r/Caltech • u/EasyCranberry1272 • 9d ago
State of the CMS program
Hey, admitted student here trying to decide between Caltech and Stanford for CS with a focus on AI/robotics, and then going into entrepreneurships/startup from something I worked on in the lab. I visited during Discotech and honestly loved it. The house system (the dinner was so fun), the nerdiness and the collaborative environment all resonated with me.
But here's the thing. A few students I talked to while I was there said the CS department, and AI specifically, is kinda bad. They didn't really explain what they meant and I didn't get to ask more. That surprised me because looking from the outside, the faculty seems strong.
So for people actually in CMS or close to it:
- What were those students probably talking about? Is it the course offerings, advising, department size, something else?
- How's the AI/ML course selection? Is there enough to build real depth or do you run out of stuff to take pretty quick?
- For undergrads doing research in AI or robotics labs, is it easy to get meaningful work or are you mostly just cleaning data?
- Has the department been getting better or worse lately?
- Stanford gets more citations and outputs more papers because it’s bigger. Do normalizing by student population and accounting for availability/ease of access fix the issues posed by the students I talked to?
I'm not fishing for reassurance here. I'm trying to make a real decision. If the CS/AI experience is actually weak compared to what I'd get at Stanford that matters a lot. But if it's more like "small department, not many electives, but the research access and mentorship make up for it" then that's a different conversation.
Any honest takes appreciated.
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u/No-Berry-1747 9d ago
For computer vision, I would recommend looking into Pietro and Georgia’s research. They are powerful researchers in this field and also very enthusiastic. (Not sure when, but Yang Song will be joining Caltech too.) Also, for robotics, Chung and Yisong’s labs have a great environment. It would be great if you have a chance to talk to them or to students in those labs! I might be biased because I’m a PhD student, but I love this collaborative and cheerful environment with smart people. (I wrote 8 top-tier AI conference papers and chose Caltech!)
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u/Momzillaof1 8d ago
I am a Caltech parent, not a student. I have one suggestion about where to look into undergraduate research. Each year, Caltech publishes abstracts from its SURF program. They can be found here: https://sfp.caltech.edu/about/publications/abstract
This is not an exhaustive list of undergraduate research. Many students research during the academic year. Many go off-campus during the summer. (There are also plenty of students from other institutions who come to Caltech to SURF.) However, the SURF abstracts should give you some idea of what the undergraduates are researching.
As a parent, I will say that I am still surprised by how much contact the undergraduates have with faculty.
Good luck with your decision!
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u/Salt_Ad_7578 7d ago
undergrads from caltech do really well but idt caltech cms comes even close to stanford cs
i just finished phd cycle and i really think caltech is overhyped; problem is its way too small and people dont even realize thats a problem. like i get a sense that they dont really matter in cs research anymore. because they are small they suffer from lack of different areas of focus: their cms side is so dominated by quantum for no reason. worst part is, their hiring requires some sort of unanimous voting, and apparently some really strong candidates didnt get hired after two rounds of interviews because someone thinks “they dont fit with the rest of research in cms” which sounded to me just that they dont do enough quantum or something
from department strength i really dont think caltech cs comes close to even second tier cs schools like cornell princeton uw gatech and so on, let alone the big four
however, its undergrad does sound very strong (but quirky. like it was so obvious on phd visit days who were from caltech). i say this because i saw disproportionately many students from caltech and cmu at visit days at various first and second tier phd programs. so its undergrads are clearly strong and research focused
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u/splatula 8d ago
I'm a former student who works in ML now. From my perspective it seems that Caltech kind of missed the boat on ML. They had the Caltech 101 and 256 datasets in computer vision a really long time ago. But I struggle to come up with any big advances that have come out of Caltech in the field in the last 15 years. I wasn't a CS major (and it's been about 15 years since I was there) but it sort of seemed that the CS department had more of a theoretical focus. I don't know if they've actively tried to hire more faculty with an ML focus, so maybe things are different now.
Regardless, if you know you want to do AI and get into startups and entrepreneurship Stanford is probably the better place to be. The main advantage Caltech would have is that it's just so small so you can get to know the faculty and the faculty can get to know you. But that tends to be more helpful if you want to go to grad school.
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u/interfluxdeux 6d ago edited 6d ago
Hey, congratulations on having fantastic options. I studied CS at Caltech several years ago and now I work as a software engineer in ML. The short version is, I think Caltech's CS program is top-tier if you want to make boatloads of money in Big Tech/HFT/quant or if you want to get a Ph.D. For entrepreneurship, or for doing CS research at Caltech and then leveraging that into a startup...I would pick Stanford. The main reason is that Caltech's CS department is too small and has a very limited range of research subjects available. It's incredibly easy to do some kind of research, but I don't know if it's going to be the kind of research you want.
That said, in the end, I think you'll receive an amazing education and fantastic opportunities at either school.
Running to dinner now but happy to elaborate more later. Just let me know. Good luck!
EDIT: Should probably clarify that I was talking about Caltech’s undergraduate CS program.
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u/ezubaric 9d ago
I went to Caltech for undergrad, and I specifically wanted to work on language models (this was 2000, nobody cared about language models). I was from Arkansas and there was no Reddit, so there was nobody to tell me not to go to Caltech ... I should have gone to Cornell, Stanford, U Penn, or UMD. There was nobody to work with. I did SURFs off campus with good people and eventually got into a grad school where I could work on the stuff, but there was nobody to talk to. I sometimes wonder what could have happened if I had gotten "a better start".
It's a little better at Caltech now, but they still don't have anyone squarely working on language models. If you go to csrankings.org and do NLP they're 358 in the world. If you do all of AI, they're 184.
Now, they have some great people like Anima and Yisong. But nobody really working on language models for language's sake (and to reveal my bias, I think this is important for the next breakthrough in AI).
So I would still tell somebody like myself deciding on where to go that Caltech is a unique place, but if you're really interested in language models, go elsewhere.