[WalterBright]

A friend of mine dropped out of Caltech due to bad grades. I ran into him a decade later, and he said he'd recently graduated from Caltech, having gone back and gotten A's.

I asked him what changed, did you get smarter?

He laughed, and said no, this time I was willing to work.

[cdelsolar]

I’m an alum and know several people who did the same thing - dropped out and came back 10 years later and finished.. Caltech was often nice about it and I believe they didn’t have to reapply.

[ldc_or_dmd]

Did he have to reapply? Acceptance rates have gone pretty steadily down at most worthwhile colleges since the 1970s. It would be surprising if a candidate got more attractive to a school as time went on.

I'm kind of curious about the process of applying to Caltech overall, as someone who didn't have the opportunity to apply to anywhere at 18, but would very much like to when I get the chance. If a person wants to get into an elite university like it or MIT, what should they optimize for? I've known people with near-perfect SAT scores that didn't get into either. Is it mostly luck-based, after what few obvious things you can control?

Sorry, I know this is probably the most frequently asked question you get any time you bring up your alma mater.

Thanks for making D, by the way!

[WalterBright]

He did not have to reapply. Caltech's stance is once you're admitted, you are welcome to come back and keep trying. I know one who came back multiple times. Your credits don't expire, either, like they do other places. It's one of the great things about Caltech. The administration was just made up of nice people.

I can only speak for the process that was in place when I applied back in the 70s. I sent them a letter asking for an application, which they sent to me. I filled it out, and sent it in with a check for the application fee. Nobody helped me with it, nor was I coached.

They had some specific requirements, like you had to graduate from high school, but I knew one person they waived that for.

What they looked for was a triad:

1. high school success 2. high SAT scores 3. evidence you're a highly motivated person

You had to have all three. And it worked for Caltech - being around smart people can be fun, being around motivated people can be fun, being around smart and motivated people means you're going to have more fun than you ever thought possible.

Caltech wasn't a place where you talked about football. If you wanted to have Carl Sagan drop by the dorm and talk about silicon giraffes, that was what was fun. If your room was next to Hal Finney's, that was fun. If a couple doors down was a guy who designed and built a working computer out of NAND gates, that was fun. If the guy 4 doors down built a powerful amplifier, and set up a giant set of speakers at the nodes of the hall and hooked it to a signal generator to emit sound below the hearing range, but was at the resonant frequency of the building, so it soon would start to go whump whump whump ... hahaha I was never bored for 4 years. Never.

I'd be a bit careful about optimizing for it. You really have to want to go there, and for the people who thrive there, it just is who they are. Caltech just wanted to be sure that the ones they admitted would be a natural fit, not an optimized fit. If you're not a natural fit, you won't be happy there, and will drop out. Nobody wants that.

I was told years later that they were skeptical about my application, and so sent someone out to interview me. He couldn't get a word in edgewise as I went off on all the projects I was working on, showed him diagrams of them, etc. He told the committee he thought I was worth taking a chance on.

I was rejected by MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, despite being legacy for MIT and Harvard.

> Thanks for making D, by the way!

You're welcome! Working on D is a great pleasure of mine. The way Caltech was run is how I've tried to run the D Language Foundation. In many ways the DLF community is our very own Caltech :-)

[owyn]

I've heard stories, my dad went there in the early 60's as a physics major, dropped out and then got a PhD in asian history from a different school, then lived in Japan for a while, taught university history for a while, then came back to the US and became a computer programmer (Cobol mostly) until he retired. He told stories like that but I didn't really believe it until the movie "Real Genius (1985)" put it on film. From what I hear, the pranks in the movie are lame shadows of the real ones but it's a movie and it gets the vibe across for me. Trying to understand my dad a little, that movie helped. Anyway, Caltech sounds cool. And the guy living in the closet would be doing crypto or AI now. :)

His last project was trying to write a comprehensive history of Japan for wikipedia. I helped him upload it and it's buried in Wikibooks somewhere now and I like to think that some of his work is going to end up in the training material for some future AI like a ghost.

[WalterBright]

Yes, Real Genius gives a sense of what Caltech life was like (except for the absurd ending). The director wanted to film it on the campus, but Caltech (normally very accommodating to Hollywood) refused, thinking it would be bad publicity. So the director found other buildings built in the same style, so it looked like Caltech anyway.

When I was there, one year we built a railroad that ran through the dorm, and another year a jungle cruise with boats.

[hodgesrm]

Doing the homework and showing up to class do wonders for academic performance. Many people (me included) have learned this the hard way.

[WalterBright]

I learned it the hard way, too.