what are the things you like least about caltech?

<p>as title. i'm really curious:)</p>

<p>that the school is completly dominated by girls geez i hate that</p>

<p>I can list a few that I think most will agree with:
1) The pace is very unforgiving. There are only 10 weeks in the term and if you get behind it's very hard to catch up before the end of the term.
2) Everything is a struggle -- nothing is easy.
3) You forget how smart your are. This may sound minor, but a lot of people lose their confidence while they're here. I found off-campus internships essential because they reminded me once a year that I was incredibly smart.</p>

<p>Oh one other thing: I've watched many of my premed friends struggle to get accepted because their GPA's are lower than students from UCLA. However, I've also noticed that it's incredibly easy to get a job out of Caltech, no matter your GPA (I've had people tell me they don't care one bit what my GPA is as long as I graduate).</p>

<p>w00t. jobs, money, mrrr.</p>

<p>The food they serve at dinner. On the other hand, dinner is one of my favorite things at Caltech.</p>

<p>Diversity. The course choices are severely limited as opposed to an Ivy or similar caliber (e.g., Stanford) school. Not an issue if you want to be hardcore science and nothing more but if you're going to Caltech, you'll very likely be specializing in science for your whole life, and these four years may really be the only time to learn a wide variety of other things.</p>

<p>Are there many pretty girls on campus?<br>
Are there many nerds?</p>

<p>If you can't find a pretty girl at Caltech, I hear there are a couple of them in that Los Angeles place right around it....</p>

<p>What courses do you guys take to... decrease the concentration of maths/phys/chem that you do?
Maybe some literature?
I read GuitarManARS's post about diversity, but there still should be some choices, right?</p>

<p>I know a hot girl from my school that goes to caltech~</p>

<p>
[quote]
The course choices are severely limited as opposed to an Ivy or similar caliber...

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Counterpoint: the relative lack of "diversity" in some respects is one of my favorite parts of Caltech. Let me explain.</p>

<p>I fell in love with philosophy (for a while) while I was here, mostly because every philosophy prof has a serious background in either math or physics. Whereas at other places, many of the philosophers are Kant scholars who write ten foot long sentences about nothing, at Caltech, the generally precision-heavy spirit makes even the humanities courses much more serious and rigorous. I have almost no doubt that if I had chosen Princeton or Harvard or Stanford instead of Caltech, I would have dismissed philosophy and political science as "that fluffy nonsense" after seeing a course or two. Caltech teaches those subjects in a way that a physicist can really appreciate and get into.</p>

<p>Something similar is true of the social sciences. Caltech is very light on fluff. Every economist here is a fairly serious mathematician. For that reason, you get trained in the social sciences like you would if you were a graduate student at a top tier place, instead of being fed watered down fluff a la Harvard's Ec 10.</p>

<p>The humanities and social sciences faculty is way better, too, by virtue of not being diluted with various waste. At other places, you have hundreds of people doing complete crap (e.g. modern cultural anthropoogy or theory-heavy literature departments). Those people are worse than useless. If they were merely useless, they could be ignored. But they pollute hiring and tenure committees, dragging down the level of scholarship throughout entire universities. (For instance, anthropology has been almost completely destroyed by a small tribe of fools who assert that the scientific study of human culture is impossible for various postmodernistic reasons. Fortunately, those people can't get within 10 miles of Caltech for fear of being eaten by angry physicists.)</p>

<p>Of course, there are disadvantages too. You can't take Hindi or learn to play the [url="<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didgeridoo%22%5Ddidgeridoo%5B/url"&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didgeridoo"]didgeridoo[/url&lt;/a&gt;]. Still, I undoubtedly would have been a narrower person had I gone to one of HPS. In my view, Caltech keeps what's best about many of the humanities and social sciences and dispenses with the garbage that makes those things unpalatable to people with brains at other places. Thus, if you're an analytical, quantitative thinker, you're much more likely to be intrigued by some things at Caltech because of the way they're taught, while you would have been repelled by those same things at other places. That should be considered by anyone with high intellectual standards.</p>

<p>By the way, for the benefit of any lurking postmodernists and/or cultural anthropologists:</p>

<p>I do realize I speak quite harshly of entire disciplines in the above post. But anyone who takes the time to think about it will realize that, in the modern academy, the emperor is sometimes naked. Yes, there are people (at very good universities, too!) who have tenure, get paid, teach students, are called "professor", and are complete, utter, charlatans. (See [url="<a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html%22%5Dthis%5B/url"&gt;http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html"]this[/url&lt;/a&gt;] and [url="<a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/%22%5Dthis%5B/url"&gt;http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/"]this[/url&lt;/a&gt;] if you don't believe me, to find out about the intellectual standards in some disciplines.) There are few places in today's politically correct world that call this charlatanism by its name, but Caltech is one of them.</p>

<p>It is, in many ways, a privilege to go to a school where you don't have to deal with those people.</p>

<p>Yeah, I can definitely see where you're coming from there. To each his own, I think. For me, the ability to be able to take Hindi or learn to play the didgeridoo (actually, for me it's really more like to tweak and perfect my playing of the didgeridoo) is very important because these are things that fascinate me, and I never will really be able to take again after undergrad. I think the opportunity for such a wide exposure is more important to me than what you've described. But eh, it's a tradeoff, I s'pose :)</p>

<p>GuitarMan - Learning doesn't stop with an undergraduate education. Make a list of all those topics which intrigue you. Add to your list as new subjects catch your interest. Whenever life becomes a bit slow, refer to your list and enroll in a class at a nearby college/university. I'm several times your age and have decided to take Chinese at college next semester. I can hardly wait to find out what those menus really say!</p>

<p>I'm guessing that you, like most admitted students, have read some of Feynman's books. Think of the wide variety of things he learned after he earned his PhD. Lifelong learning keeps your brain alert. Knowing that there will always be more things you'd like to study than you will have time to learn before you die makes life exciting.</p>

<p>Mmm, maybe you're right :)</p>

<p>Another thing that I don't think has been mentioned in this thread is that the engineering tends to be more theory-based. I know Ben can elaborate on this a lot more, but basically some people tend to want to focus on what they want to do and not take "irrelevant" courses. At Caltech, as Ben said, you are trained first to be a scientist and second to be whatever you are majoring in... some people may not like this. It really depends on your style of learning. Personally, after talking with Ben and reading numerous posts on this forum I think it's an awesome way to learn, but it's definitely not for everyone.</p>

<p>I've heard that a lot of the professors don't care very much about teaching and that overall the teaching quality is pretty poor, particularly in math. (Don't jump on me right away--I'm not saying I believe it, but my family's trying to get me to go to MIT mainly based on this one impression, so I figured I'd try to check it out.) So... any truth to that?</p>

<p>I haven't taken any classes at Caltech obviously but I did talk to a lot of students and got the complete opposite opinion--I think probably one of the most mentioned things by Caltech students was faculty accessability. Almost every student I ran into said that most teachers were passionate about their teaching and that there was a very strong emphasis on even the most basic classes--but also that whenever he/she needed help or wanted to work on a project or anything that the faculty was available and motivated to help. </p>

<p>When I went to MIT last year I don't think any students said anything bad about the faculty but the "accessibility" factor wasn't mentioned as much (that doesn't necessarily mean anything though).</p>

<p>Kim--I've heard the same thing (not like I have any bias either :p). I mean, no first-hand experience of course but I would imagine it is true in at least some cases. ~waits for Ben's counterpoint ;)~</p>