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Caltech Awards 10,000th PhD Degree
- WalterBright 6y agoI wound up at Caltech by pure luck, finding an institute particularly well suited to my personality and what I needed. For one example, Caltech has an honor system where the default is for the professors and students to be collaborators and trust each other rather than be adversaries. Thanks, Caltech!
- redis_mlc 6y ago> the default is for the professors and students to be collaborators and trust each other rather than be adversaries. Can you explain why professors and students would be adversaries?
- cowsandmilk 6y agoI knew a professor who was sued by a student over her grade on an exam. Going through that made him keep the originals of each student exam and only return photocopies so that he would have your original work if it ever came to that in court. Toxic event breeding more toxicity.
- WalterBright 6y agoHow very sad.
- redis_mlc 6y agoWell I know that situation is normal in elementary and high school in the US now in the Bay Area from talking to former teachers. (Helicopter parents frequently sue if their child doesn't get an A, so teachers are told to cave in. Teachers say, "I love the students, but the parents are the problem.") I wasn't aware that's an issue in graduate programs.
- saagarjha 6y agoI had a professor brag about a legal battle where he got GitHub to take down a student's submission for the class project (which was of course the same every year) because it contained his "copyrighted material" (read: a mediocre, incomplete MIPS emulator and hacked-together toolchain). Some professors are just not very nice people about these things.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> For one example, Caltech has an honor system where the default is for the professors and students to be collaborators and trust each other rather than be adversaries. What does this mean in practice? Students and staff collaborate in every institution I've ever been part of.
- carabiner 6y agoMaybe professors leave the room during exams. I think a number of universities do this. Outright "adversaries" sounds insane and toxic though. I don't know how an undergrad institution could even function if students and professors were actively trying to undermine each other.
- CurtHagenlocher 6y agoThirty years ago, the exams were all take-home.
- WalterBright 6y agoAt Caltech, they were normally take-home. Institute policy was they were not proctored. The exams had a time limit from opening the exam to pencils down. The conditions, like open-note or open-book, were specified. The students were totally on their own with this and nobody would know if they chose to cheat or not. Cheating was so trivial to do there was no cred for bragging about it. If other students found out someone was cheating, that someone would be ostracized by the students, which was much worse than anything the institute could do to them. Of course, people are people and I'm sure some cheating went on. But I bet it was at a much lower rate than at places with proctored exams. As for me, it was the first time in my life adults trusted me and treated me like an adult rather than a child. I much prefer that to the extended childhood offered by other universities. I was motivated by simple pride to earn the degree rather than cheat and get a tainted one.
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- blkknightarms 6y agoI 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.
- Twisol 6y ago> 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 6y agoIt'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…
- dragonwriter 6y ago> 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.
- balozi 6y agoWould you qualify Caltech as a competitive environment?
- BalinKing 6y agoPersonally, I absolutely would not—collaboration on sets among undergrads[0], for example, is very common (and even officially encouraged) in my experience. [0] I can't speak for the graduate experience, but I'd assume it's also non-competitive?
- WalterBright 6y agoNot really. Institute policy disallowed curve grading. I also found the better students to be generous in helping me understand the stuff. Without them I would have flunked out.
- qwhelan 6y agoThe opening words of ACM95a my year are seared into my mind: "I would like to apologize to the students who took this course last year. I always aim for a mean exam score of 50 and a standard deviation of 10. Last year's mean was 29 and I will attempt to not repeat the mistake"
- WalterBright 6y agoHaha. I remember AMA95's first lecture where Prof Cohen said "the course catalog describes this class as introductory. It is, but make no mistake, it is not elementary." AMA95 had a reputation for being a trial by fire. Doing well in it meant you were going to graduate. Tough as he was, I liked Prof Cohen. He was a no nonsense kind of guy, and obviously enjoyed his subject. I was sorry to read he passed on recently.
- tzs 6y agoAt least I didn't hear about people being haunted by 95 afterwards. For us math majors, who instead of 95 had to take Ma108, it tended to haunt us. For years or even decades afterwards the number 108 would show up. Call a busy tech support line and get put in queue, and you are told "The average wait time right now is 108 minutes". Check after lunch to see if it is time to go back to work...it's 1:08. That number would just show up way more often then it should have. I know one person who fought back. She took the intro to digital electronics class and the intro digital electronics lab class in her senior year, instead of in her freshman year like most people did, which means she took them after 108. For her electronics lab project she built herself a digital alarm clock (the traditional project). But her clock was special. It skipped 1:08, instead holding 1:07 for two minutes than going to 1:09.
- BalinKing 6y agoSimilar anecdote: I deeply believe that Caltech is the best[0] university for me (and that's even while I'm struggling with major burnout due to an insanely rough sophomore year[1]—even though my current situation is decidedly suboptimal, I don't regret a thing). My particular favorite aspects of Caltech are three-fold (in no specific order): 1) The Honor Code and collaborative nature, for the reasons you've mentioned :-) 2) The breadth of the Core and CS major requirements. e.g. I really doubt that I would have found a fascination for physics, without Caltech having required me to take two terms of special relativity and electrodynamics as a freshman. 3) The theoretical focus. Even though I'm a CS major, my classes are often proof-based. One (non-CS-specific) example was Ma 1a, the mandatory first-quarter freshman calculus class: It spent the first two weeks building up the real numbers (i.e. starting from the Peano axioms). Caltech's theoretical-ness has a particularly special place in my heart, because it's one of the big reasons I recently cared to learn about interactive theorem proving and formal verification (which I love so much that I'm working on a undergraduate research project in Coq). [0] (among the universities that I know enough about) [1] I'm honestly a bit hesitant to share about my burnout publicly (since mental health issues can have stigmas and I don't want to shoot myself in the foot re: grad schools or employers), but HN is sufficiently anonymous (at a casual glance) that this feels safe enough.
- divbzero 6y ago> hesitant to share about my burnout publicly Wish this weren’t the case! The more open and okay we are with it the less perceived stigma there will be. We should consider it as typical and normal as physical conditions like asthma or diabetes that many of us have experienced or live with today.
- neolog 6y ago> sufficiently anonymous your name is in your profile
- Eduardo3rd 6y agoI'm not an MIT alumnus, but if I was one I feel like this joke would write itself.
- pedroma 6y agoI wound up at Caltech by pure luck too. Walked there from PCC, which I went to for 2 years (I didn't attend Caltech).
- sova 6y agoCaltech has been around for 129 years, averaging 78 PhDs a year.
- jjice 6y agoI have no frame of reference for this situation, but that sounds like a _ton_
- sien 6y agoList of top 10 US places for doctorates for 2016: Rank Institution Doctorate recipients 1. U. of Texas at Austin 849 2. U. of Wisconsin at Madison 823 3. U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor 819 4. U. of California at Berkeley 796 5. U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities 787 6. Stanford U. 763 7. U. of Florida 730 8. Purdue U. at West Lafayette 727 9. Ohio State U. 716 10. U. of California at Los Angeles 689 https://www.chronicle.com/article/universities-that-granted-the-most-research-doctorates-over-all-and-by-field-fy-2016-244059/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/universities-that-granted-... There were ~55K doctorates issued in the US overall. https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=297405 https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=297405 So really, 78 is a year is pretty low for a place like Caltech.
- bpicolo 6y agoMakes sense - the top schools on the list are over an order of magnitude larger, by student population.
- WalterBright 6y ago> 78 is a year is pretty low for a place like Caltech. Except that Caltech is pretty small. When I attended, the student body, undergrad and grad, was about 1500. It was smaller than my high school.
- hvdfhbj 6y agoInteresting, those are all somewhere in the range between elite and thoroughly respectable. There's no random crap schools you've never heard of pumping out oodles of PhDs every year, which is good news at least.
- scottlocklin 6y agoI'd love figures on how many PhDs are issued broken down by school in timeseries format. JDs don't count. Would be helpful to know who is debasing the currency. Caltech definitely isn't. One of the few actually elite institutions left. No fake subjects either. I'm guessing places like Harvard, UCB and MIT each issued close to 1000 last year. Lower ranked schools, maybe 500 each; probably cumsum to significantly higher than CalTech even with short histories.
- analog31 6y agoWhat currency? Are PhDs fungible? I doubt it. Disclosure: Physics PhD, working in industry for 25 years.
- scottlocklin 6y agoYeah, whatever: I have one too; only 16 years out. PhD is definitely a currency, and no they're not fungible: I'm trying to figure out which ones are actually worth something. In my experience it's a fairly lousy signal. Every Caltech PhD I've met has been sharp as a tack though.
- sdenton4 6y agoDoes CalTech have some institutional advantage driving better quality? I would normally guess that more 'local' factors have bigger effects: personal characteristics, then advisor effects, then department effects, and finally some vanishingly small institutional effect. (or, more pessimistically, larger universities tend to have disadvantages that individual profs and departments might or might not overcome...)
- scottlocklin 6y agoThey have a merit-based admissions reputation at least, and their small numbers keeps it exclusive. On the other hand, most Stanford guys I've met have also been sharp, and they graduate 700 PhDs a year according to someone below.
- lquist 6y agoOne of the most insane stats I've heard: Roughly 1 in every thousand Caltech alumni has a nobel prize
- chrisseaton 6y agoFor context, there are only 603 prize winners total. That's extraordinary.
- bagacrap 6y ago603 prizes*, 934 unique recipients.
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- artemisyna 6y agoWell. This is a random post to be seeing on the HN front page. Yup, Caltech is small.
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- Tomasz_Papka 6y agoOrder french fries & a coke and we will add a Phd from Caltech for free!
- musicale 6y agoImpressive - I want to meet the recipient!
- WalterBright 6y agoFun fact: The Caltech campus is a popular location for Hollywood productions. For example, an episode of the Amazing Spider-Man was filmed there. The photo on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_(TV_ser... is one I took :-) I remember wandering to class one day in a sleep-deprived haze and saw the filming, went back and got my camera.
- gautamcgoel 6y agoCurrent Caltech PhD student here. Happy to answer any questions.
- WalterBright 6y agoAre the following phrases still used - trolling, flicking? how about 3AM runs to Tommy's? and The Ride? finesse vs brute force and ignorance?
- augustocallejas 6y agoBS 2001 graduate here. When I was there, Negative Time Tommy's Run was still a thing (although they did build a Tommy's like 5 minutes away). Also, I wonder how much of the undergraduate culture was visible/apparent to the graduate students.
- WalterBright 6y agoNegative Time must have been new jargon! And true, the only interactions I had with grad students was with TAs.
- augustocallejas 6y agoOh Negative Time Tommy's Run was done the night when Daylight saving time ended, so students could leave campus and come back before the time they left. :)
- WalterBright 6y agoYou just made me LOL. Thank you!
- gautamcgoel 6y agoI have literally never heard of any of these things. I know the undergrads have a very unique subculture here, which grad students aren't really a part of.
- redis_mlc 6y ago"Ph.D.? Sorry, you're overqualified to write CRUD apps for us." lol.
- cdelsolar 6y agoAnyone else Ricketts House? Caltech '04 here. I miss that place sometimes.
- bird_monster 6y agoIn the beginning of my career I hoped somehow my path would take me in the direction of a PhD. It's a thing that I still hold in very high esteem, pretty much regardless of the area of study. The amount of work, expertise and determination still seems incredible to me. As I get older, I get closer and closer to thinking it'll never happen for me. Not because of life or kids or money or whatever, but because I just don't have that amount of commitment to put towards one area of study. Almost a decade (or an actual decade) devoted to just one thing seems insane to me. It's the thing that, if I won the lottery (or my options become of any value), I'd give a shot. Not sure in what really. I'd start with a master's probably. But if I didn't have to care if what I was doing was kind of ridiculous, I would try.
- LetThereBeLight 6y agoI am one of the 39 PhDs mentioned in this announcement. Very unexpected to see this on HN.
- O_H_E 6y agoCongrats
- piotrb 6y agoSheldon Cooper must be proud!
- mensetmanusman 6y agoMore children in the academic family tree! I would love for a well funded organization to use big data analysis to try to build as complete as possible a full family tree of every PhD: http://nghiaho.com/?p=978 http://nghiaho.com/?p=978 It might help show where there a blind spots :)
- hikerclimb 6y agoMost PhD don’t do anything... they shouldn’t be awarded...