Why do you want to go to Caltech?

Colleges & Universities California Institute of Technology
9

<p>I’m absolutely in love with Caltech.</p>

<p>Reasons:

  1. The size. And not just because it’s good to have smaller classes and more personal attention from the faculty and graduate students. The small student population breeds more of a spirit of cooperation and collaboration than more competitive schools like MIT and Harvard. It also creates a social climate that seems bizarre to outsiders, but that I wouldn’t trade for the world. </p>

<ol>
<li><p>The Honor Code. I spoke with an alumnus from the graduate school at Stanford, and he’s appalled at their honor code. It had two parts – the students were required to conform to certain standards of academic conduct, while the faculty were required “to not place students in a situation where they might reasonably be expected to violate the Honor Code.” Now what is that? Do you trust your students or not? Someone once told him, “We are not teaching students, we are training colleagues.” He was referring to graduate school, but he told me that it applies to the Caltech undergrad experience as well.</p></li>
<li><p>Southern California. There are enough good schools out there that it’s OK to take into account where you’d like to live for four years when you make your decision.</p></li>
<li><p>Research. This is the single, overriding, mammoth reason that dwarfed all others for me. I want to go to Caltech because I want to do real, meaningful research (not programming busywork) as an undergrad. </p></li>
<li><p>It’s HARD, and I want to be challenged. From the words of a Caltech alumnus I spoke with: “Caltech is soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly, old-and-bitter-at-twenty hard. I think I was lucky in coming from a very challenging high school, because the sudden ramp in difficulty wasn’t as shocking for me as for folks who, like yourself, never felt challenged before they got there. During our orientation we had a speaker tell us to introduce ourselves and shake hands with the person on our left, and the person on our right. “Great,” he said. “Now in two years either you or one of them will be gone.” And sure enough, the guy on my left didn’t last the year.”</p></li>
</ol>

<p>So those are my five main reasons for loving Caltech. It’s good stuff that I feel I can’t get anywhere else but Pasadena.</p>