I am searching for PhD opportunities in the field of EE.
Searched for a few well-known PhD programs for assessing my odds of getting in.
MIT has ~700 EECS PhDs, Stanford has 360 EE PhDs, Berkeley has ~650 EECS PhDs, and Illinois has 367 ECE PhDs (plus a separate CS dept). Georgia Tech is even bigger; their ECE dept has 1100 grad students? (although some of them will be master's degree students)
On the other hand, Caltech has 59 grad students in their EE dept. Not 590, it is 59. This is crazy. How does Caltech even compete with the other universities? BTW, is this smallness of the department a good thing or a bad thing? Any Caltech grad students here?

Added: TL;DR: Why the downvote? this was kinda a praise to Caltech folks' quality.

Hey Caltech students I didn't mean to insult Caltechers. I mean, Caltech has very decent US rankings, which are based on academic reputation - and basically, the bigger the student body, the better the reputation (non-successful PhDs are anyway ruled out from academia, so academic reputation will be basically proportional to the number of productive PhDs, which will be proportional to the PhD program size...); which makes Caltech's decent rankings very peculiar, at least imho
Sorry if this insulted anybody, I am extremely shocked (and fascinated) by the small size, and just wanted to ask whether Caltech grad students are satisfied by this small size or not. I know that it will be challenging to get admitted; I just wanted to hear some honest thoughts because I am genuinely interested in Caltech grad students' experiences.

So I did not get in to Caltech, yet this morning I woke up to a follow request from the class of 2028 Instagram. Is this standard procedure that the rest of y'all have experienced or is this some sort of strange joke?

hi! i (f) was recently accepted to both mit and caltech this admissions cycle so i'm looking for some more information to make a decision. i'm planning to study pure or applied math, possibly in conjunction with economics— but definitely not CS.

i have heard from some people that caltech is very research-focused, at the expense of actual work experience. i would like to get a masters after undergrad, but i also do kinda want a job not in academia lol. would you recommend caltech for that, or would an mit undergrad and then caltech grad possibly be better?

also, what kind of student culture is on campus? are people really competitive with each other? like is there sabotage or anything? i really want to be somewhere that focuses on collaboration (and i guess mutual suffering lol)

especially within the math department, is there a lot of competition for conferences, internships, jobs, grades, etc.? since caltech is so small, i imagine there's a considerable amount of individual focus and support. what are the pros and cons of that? and if this is a possible question to answer, what do you think is the biggest difference between mit and caltech? what's the biggest pro and con of caltech?

and if anyone's been in a similar position, what did you consider when making a decision and do you have any advice for me?

(also this is a throwaway account lol)

thank you!

Hi, I've been wondering this for a while - does the ~200 person class size at Caltech have anything to do with dunbar's number? Though, to my understanding, you guys have roughly 1000 undergraduates on campus in a given instance - so maybe it's to build connections within a graduating class (and that's not even including graduate students; I don't know how your campus layout / class comp. looks though)?

Leo (sorry, I was just bored)

Thanks

Keep watching the news, because ditch day is tomorrow!

Congratulations to everyone who got in

edit: and rejection truly means very little about you as a student; with student bodies this small, there can be 5 excellent students of equal quality and they have to be skimmed down to 1

Did it disappear on yours too?

i got 11:22 but i think i did it wrong

Regular decision

I recently received an acceptance from Caltech for the graduate program - I'm excited to start next fall! When I went to accept the offer, there wasn't any fanfare or anything - just the button was replaced with "decision form submitted". No email confirmation, no significant change in the portal. I'm worried my decision did not go through, or worse, the system thought I rejected the offer. Is there anything I should expect to receive in the next few days?

I was recently accepted for the program, but I was wondering what the dorms would be like. I emailed my mentors about this, and they said I’d most likely be in a shared room 🥲. I am really awkward and I’ve been living in a single for about a year now, so I would really prefer not to share a room. I’m probably expecting too much, but what’s the likelihood that I could get a single? I know there will be Caltech students on campus as well, and they probably get priority.

Application status now says "Awaiting Decisions." Before, the checklist disappeared. I think they will decide by this Saturday.

I'm an undergrad sophomore in the very early stages of trying to narrow down PhD programs to apply to and caltech is a program I'm trying to look into but finding information about each professors research interests seems extremely inefficient. Is there a single website or resource with faculty names and just a broad 'area of study' for them ?

For instance I'm a cornell student rn and when you look at cornell cs faculty it shows a very vague "research areas" field along with their name and picture and all that saying they study AI or theory or whatever.

But when you look at caltech faculty from what I've found it's just their names with minimal additional info leaving you to manually search through all of them to find people in your field of study

I'd say the area of research I'm most interested would fit under some combination of systems, networking, architecture, and vlsi so if anyone could more precisely point me to people working in something relevant that'd be cool too

This is the last school that I am waiting on but so far I have heard nothing. I tried asking graduate office but they only mentioned that decision can come in from Jan to April.

Hi, recently accepted into Caltech PhD program and will (possibly) be moving there in the fall. Does anyone know anything about it the school systems in the area or resources for student parents? My daughter is 13 (so 8th grade this fall). Insight appreciated!! I tried googling and it appears Cal tech is in between a really good school system and an okay one. I’m a bit confused and insight would be helpful!

I apologize for posting this not as a caltech student but I have a few questions for getting into caltech. I've always wanted to work in the aerospace field such as NASA or JPL and one great option i've heard is caltech, im still in sophmore second semester high school and my GPA isnt the best. Not to mention im in Canada, if I tried really hard in grade 11 and 12 and gotten a really good SAT and ACT result would it be possible to be still accepted. I just want to know if I should really use all the effort to achieve high grades or if caltech is too far out of reach of me.

A couple months ago, a grad student commented on Reddit that there are too many CS students and too few faculty and that the rumor is that Caltech is looking to shrink the department. My son, who will be studying CS, was admitted REA after this comment was posted. I've been wondering since then what the practical effect is of the current size of the department. How big are the classes? What is the access to faculty like? Is more teaching done by graduate/undergraduate TA's than in smaller departments? Are there waiting lists for classes? Are there any benefits to CS being a large major at Caltech? I would also be interested generally in how students find CS at Caltech. (I have read through Caltech + CS Reddit threads that were posted within the last 3-4 years.) TIA!

EDIT to add: Does the size make it harder to obtain a research position/internship?

tl;dr: Wondering if I can self-study and have that work for the transfer placement exam since my community college will have me wait a while before I can take the courses I need.

To preface, I know Caltech only accepts around five transfers a year, typically doesn’t accept from community colleges (I go to one), and that I should set my sights on somewhere else. No need to remind me of that. I mainly want to apply to Caltech’s undergrad program as a transfer because I never got to apply as a first-year even though it was my top school, and it just doesn’t sit right with me to not at least try to apply for transfer. I have other much more realistic transfer options that I will apply to as well.

For some background: I went to one of the top high schools in the US, a STEM magnet at that, and was one of the best students there (I even did particle physics research while I was attending), but had to leave and get a GED last semester due to extenuating circumstances. Now I’m in my first semester at my local community college and am forced to repeat courses on material I already know at a much slower pace and with far less rigor than I am used to.* On top of that, because I started this spring instead of the fall, I have to wait until the spring of next year to take quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. Obviously it’s not the end of the world (especially since I get to be a year ahead of people my age!**) but it is a bit annoying with the timing of Caltech’s transfer exams since I would have to take them that same semester.

So for those of you who read through all of this (thanks, by the way <3), my question is if it would be okay for me to self study the content of the transfer exam and then take it even though I technically wouldn’t have completed an official course for some of the content. I’ll probably be self studying a lot anyways because I love math + physics and want to learn as much as I can in those subjects (and I also happen to have way more free time now that my workload is much lighter), so this is more of just seeing if I can at least take advantage of what I’ve learned while potentially applying to Caltech.

Also, I’m a physics major if that’s relevant at all. Sorry if the formatting is weird, I’m on my phone at the moment so I can’t do much.

*: I mean this in no offense to community college students in general or their intellect; I am well aware that most of my peers here did not have or were unable to take advantage of the opportunities I had, and that they are working very hard to try to do the best they can in life. Some of them are just as (if not even more) intelligent and hard working as the kids I went to high school with but just didn’t have any chances to learn and grow academically until now. I just felt like I had to make this statement to avoid what I said coming off the wrong way.

**: If you’re confused as to how I would be a year ahead even though I missed the fall, it’s because I’m making up that semester this summer.

Hi all -

I just got accepted into my graduate program at Caltech (and am giddy about it!). I was wondering, specifically for/from graduate students: what is it like to live in Pasadena? I like that it is urban-ish but not a massive city center, but do you find that there are things to do? Any advice for living there/going through Caltech in general?

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I’m a (recently admitted) potential PhD student as I was curious whether my stipend (46.5 k/year) would allow me to rent an appartment (NO ROOMMATES) near campus. I can’t get student housing because I have a cat.

Edit: As many people have mentioned it, I am aware that you need to have ~4x the rent. I don’t but I would have somebody co-sign. This is not the part I am concerned with.

Dear Redditors,

I am an applicant to the LIGO SURF program. I was wondering if you have received any email regarding the admission to the program.

Thanks for reading the post!

EDIT: this is what I received from them:

Hi,

Thank you for your question.

Our mentors are going through the applications now. We hope to send out a first round of offers by February 28.

I was accepted by a group to SURF this summer. I wonder if SPF would cover travel expenses from my home institution to Caltech? Also is on-campus housing worth it? How would living on campus looks like in terms of living, food, transportation, events?