<p>Basically, my decision comes down to these two schools. Both amazing, I know :D
I'm planning to major in bio and possibly minor in comp sci. Now, I know Cal Tech's programs in both are ranked higher...but is there really a difference? </p>
<p>Also, UChicago is a much bigger school, which I have no problem with. Considering Cal Tech is only 200+ students per class, would I feel "lonely" there per se?</p>
<p>Also, how is the courseload? UChicago is more of a liberal-arts type school, while Cal Tech seems to be more of the super-hard tech school workload.</p>
<p>As for my personality, I'm a computer nut and love gaming but am also outgoing and like to meet quirky people with diverse interests. Cal Tech would surely be better for the former, and UChicago definitely excels in the latter.</p>
<p>I probably seem like I'm rambling by now...but I really need some help mulling over the strengths/weaknesses/courseloads/personalities of each school. Anyone with something to add or expand on, please do!</p>
<p>I am a grad student at UChicago who graduated from Caltech last year, which I also chose over UChicago back when I was applying to college.
I would say all else equal, Caltech is an ideal environment for someone broadly interested in Bio and CS, as long as you don’t mind taking hard physics classes.
Both schools have an extensive core curriculum, but Caltech’s essentially consists entirely of science classes (including required classes in quant mech, stat mech, probability, linear algebra, differential equations), while much of UC’s consists of humanities classes. To that end, for someone broadly interested in science Caltech curriculum will force you to:
a)Learn (professionally) useful skills–a lot of biology-related research requires knowledge of math, physics and computing that bio majors at other schools don’t learn as undergrads unless they are interested, but is required of Caltech students.
b)Channel your scientific interests by seeing “what’s out there” and what you’re good at.
There’s a TON of research on campus roughly at the intersection of CS and biology and Caltech goes out of its way to make them accessible to students through SURF, “menu classes”, and freshman seminar classes, and encourage them to participate in inderdisciplinary research–if you’re interested in biology and have good programming skills there’s a ton of research groups you can join right away. You can certainly obtain all these skills and experiences at UChicago, but you’d have to be more proactive and make a deliberate choice to do so.
On the other hand, if while at Caltech you find out that you’re not interested in science/math/engineering (which happens to a surprising number of people), there’s almost nothing else for you and you probably won’t be (academically) very happy- humanities offerings are sparse, most humanities classes are geared toward people who don’t care/don’t have time, and the professors teaching them are not famous or leaders in their fields, which is of course very different from the situation at UChicago which has famous professors in pretty much every subject.
There are similar complaints about CS departments at both of these schools that they are small, too theory oriented, focus on just a few research areas, and have excellent offerings in those areas and not much else in others. </p>
<p>Socially, I actually think the schools are pretty similar (although in this respect I’m much more familiar with Caltech…)- both have large proportions of quirky people with diverse interests, who are often ****ed off at their workload.
(Despite their academic interests, people at Caltech are as likely to argue about politics and philosophy than science if they happen to have free time at 2 AM). Due to Caltech’s small size it is true that almost everyone on campus knows almost everyone else so its hard to keep anonymity in times you might want to…</p>
<p>I personally chose Caltech over UC because although I loved humanities classes in high school, I knew I wanted to do something scientific/computational (although I wasn’t sure what exactly), and didn’t want to be forced to spend time writing history papers. At the time I entered I fancied going into CNS or computational biology- after taking classes and going to freshman-seminars in both subjects my freshman year, I decided biology was boring and programming annoying and switched to pure math. If I went to UChicago, the stringent humanities requirements (and the fact that students can’t really take more than 4 courses a term- at Caltech I regularly took 6, even if I didn’t put in my best effort in the ones I didn’t find interesting), may have left me behind my peers if I made the same realization.</p>