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[quote]
Originally Posted by psquared*
Besides the fact that it is a household name and it will be easier to get a job after college or go to grad school if you get good grades while attending MIT. Why do you want to go there, it seems like you give up all of the fun you could have had at another great yet less demanding university? I have read in other posts that you do 12 hours of work a day, sure I find math and phsyics fun too, but 12 hours of it a day, for 4 years is overwhelming. So why do you want to go to MIT, besides the name recognition?"*
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<p>I'd also rather see it from another perspective: Caltech applicants!</p>
<p>PS. Good Luck to all RD Applicants and EA Deferees</p>
<p>[ul]
[<em>]The challenge - Yep, as you have already noticed, Caltech selects the *best</em>, and to stress on that, the best of the "bestest". So imagine your highschool with a multiple of you. How challenged would you feel? I believe that's what I'm going to encounter at Caltech.
[<em>]As a result, there will no more be a competitive environment around, but a collaborative one. A leap in your life, huh?
[</em>]The small size - and the small faculty-to-students ratio
[li]and finally, the honor code.[/li][/ul]</p>
<p>Let's see...why do I like Caltech? Academic rigor's a biggie, but that's not surprising. Also, the environment where everyone is really smart appeals a whole lot. Caltech's also really pretty small, but I really don't want to go bigger. (Size is the biggest reason I'm not applying to MIT, for example). But yeah. Because it's cool, obviously.</p>
<p>I also like a lot about Caltech, and my visit to the campus pretty much sealed the deal.</p>
<p>I REALLY like the collaborative atmosphere, and the type of people with whom one would collaborate. I love math/science, obviously, and want to be with people who love it also. The campus is beautiful and the weather is nice. The small amount of people also appeals to me. Plus, there's the chance I could be on the soccer team/tennis team etc. where that's nearly impossible for me everywhere else.</p>
<p>Reasons:
1. The size. And not just because its good to have smaller classes and more personal attention from the faculty and graduate students. The small student population breeds more of a spirit of cooperation and collaboration than more competitive schools like MIT and Harvard. It also creates a social climate that seems bizarre to outsiders, but that I wouldnt trade for the world. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>The Honor Code. I spoke with an alumnus from the graduate school at Stanford, and he's appalled at their honor code. It had two parts the students were required to conform to certain standards of academic conduct, while the faculty were required to not place students in a situation where they might reasonably be expected to violate the Honor Code. Now what is that? Do you trust your students or not? Someone once told him, We are not teaching students, we are training colleagues. He was referring to graduate school, but he told me that it applies to the Caltech undergrad experience as well.</p></li>
<li><p>Southern California. There are enough good schools out there that its OK to take into account where youd like to live for four years when you make your decision.</p></li>
<li><p>Research. This is the single, overriding, mammoth reason that dwarfed all others for me. I want to go to Caltech because I want to do real, meaningful research (not programming busywork) as an undergrad. </p></li>
<li><p>It's HARD, and I want to be challenged. From the words of a Caltech alumnus I spoke with: "Caltech is soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly, old-and-bitter-at-twenty hard. I think I was lucky in coming from a very challenging high school, because the sudden ramp in difficulty wasnt as shocking for me as for folks who, like yourself, never felt challenged before they got there. During our orientation we had a speaker tell us to introduce ourselves and shake hands with the person on our left, and the person on our right. Great, he said. Now in two years either you or one of them will be gone. And sure enough, the guy on my left didnt last the year."</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So those are my five main reasons for loving Caltech. It's good stuff that I feel I can't get anywhere else but Pasadena.</p>
<p>Yes that was well said indeed. I decided to fill out the Caltech athletic recruiting form for the golf team, lol, because I didn't even play this year. I couldn't get the form to work however. I wonder if indicating an interest in intercollegiate sports helps in the admissions process. Does anyone have an idea about that?</p>
<p>Caltech sent me their long viewbook today, which I thought was very well made and very informative. I guess the great thing about Caltech, and probably MIT, too, is that a degree genuinely means something. Caltech is thought of as a school for geniusues, while Columbia, for example, while a great school, is not.</p>
<ol>
<li>People - Intelligent, Unique, etc.</li>
<li>MATH AND SCIENCE</li>
<li>Collaboration</li>
<li>Education (Not because it’s a “good school”, but because I love to learn and I could learn a lot there)</li>
<li>Houses/Pranks/Traditions and that sort of environment</li>
<li>Most people aren’t the snobby, stuck-up people who go to schools just because they want to brag or because the schools are number one. They just genuinely want to go there.</li>
<li>Really interesting conversations and ideas.</li>
</ol>
<p>I hope this makes sense… I kind of just rambled on… all of these qualities are equally important… and why hasn’t anybody said the Houses/Pranks/Traditions besides me? It’s a huge part of caltech.</p>
<p>It’s a huge part of caltech, but you’re going to spend hugely more time doing academics than doing traditions. Even if you do find the traditions as awesome as you expect (which is far from a given), Caltech is emphatically not the school to go to if you want nonacademic things to be a huge part of your life.</p>
<p>Please note that this thread was started in 2005. While the question may still be persist in the minds of people just joining this forum, more information is available in other threads.</p>
<p>These are reasons you could choose Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, U. Chicago, …</p>
<p>I don’t think all of their people are generic. And a lot of those schools have insanely good math and/or science.</p>
<p>You should attend Caltech if and only if you want to be surrounded by people who are ridiculously academically oriented and talented, whose math/science interest is their defining quality as students at least (if not as people)…and you feel yourself intelligent enough to enjoy an atmosphere where you’ll be consistently intimidated by the intelligence.</p>
<p>There are brilliant people at every school, but most schools select students based on much less hyper-academic criteria.</p>