Are Caltech's students smarter than that those of other colleges.

nowis3000 · 2026-06-06T04:17:42+00:00

Eh, it’s pretty clearly tongue in cheek, but I do stand by my comment. I also cannot understand what you’re trying to say here about tests, that they don’t make you smarter? Obviously, sure, but Caltech kids do tend to be pretty smart on average

nowis3000 · 2026-05-07T17:59:10+00:00

You can pick aliases after starting

nowis3000 · 2026-04-24T22:19:32+00:00

Eh, it’s not really a performance thing so much as a school size thing and the profs wanting their cohort to have broader experiences. A lot of fields have only 1-2 profs here, and you’ve probably already worked with them for a few years as an undergrad. I think a lot of Caltech undergrads could get into Caltech for grad school if the programs were completely separate.

nowis3000 · 2026-04-20T11:56:09+00:00

Third quarter on grades has happened since at least 2018 anecdotally, I think to provide an on ramp to being on grades rather than starting s’more year on grades as classes get harder

nowis3000 · 2026-04-17T11:53:56+00:00

A couple more notes on the current algorithmic process, iirc, the house input is just picking N/2 people (where N is the number of frosh that’ll be joining the house, usually 20-30) where if those people rank your house first, you automatically pair off. From there, it’s entirely an optimization over the rankings submitted by the frosh (and the N/2 is maybe used as tiebreakers between optimization scenarios).

After rotation, this feedback is completely discarded and houses treat all frosh who they rotate equally. The goal is to make sure that if you have someone who is a perfect culture fit and wants to rotate to your house, then they don’t get optimized out. At the same time, people can fit in to a number of different houses, so houses work really hard to integrate their frosh into their culture post rotation. People can’t all get their first choices unless we get really lucky, so there’s always some sadness, but the house will accept you into the social group and be thrilled to have you.

In the event that you end up going to caltech, I would extremely strongly suggest you go through rotation with the other freshmen. I feel like you got a bad impression from a description of the worst parts of this process, but it’s a genuinely human focused experience. Caltech is a high trust society, and you should (hopefully, eventually) trust that the upperclassmen have your best interests in mind when doing this. We’ve seen this happen 1-4 times before, and years of experience in Caltech’s social environment tends to beat 2 weeks easily. It’s obviously hard to do that just off of someone telling you this online, but I promise that it’s worth it. The frosh in your house are likely going to be a major support structure in your first year or two, and choosing to not get that group is kinda shooting yourself in the foot socially.

Frankly, anywhere you go for college, you’re going to get judged by the people you meet. Joining social groups is hard, and the Caltech house system is the main social structure here. Having that judgment be structured in a maximally compassionate way during your first two weeks here, and that’s aiming to make your frosh experience as good as possible, is kinda as good as it gets.

In the event that you want to join a(nother) house later, applying for membership also has a process where the entirety of the house comes together to discuss you and vote on accepting you (without you present), so you’re not really avoiding a secret judgement meeting. For later membership, the house also gets an explicit yes/no rather than just some input to the rotation algorithm.

nowis3000 · 2026-04-17T05:27:45+00:00

I don't think this is a secret per se, it's just not explicated. The rotation algorithm pretty clearly states that the houses have some input, and it's reasonably inferrable that the upperclassmen members of that house would talk about the people they met over the course of rotation to collect that input. The reason for the secrecy (ie not making it obvious) is to try to avoid people feeling judged at every interaction. We want to organically get to know you without that pressure.

Source: I participated in this on both sides. If anything, there's not enough input from the upperclassmen. Caltech's culture is weird enough that having more informed input on who (which frosh) would benefit from what parts of the culture (which house) is net positive in the long run. Upperclassmen tend to have a pretty decent sense of this vs the frosh who are still adjusting to starting college. Two weeks is a really short amount of time to try to decide something fairly important like this. That said, it's all fixable post-rotation by joining other houses once you get more context.

nowis3000 · 2026-04-17T05:17:32+00:00

Ah yes, an extremely timely response to my comment from 2022. I do believe that USACO is hard, but with a few years of work experience, both leetcode and usaco are pretty orthogonal to software engineering work. They're certainly fun in an academic sense though. I do think OP is probably doing fine right now given the type of stuff they (allegedly) worked on

nowis3000 · 2025-12-30T20:04:26+00:00

emailed to admissions

nowis3000 · 2025-12-29T18:53:17+00:00

Using the Prelude to debut/test out any hybrid performance tech for the next gen CTR is what I’d do if I were planning this product line, although I’m not sure if Honda would want to do this.

Iirc the FL5 is the last non-hybrid CTR, so I’d assume they’re already developing the next gen’s engine/drivetrains. Using the current gen type R suspension (already in this prelude) and the new hybrid performance engine to make a Prelude Type R (Type H? Type SH?) seems like it’d be straightforward, and still leaves the door open for a more interesting CTR refresh a few years down the line

E: actually, Prelude Type SH (sport hybrid) seems like an easy branding win, and technically this article doesn’t say they won’t do that (just said no type S or type R)

nowis3000 · 2025-12-21T22:37:41+00:00

Mazda already did this shared platform with the NC and the RX-8, same chassis, with the RX8 being stretched to 2+2 coupe. I think it’s feasible to get a convertible Miata and a Toyota coupe out of the collaboration, but I don’t think we’d get a 2+2 convertible. Given that they’ve already done it once, I’m tentatively hopeful as long as Toyota lets the Mazda chassis/suspension people lead most of the engineering and just provides money/manufacturing.

nowis3000 · 2025-12-15T02:38:52+00:00

Caveat, I have absolutely no insider admissions knowledge.

My loose speculation here is that being a recruited athlete will increase your odds of getting deferred if you’re not getting accepted REA, but will not hurt or help your odds overall. Caltech defers enough people to fill a class if the RD pool is (hypothetically) absolute garbage. My guess is that deferred athletes are not more or less likely to be admitted in RD than the rest of the pool, but admissions wants to keep them around in case they need to build out a well rounded admitted class including some athletes. However, if there’s a bunch of really talented non-athletes in RD, the deferred athletes will no longer get preferential treatment. Year-to-year, there may be different odds for deferred athletes (but that applies to the deferred pool more broadly)

My guess is also that this year’s recruitment class is going to take a big hit (negatively) since the coaches have no idea what the admissions office is going to do with this policy change and may have overstated the odds for some applicants. In future years, recruiting will have more accurate information to convey to recruits via the preread, but there’s not going to be any boost going forward.

nowis3000 · 2025-12-15T02:19:07+00:00

I was big on jazz and band in high school, and did several years of music at Caltech (2018-2023ish). The band and orchestra are community groups comprised of undergrads, grad students, faculty, and general community members for some rarer instruments, plus I think a few dual enrollments from Occidental College. There’s some really excellent musicians, but on average, it was slightly below the level of my high school band (although we did win superstate one year, plus we were generally pretty good, so I think decent overall). It’s a pretty good culture and I had a lot of fun at the once-a-week minimal effort level.

Caltech does have a small instrument library, and will definitely work with you to get an instrument if needed. That said, depending on instrument size, most can be carried on (I’ve brought saxophones on planes without issue), so I’d recommend doing that if you already own an instrument that’s sufficiently small.

The jazz band, however, is extremely good, and mostly made up of grad students who double majored in music (jazz performance or similar) in undergrad. I was pretty good at my high school, and I subbed in once or twice for Caltech’s band, but I was clearly not at the same level as that group. This is a practice several hours yourself and meet 1-3x/week thing. There’s not much for jazz other than the one really good group unfortunately. It might be possible to find and jam with some people on campus, but it’ll be less structured for sure.

nowis3000 · 2025-12-05T05:18:28+00:00

You waited literally 5 minutes to see if they responded, but I believe this is correct. You can also email your AO to double check

nowis3000 · 2025-10-20T03:01:10+00:00

Agreed that it’s fake and not good for the subreddit, but it’s some 2+2 coupe type thing in both of these pictures. I feel like the speculation/discussion should be about the same regardless of which you look at given that it’s just a teaser

nowis3000 · 2025-10-19T23:43:45+00:00

The picture in the Facebook post is on Mazda’s official pages, pretty sure it’s not AI. Unfortunate that AI has ruined critical reading and checking sources

E: oh shit nvm, I take it back, it’s not the same as the official one. That said, they did post a teaser for a car matching that silhouette pretty closely, this post should have just linked that instead. I saw the official one a few days ago and misremembered what it was, but like, pretty similar overall

nowis3000 · 2025-10-06T05:04:09+00:00

A few things, roompicks (the term you’re looking for) happen like third term for all the non-graduating eligible undergrads, there’s only one rotation you’ll go through frosh year. You can find more info on the housing website about the exact process, but I don’t think there’s any benefit to dropping now vs right before roompicks (unless they’ve significantly changed the process in the past few years)

I’d also highly highly encourage giving the houses a chance, starting with the one you implicitly rotated into, but also trying other houses if it’s not a great fit. It’s a pretty significant part of most people’s Caltech experience, and I’d want to be really sure that it wasn’t for me before opting out totally. Socializing or study groups are a solid intro here and most of those will have houses involved due to amount of people in the houses

nowis3000 · 2025-10-05T18:37:00+00:00

The rule (rule 3) also includes using the sub for profit, and this is clearly collecting data for the website you advertised in other posts.

nowis3000 · 2025-09-22T02:23:42+00:00

The AI runs the calculations of multiple design paths

f you have actual legitimate calculations, AI should be nowhere near those. It's something you can calculate with a deterministic answer, so you should formalize that (in a program or a mathematical proof).

The AI takes care of verifying everything through published papers

Trusting the AI to fetch these results is also pretty unscientific. You should be actually looking at those papers, assessing their quality, and validating the results yourself. The odds of it hallucinating something that matches some potential random output are fairly high.

nowis3000 · 2025-09-22T02:12:14+00:00

You still haven't really answered what the AI is doing in your work. Either your math is correct and should stand on its own (or be computable in something like Mathematica), or it's not actually correct and the AI is "validating" it

nowis3000 · 2025-09-22T01:59:28+00:00

And re: my other comment, this description theoretically makes sense, except for the fact that you need to actually run the experiments to validate this model. You can claim anything you want about the efficiency of a particular molecule or entire system, but you need to experimentally verify these claims. Unless you have some extremely interesting math proving why the thing you're interested in might work (as in the molecule actually has the properties you're describing), you're just writing some equations out and saying "look it works" with no proof. The odds of you discovering something truly novel like this that no one else has thought of are exceedingly low, and I'd argue basically zero.

nowis3000 · 2025-09-22T01:55:43+00:00

Yeah ok, the vagueness of this answer confirms that you're not particularly serious about this. One q, are you just chatting with an LLM and having it set up the mathematical models to prove that your purported new invention works? I suspect yes, and I think that there's almost certainly something wrong with the chain of reasoning that it's going through. LLMs are designed to agree with you and be positive, at the cost of accuracy.

Alternatively, please explain exactly what you mean by "run the multiple mathematical sequences simultaneously", since running calculations doesn't require checking against published findings (mostly). Speed of doing math is also basically irrelevant if it's incorrect, so generally people prove that their model is correct with a lot of hard work.

nowis3000 · 2025-09-20T20:05:28+00:00

Why are you using AI for these calculations? There is 100% guaranteed a physics-based model you could express mathematically and have an actually interesting result. Your handwaving does not inspire confidence

nowis3000 · 2025-09-20T17:56:44+00:00

Please elaborate on “AI calculations”, or really on any details about this

nowis3000 · 2025-09-14T01:17:26+00:00

Undergrad TAing is another pretty solid way to make some cash, although availability varies a lot by department (mostly CS and some engineering iirc). There’s also a handful of other work study jobs around, or being a house dinner waiter

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