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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV
CMU and MIT are indeed very similar based on impressions from people who went to CMU for undergrad and MIT for grad school.
My impression of MIT undergrads from TAing them is that they're not very different from Stanford undergrads once you remove the humanities majors and athletes Maybe there are some more LARPers or people who don't know how to properly dress themselves at MIT, but not by much.
Caltech is... something else entirely. I went to their grad school visit weekend and the undergrads on campus kind of freaked me out. But I now know a good number of of Caltech undergrad alumni and maybe 3/4 of them seem totally fine and well-adjusted (I know even more PhD alumni, but obviously you can't compare the two).
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Yes. I went on a tour of Caltech in my junior year of high school since I was considering it as one of my colleges. Our tour guide was obviously a genius, nerdy, and probably a little on the autism spectrum, or maybe just a bit of asbergers. But clearly a genius. Mismatched socks, and yes, I swear, as he talks he fondled a magnet. Probably two magnets. Since he was a physics student, the magnetic forces probably appealed to him. He probably dreamed Faraday lines and Maxwell equations.
Caltech I would wager is the highest IQ school in the U.S., maybe even edging out MIT. I think the students at Caltech embrace their nerdiness as a badge of honor, and did so decades before it became fashionable to be a nerd or least pretend to be one, even before the terms "nerd" and "geek" were invented. If you remember the film "War Games", the two nerdy/geeky geniuses that the Broderick character gets computer advice from, probably C.T. grads. Like I said earlier, they didn't set "Big Bang Theory" at Caltech and nearby JPL (that started as a Caltech facility where rockets could be safely tested away from campus) for nothing. The polar opposite of a "football school", although some of the students play a form of football, badly. Why Stanford prides itself on sometimes having good football teams puzzled me, until I realized that Stanford is secure in its elite reputation so they can afford to. Plus football is important to some of the alums. But the band is a joke, so it shows where their heart is, with the nerds.
Most colleges, including the best and smartest, proclaim to adhere to the ancient Greek (or at least Ionnian/Athenian) ideal of balance (the Dorians/Spartans mostly viered to the militaristic pole although some of their colonies did not). The ideal person (if their ability and social position allowed) should be a scholar, cultured, socially adept, politically involved, athletic, and a warrior if necessary. Only a relative few achieved this balance, but some did. Socrates was a genius philosopher, man about town at all the best parties, and a skilled warrier in the Pelo. War, although it didn't end up well for him when a conservative faction took over after the defeat to Sparta and put him to death.
Of course some colleges lean to one pole or the other, the "Spartan" football schools, where football is an important revenue source and gives pride to alums and students, and the "Athenian" academic excellence/balanced schools. Some schools (UCLA, Washington, Michigan, Texas, Stanford etc.) do it all well, academics & athletics. Schools like MIT and Caltech have put in mandatory humanities courses for undergrads, and encourage them to take up sports, or at least keep fit in a striving for balance, not just hard science excellence. While many of our billionaires were nerds, the nerdy/geeky aspects have become somewhat worn down, not entirely. A certain mega billionaire who I will not name still rocks back and forth in his chair, and for all I know, might be rolling magnets in his hand to this day. And honestly, being a nerd became cool when it was observed how rich they often became. The jocks, in most cases, sold shoes or changed tires. The luckier jocks became well off selling cars, or real estate. Very few became pro sports millionaires.
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