Can I Get Into Caltech? | Tips From a 13-Year-Old

[radium]

Even if you have a special talent it is still random. A lot of the people do and they want something different each year. For example, they may have a lot of other people who are good at coding applying that year so you will have more competition. Maybe they will choose one of the other people because they also have another thing that they want (maybe they play bassoon and they want another one for the orchestra). Another possibility is that they already admitted a lot of coders the previous year and don't want any this year.

I have seen world class violinists and even people on chemistry/physics etc Olympiad teams get rejected from these schools (or they may get into MIT but not Stanford etc.) You can never be sure if you get into one of these schools. There are a lot of very talented people you are competiting against. There will always be someone who is as good or is better than you.

 

[Call me James]

You make a good point. Although I wouldn't call it completely random. If you achieved great things in High School, that's a heads up to the school that you will probably go on to do great things in the future. Schools love money. If they see that you can achieve incredible things they will take that for an example, and with your achievements, you may make money and donate to the school. They don't want to miss their next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. I may not turn out to be either of them although they would have done similar things that I plan to do.

 

[radium]

But one of the points I am trying to make is that the admissions committee may not always make accurate judgements of one's ability. Sometimes they miss someone verybtalented and instead take someone who really shouldn't have been admitted. The undergrad admissions committee is not made up of famous professors, Mark Zuckerbergs, etc. Some admissions officers are literally still in their twenties. These are all just things to keep in mind when thinking about these schools. The competition to get accepted is tough and that general attitude pervades the campus culture. Not everyone is cut out for it, even people who have the intelligence to succeed. It's very easy to get lost, and if you are not assertive you will not get the most out of the experience. For example, if you just attend lecture and complete the required tasks, you may not interact with your professors much if at all (it also depends a lot on the department). You can take two people who attended the same classes in the same major and they may have a completely different experience because of how they went about their education.

If you do not mind solely taking classes in your course of study, I would consider Oxford, Cambridge and ICL to be just as good as the top U.S. schools. I actually hear the students in the U.K. are much happier and I kind of wish I could go there myself.

 

[Logical Dog]

Yeah, this was what I was talking about. I have to shine through with my coding abilities.

CODING is not all there is to know about computer science...
computer science is the field of study of algorithms, operating systems, computer architecture, software, networking, ethics, programming languages. data...i forgot the rest.

What is the major you actually want to do? :) maybe try and understand these other aspects at a general level too!

 

[e.bar.goum]

Odds are better if you aim more for a top 75 or so school for undergrad, earn a 3.9+ GPA in your favorite STEM major, hit a home run on the subject GRE, publish a few papers as an undergrad, and secure outstanding recommendation letters.

Getting into top 10 schools for grad school is much easier than for undergrad. The above considerations may sound tough, but at least there is a well-defined path with a high probability of success.

+1. Also, there are multiple* universities in Australia in the top 75 schools in the world. I would encourage the OP to go to one of those, and not go into a huge amount of debt for undergrad. You can get an excellent education in Australia.

*5, going by Times, 6 by QS. ANU, Uni Melb, USyd, UNSW, UQ, Monash. Odds are very good that the OP lives close to one of these universities.

 

[Vanadium 50]

James, I don't think we are getting through to you. You think your odds are 30%, when in fact they are closer to 19,000:1. Nineteen thousand! That's a 99.995% chance that you won't get in.

You don't want to put the effort into getting the best possible marks in every class? OK - but I assure you that someone else in this pool of 19,000 did. You like to code? So do the other 19,000. You code well? Fine - but do you do so better than all 19,000?

You can't plan your future on a 1/19,000 chance. You can't even plan it on a 1/3 chance. You need to work our butt off just to have a chance at these schools and you still need to apply elsewhere - like Australia.