories imply.</p>
<p>The majority of students at any college are not the next nobel prize winners. I don’t know if you’ve figured this out, but there aren’t actually all that many nobel prize winners. </p>
<p>In any case, Caltech undergrads are on average smarter (in terms of math/science aptitude anyway) than any place I’ve been, in my opinion. This makes sense because we specialize in producing academics (i.e. somewhere like MIT might have more people with a bent for business). Looking at our stats, this is reflected–in how many people we send to grad school, in how many of our graduating students get top awards, etc. </p>
<p>For example, this year we had 14 current Caltech undergrads snag the coveted NSF Graduate fellowship. MIT had 23. Keeping in mind that Caltech is a little less than 1/4 the size of MIT (in terms of undergrad population) this ain’t too bad :)</p>
<p>Edit: As for your second comment, you’re right that a lot of the time issues are due to poor prioritizing and lack of maturity–but that doesn’t mean Caltech isn’t really, really hard–because it is. I have awesome time management skills, but all this really means is that I get a little more sleep than my friends.</p>
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<p>Jesus, this makes it crazy that in my undergrad department of 16 I know five people that won NSF and one with honorable mention (or whatever their next lowest level is). Makes me wonder if I should have applied for the NSF. :(</p>
<p>Are you counting students who were in your undergrad department but got the NSF later (in grad school?) If you’re only counting people who got it as seniors, that’s pretty impressive. It’s apparently easier to get it as a first or second year.</p>
<p>Four of them got it senior year and one got it in grad school. The honorary mention stayed an extra semester to finish a dual degree and got it that year, so I guess it counts since he hadn’t started grad school.</p>
<p>My year also had crazy curves on all of our tests since we were the apparently the best one in ages. If I was one year later or earlier I probably would have had straight As for my in-major classes. :(</p>
<p>Hah, well of course that’s expected I suppose; originally I made that comment coming out of PFW and after meeting a lot of kids that didn’t put academics as high on their list of priorities as I personally did, and I was a little bitter. I know that there are also a lot of extremely gifted kids that WILL go on to do great things after Tech and I was just unfortunate enough to not have met many (which, in hindsight, is probably because they were too busy working to mess around with pre-frosh.)</p>
<p>And I know about how much you advocate about Tech being a really challenging school lizzardfire, it was your specific comment about how the average undergrad at Tech is above the average at Stanford (as well as some personal experiences) that made me decide on Tech being the right fit for me over any other school. I’m just looking forward to seeing how difficult once I attend :)</p>
<p>@lizzardfire</p>
<p>It is also easier to get it after Obama was elected and promised to triple the funding for the program, and last year put stimulus funding into the program.</p>
<p>I won an NSF last year and I will not deny that without ARRA funding I would not have won it.</p>
<p>Yeah compucomp, that’s definitely true.</p>
<p>it’s also (partially) resolved by the heavy modafinil use of some Techers ;)</p>
<p>You’ve presumably been there a year, kiruyama. I’m curious how you found the first year. </p>
<p>One of my friends who went to Caltech said that during the freshman camp, he had figured one of the other students for a “total zero.” It turned out that the other student was a total math genius. Impressions from PFW could be misleading. On the other hand, kiruyama may just have attended a really tough high school.</p>
Harvard is like that too. Everything is a competition. Not a warm fuzzy place to chat with classmates about the interesting things you learned in class that day and reflect on the joy of learning and just being. 2-3 hours of sleep a night is not uncommon. Nor is burnout. And it’s not because everyone is on fire to learn. It is hard to turn off mental competition; fear of failure to be the imaginary best. Weather not too hot either. At least CalTech has some warmth.
Please use old threads only for research.