How to Write the Caltech Admissions Essays

 By Sarah O'Neill, Supreme Editing, Coatesville


CALTECH Excerpt

 

“Research-driven. Change-motivated. Well-rounded. Sleep-deprived. We're your people.”

 

According to Caltech admissions (via their website): Remember, Caltech is an unapologetic STEM institution. Literally, there is no way to write about too much STEM in your supplemental questions. So lean all the way in on the STEMiest of STEMmy topics (yep, those are made-up words but totally appropriate). Review our What We Look For page before you get started.

 

Caltech's mission – to cultivate learning, discovery, and innovation for the benefit of humanity – relies on its community members embracing fundamental Caltech values:

o   Openness and enthusiasm for having preconceptions challenged

o   Respect and appreciation for the idea that, while we are all members of the same community, the opportunities we've had to develop, showcase, and apply our talents have not been equal

o   Passion for the ideal that science can and should meaningfully improve the lives of others

 

In history, the types of students admitted consisted of people who wanted to solve societal problems, were focused on building a better community through service and leadership, and discussed passion for STEM projects, experiences, and research. Sample essays show strong storytelling strategies that reveal character through personal realization and growth. Students displayed specific leadership and community service opportunities and highlighted their passions that have evolved through opportunities in STEM-related fields. 


Supplemental Essay Example:

Prompt: I’ve seen tons of sci-fi movies that discussed how AI technologies can be misused for individual benefits or that robots will finally turn over the world. These movies have always prompted me to think about how I can improve the current technology and build an AI that is perfectly harmless but still maintains all the advanced functions. Especially, I want to solve the privacy issues created by intensive image recognition algorithms in current surveillance systems. I experiment this dream in my individual research where I made crowd estimation algorithms privacy-protecting by using thermal images as input. Coming to study at Caltech, I want to continue to explore this dream and finally create the AI recognition camera that can operate without any privacy concerns.

I aimed to collaborate with people from different disciplines in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program. To avoid privacy issues, the hardware of the surveillance camera needs to be adjusted so it senses human characteristics instead of taking actual pictures. So I need to collaborate with people from electrical or mechanical engineering to identify the right type of sensor that can detect the essential characteristics and still keep a low battery consumption. I’m currently thinking about thermal cameras and carbon dioxide sensors, but I bet people who are specialized in those areas can give me better suggestions. After the hardware, I would be predominantly working on building the AI algorithms that use the sensor inputs on the camera to identify human figures. I might need help from biology students to figure out essential characteristics that can separate humans from other objects in the scene. Finally, after we integrated the software and the hardware, we need to collect data in the Caltech community to train and test out approach. We might also need help from art students who can make an elegant and simplistic product design for our camera.

When we had the finished product, I hope to implement it in the real world through the help of The Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships (OTTCP). I could either start my own company or collaborate with existing companies or the government.

 

 

 



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