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<p>These are reasons you could choose Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, U. Chicago, …</p>
<p>I don’t think all of their people are generic. And a lot of those schools have insanely good math and/or science.</p>
<p>You should attend Caltech if and only if you want to be surrounded by people who are ridiculously academically oriented and talented, whose math/science interest is their defining quality as students at least (if not as people)…and you feel yourself intelligent enough to enjoy an atmosphere where you’ll be consistently intimidated by the intelligence.</p>
<p>There are brilliant people at every school, but most schools select students based on much less hyper-academic criteria.</p>