<p>RacinReaver, I understand your point about the classes here being theoretical in nature (at least I hope that is your point–if you really feel that our courses are simply there to be difficult and not actually offer useful skills; I’m somewhat bewildered) , but keep in mind that almost all of us here are “experimentalist engineers/scientists”. Although theory is much more important here proportionally than at other major universities (i.e., more people choose to study it proportionally) the vast majority of students at Caltech are experimentalists.</p>
<p>In addition, I have found almost all of my classes to be practically geared and useful for application. (EE Major). It’s true that in many cases our classes are more theoretically geared than others, but I see it as offering a rigorous theoretical background with the idea that you as a student can now “recreate” that applications of that background as opposed to simply memorizing the applications.</p>
<p>An example for you: At many universities, feedback amplifiers are taught hand-in-hand with SPICE. It’s a very useful tool, but also sort of a crutch. If you’re allowed to tweak your component parameters in SPICE to get a “better” amplifier, you may learn something–but not as much as you would learn if you had to design the amplifier on paper, manually doing all of the math that SPICE would normally do for you. This isn’t exactly theory, but it’s the same type of fundamentals based learning. We’re given the math necessary, the desired characteristics, and from there we learn the rest.</p>
<p>EDIT: </p>
<p>foo, I think the part dauntless was trying to convey is that you really don’t know what you will do until you get here. In any case, dropping out of Caltech and going home just because you can’t hack physics is ridiculous. You can always become an E&AS major… (you can’t spell EASy without E&AS!!)… what about MechEasy?!? EE has two Es in it so it must be ExtremelyEasy too…</p>
<p>oh and of course there’s always bio :P</p>