Brent's Blog

Anyways.

Just had a Bawls and a Mountain Dew, I'm wired.

Time to talk a little about what I saw on the college visits. CalTech, first off is a pretty large campus for a school with 900 undergraduate students, the reason for this is that the school is also home to 1000 grad students. The school has a research focus, so the professors come to the school to do research, and teach on the side. They put a major emphasis on how many Nobel prize winners teach, had taught, or had graduated from CalTech (31 if you're curious). Student life looks rather, um interesting at CalTech, the undergrads don't live in traditional dorms, they live in what are essentially frat houses. Each house a hundred or more people in it who are supposed to live together as a tight-knit community. That's great and all, but if you look at these houses it's plain that their lifestyle is a tad more unruly than the traditional dormitory. Wrecked furniture was strewn about, the hallways were painted black, with murals depicting dark or drug related themes throughout the house, plus the individual rooms didn't look all that great either. Now, I know I shouldn't be picking colleges based on the dorms, but I think it says something deeper about the school and the students who attend it. I'm not sure that CalTech is for me.

Harvey Mudd College, on the other hand, was a thoroughly pleasant to visit. The campus is very nice and well laid out (the school is somewhat smaller than CalTech with about 190 students incoming each year). The dorms were well cared for and planned out. Every four dorm rooms made up a suite with independent living spaces and bathrooms. There are no graduate students at HMC, so the focus is just on teaching, though there are research opportunities for research available to undergrads. After taking a tour of the campus and eating lunch in the dining hall I sat in on a class. The class was Java programming (which is required in the core curriculum at HMC), and I found myself able to understand most of the stuff being taught (thanks, Isaac). The professor was nice and the whole class was very informal, I like an easygoing environment like that. So out of the two colleges I've seen so far I really like HMC over CalTech. I took some pictures of the HMC campus, I'll post them when I get them developed.

I came home from the PSAT and slept for a few hours before karate. Sensei has been stressing basics a lot for the people taking the dan exam on Friday. I'm part of the registration team for the Western States Tournament on Saturday. We have to be there at 6 AM, so Kelly is going to pick me up. Saturday is going to be a very long day.

¶ 1:13 AM

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