People at Caltech v Stanford

tech_fan
Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:47:03 +0000

Yes. I agree with everything that’s been said and have a few small things to add.

At Caltech, everything is more concentrated, so you are likely to find what you want, if it exists, without a great deal of effort searching. If you want to do research in a certain field, you may have to ask 2 professors to get an offer as opposed to 5 or 8 at a bigger school where there is more competition. If you want to talk about Asian history or moral philosophy, you are likely to know the people in your class with a similar interest. You won’t have to seek them out through clubs or other circuitious routes. But there won’t be a huge number of them, either.

At a bigger school like Stanford, there are definitely MORE students (in absolute numbers) with any given interest, and MORE research in most fields going on, but it becomes a challenge to find and integrate those things into your life. If you are very proactive and are ready to seek out opportunities to connect with people who share your interests, then you are likely to find more of them at Stanford. But they won’t come to you, and you are unlikely to just know them personally beforehand the way you are likely to know a majority your Caltech classmates.

It’s definitely true that you are very unlikely to find a dinner table (say, 8 people) at Caltech who all care about the nuances of criminal sentencing or Rembrandt and have read deeply and thought hard about those things. Sometimes I was disappointed by this, because I felt like the non-science interaction at Caltech was sometimes pretty shallow. But this turns out to be true at most places. Admitting better-rounded students does not lead to that kind of dinner discussion.

It’s just that at Stanford, if you really care about criminal sentencing or Rembrandt, you can join the Mock Trial team or sit in on a Law School class; you can join an art or literary magazine and meet people with your particular interests. Harvard is an even more extreme version of this. There are many, many more extracurricular opportunities than at almost any other school, but you have to be proactive in finding them and being accepted as a part of them.

So this decision is going to depend very, very heavily on your personality. If you are the kind of person who will actively go out and meet people you don’t know through clubs and such just so that you have good, broad interaction, then you definitely should aim for Harvard or Stanford – places with lots and lots of people and a huge variety of different activities. If you prefer diversity to come to you, Caltech is a better bet. Somewhat paradoxically, it seems that most people who are not very outgoing who go to big (even very good schools) end up hanging out mostly in their major or with a few kids they met freshman year.

These opinions should be taken with a very healthy grain of salt, because I’ve never spent time at big school except for a year part-time at Princeton (and that’s not Big by Stanford or Harvard standards). But nevertheless I feel unusually certain that this post isn’t too far off from the truth.