[blkknightarms]

I made a huge mistake of not applying there and to MIT. I was concerned about the heat in Pasadena and the piles of snow in Boston (silly me. why don't Ivy's relocate someplace nice like Hawaii?). I aced the math SAT-I section without studying and was in GATE and NMS. Instead, I went to a top 50 public state research uni (that became a party school just as I got there) because it was a sure thing. I think I learned more and developed more initiative because it was so sink-or-swim, and the standards were high and the assistance was low. I even hustled an undergrad paid research gig in a top security lab to fix grad students' and postdocs' network code that looked like spaghetti after being puréed in a blender.

[dragonwriter]

> I made a huge mistake of not applying there and to MIT. I was concerned about the heat in Pasadena and the piles of snow in Boston (silly me. why don't Ivy's relocate someplace nice like Hawaii?).

Neither MIT nor Caltech are Ivy League schools.

[Twisol]

> I was concerned about the heat in Pasadena and the piles of snow in Boston

As a native Californian living in Pasadena, I also hate the heat -- but, unlike Boston (in my experience), air conditioning is standard, and makes the outside situation matter far less. (It's also not usually that bad, and it's almost always a dry heat.)

The one time I visited Boston (for an undergraduate research program), it was frosty the first few days, and then hellishly humid every day thereafter. The dorm I was staying in didn't really have temperature control, and I got the sense that AC wasn't as common.

Your mileage may vary!

[saagarjha]

It's not even that hot in Pasadena. Like, it gets warm in the summer, you may want to stay inside and turn on the AC, but it's typical southern California weather…