<p>Hi, i've read many post on college confidential about caltech and have read about it's difficulty and want to know if I would surive at caltech or if I should instead attend Berkeley. As an admitted caltech student, I would like to know if it would be "too hard" for me? Most prefrosh and undergrads I talked to at prefrosh weekend were coming with private schools or rigorous public schools and most had experience with linear algebra and differential equations. I've however only gone up to calc BC. Also, most students had been admitted also to multiple other top schools like MIT, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, but I've been rejected from both MIT and Stanford, as well as Berkeley's Reagent scholarship; would that mean I only got admitted due to luck and do not really have the skills to survive at caltech? Even in my public highschool that is not considered anywhere near rigorous, I have had difficulty earning A's. Moreover, I have absolutely no math and science background in anything outside of AP Calc BC, AP Physics B, and AP Chem and have not been reading college textbooks since 6th grade or anything like that. And I don't even fully understand what epsilon means.
any response would be much appreciated and thank you.</p>
<p>Do you have a passion for learning? Are you willing to work double hard to make up what you are lacking in education? You aren’t behind - there are appropriate classes for you to take. Caltech believes you will survive.</p>
<p>Only you know what your heart desires and are capable of handling. Caltech isn’t really easy for anyone.</p>
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<p>This. Certain parts of Core are easy for people who have already seen the material but a relatively small amount of people find all of Core easy and a large number of people find all of Core hard. That’s one of the points of Core. </p>
<p>I personally found core math and chem pretty easy but core physics is hard for me because a good number people have already seen calculus-based physics before. However, many of those people who find physics easy found chem very difficult.</p>
<p>If you got into Caltech, you CAN do the work but not everyone rises to the challenge of Caltech; that depends on work ethic and not previous knowledge.</p>
<p>There is a group of people who struggle a lot at Caltech, and either don’t graduate, or end up with GPAs that severely curtail some options (like going directly to graduate school). I don’t think its fair to say that all of these people just “didn’t rise to the challenge”. I do think that work ethic and native mathematical ability are both much more important to getting good grades at Caltech than high school preparation. It’s not entirely obvious how to tell whether you have either - I doubt there are many people who come to Caltech imagining that they will be slackers, but some people end up doing it anyway. I did not find my public high school classes to be trivial (and even…gasp…got a B in a science class), and I did fine at Caltech, though the first year was tougher for me than for those with a better preparation. I don’t know much about Berkeley, but I didn’t get the impression it was exactly easy there either. If you have a strong preference based on the social scene, I would go with that - it’s a lot easier to work hard if you’re happy otherwise. I’m also almost positive that less than 1/2 of Caltech students come from private schools.</p>
<p>Berkeley is not easy, but there are easy options. You do not have to take a large core of relatively intense material in all sorts of mathematics and science fields. </p>
<p>I think that hardcore experience can be good for some people, but my impression is it works better for people who already are pretty strong at math and science and will just take the classes without finding them totally out of the ballpark harder than anything they’ve ever done. For those who find those classes a drain, it can suck time and energy away from doing other things.</p>
<p>That said, Caltech is a small school, and I imagine a lot of its students belong to the category of perfectly able to (with some struggling) get through what it requires of them.</p>