What do most people become after graduating Caltech?

cghen
Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:31:24 +0000

Wow, what a little argument I missed on my short vacation…



tiyusufaly:

Yes Joe, we have had some Techers come out onto the Mudd board and portray Caltech as appreciably superior to Mudd, and (I don’t know if this is intentional) put us down.

I think tiyusufaly is actually referring to a couple of posts I responded to on the Mudd forum.

The first case (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=2107188&), was a thread called “CIT vs. Harvey Mudd?”. It turned out that CIT was referring to Carnegie Melon (d’oh!), but I was responding to rocketDA’s anti-Caltech rhetoric:

rocketDA:

First, CalTech boasts a very low student to faculty ratio. It is something like 3-1 or 4-1. Unfortunately, they include research faculty in the count, which you will never interact with as an undergrad. (I know this because I actually just talked to my phyics lab professor today who is full-time research faculty at CalTech and is a visiting professor at Mudd but just decided to come to Mudd as a full-time professor.)

rocketDA:

While CalTech has astounding facilities, they neglect to tell you that 90% of it is off limits to undergrad. I know this from talking to my prof and because I worked at JPL (paid by CalTech) 2 summers ago. This issue is swept under the carpet for undergrad. (As I understand, there are a few acceptions from time to time though.)

rocketDA:

This leads me to my second point, which is that although CalTech is a world-famous research institute, that does not mean that undergrads are guaranteed any research during their four years. CalTech gets most of their money and prestige from the grad school, not the undergrads. You will be taught heavily by TA’s, like my physics lab professor (when she was doing grad at CalTech).

In another post (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=182327&) titled “Mudd vs. Caltech”:

I gave a Caltech perspective on/clarified:

radioactivepb:

the techers ive talked to say they generally dont go to their classes and just learn the material on their own. i don’t know that many techers, so this may not be representative of the entire school, but i think it is. whether this is because the profs are sub par compared to mudd profs, or they have better text books, or they’re just smarter and are capable of teaching themselves most of the material, i dont know. but if you think you’d rather be taught by a prof than teach yourself, maybe mudd is better. then again, if you like the idea of sleeping in till 2 pm every day, maybe caltech is better. oh, and mudd has way better parties

I corrected:

chalk:

why are either smarter?

we have basically the same quality of students, by the numbers.

I explained my position on:

rocketDA:

interpret/apply that influence on the SAT scores. if caltech were SO much better, than we would never be right up there in academic competitions, PhD productivity, and national academic honors.

And I showed that the NSF awards for last year were not indicative of long term trends as suggested by:

tiyusufaly:

As for the NSF fellowships, I found this link: https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do

Just looking at the year 2006, I counted 12 NSF fellowships from Caltech undergrads and 10 from Mudd undergrads. So there is a 6:5 ratio while the total undergrad population ratio is ~9:7. So there you have it.

So tiyusufaly, if you were referring to someone else coming over to the Mudd board (and I looked and couldn’t find anyone), then I’m sorry that I posted this here. Here and in my posts on the HMC board, I’ve never intended to put Mudd down, but when a) students are asking advice over which school to attend, and b) some people on your board are making false claims, I’m certainly going to at least give my perspective.

Also, I think anyone who read this entire thread will be pretty confused why rocketDA felt the need to bring up Mudd in the first place - post #44 is just silly.