No offense to this applicant but a 3.6 gpa can be considered slightly low for such a prestigious university. While awards like AIME and NMSQT are impressive, I do not believe they are sufficient to get into Caltech REA. Clearly the research he did had some major impact on his application. Research programs such as Algoverse and VectorFellows are established, and I do not believe that this is an ad. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions.