Caltech VS Princeton VS Yale

reuynshard
Mon, 01 May 2017 00:02:05 +0000

This is a highly personal decision about the type of college you want to attend. Caltech is the smallest of the 3, which means that it tends to be the quietest, but also the one with the least number of other events, talks, performances, etc. happening on campus. All 3 schools will have people partying but also plenty of people that don’t drink or prefer other activities, so it’s not really a differentiating factor. Another thing to consider is the house system at Yale and Caltech vs the eating clubs at Princeton, which tend to be more stratified.

With regards to machine learning and computer vision, Princeton and Caltech have larger groups, so there might be more research choices, but also more CS majors, so it kind of evens out. Yale has Steven Zucker who has made some pretty fundamental contributions to computer vision, as well as several other CS/Applied Math/ Biology faculty. More than 90% of Science majors at all 3 schools are involved in research.

If you’re looking for breadth of education in other fields, Caltech lacks pretty severely in that aspect. You will get close interaction with professors, but not the same variety of courses as in the other 2 schools. If I’m not wrong, they only have a macroeconomics course only once every few years, for example.