At the Student-Faculty Conference last week, there was a lot of talk about admissions and in particular, I heard many students lament that Caltech wasn’t exactly what they expected when they decided to enroll here. This week, prefrosh will come to campus, and perhaps some of them will pick up this newspaper. If you’re a prefrosh, this article is for you. I’m going to try to help you decide whether or not Caltech is for you.

First off, you need to understand one thing: The Caltech undergraduate experience is not a stepping-stone to a six-figure salary or a Nobel Prize. Being an undergraduate at Caltech is not training for the future, it is learning for the sake of learning and living in a truly unique community for four years.

Coming to Caltech means living a particular way of life. Matriculating here is committing to an honor code, a house system, and a series of core academic requirements. If all you want is a sure path to a PhD, contacts to help you form a startup, or an easy road towards medical school, do not come to Caltech. However, if you’re looking to study science, math, or engineering at the highest levels for the next four years, you’ve found the right place.

A rewarding college experience will not be served to you on a silver platter. No matter where you go, you will have to choose your own extracurricular activities, build your own relationships with professors, and define your own career path. You are an exceptional student and with a little bit of personal initiative, you should be happy and successful at any school.

Caltech likes to tout several exceptional qualities: 3-to-1 student/faculty ratio, the highest percentage of graduates going on to earn PhD’s, and a whimsical student life characterized by pranks and traditions. None of these factors should matter to you, because you’re not going to meet faculty, earn a PhD, or pull any pranks without doing the legwork yourself. Put time into those things at another school, and you will get similar results.

There are probably some other factors drawing you to Caltech: perhaps the weather, the tuition, or the U.S News Ranking. Weather changes (sometimes), tuition goes up, and rankings go down, so I would not put too much stock in those things either.

There may also be a few things turning you away from Caltech: limited breadth in humanities and social sciences, the male/female ratio, or the insane workload. If you talk with science majors at other schools, you’ll find out that Caltech students actually take more humanities than they do. The male/female ratio is an easy scapegoat, but the truth is, science nerds don’t get much play at any university. As for the insane workload, I’m not going to sugarcoat it – if you don’t want to work hard, you should go to your state university and major in letters and sciences.

All of these other factors just complicate the question and it is foolish to weigh your college options in terms of imprecise statistics or fleeting impressions. There’s really only one thing you have to ask yourself: Do you love science? If you do, then you’ll find that Caltech provides unparalleled opportunities for you to challenge yourself in the classroom and in the lab. No matter what little problems may arise during your time here, the science will make it all worth it.

If you don’t love science, you’ll spend four bitter years working and complaining, and you might even start saying things like, “The house social life is the only good thing about Caltech.” You’ll meet some of these people on campus, but keep in mind that people who praise the Caltech social life are probably crazy. Once you’re here, there will be plenty of extracurricular opportunities and even some that are unique to Caltech, but please don’t make your choice on those grounds. Come to Caltech for the science, and for no other reason.