Life moves pretty fast. One moment you’re lamenting with your FRC teammates that you barely missed World’s this year, and the next you’re reading an acceptance letter from the California Institute of Technology to go study there, complete with an invite to this thing called ‘DiscoTech’.
What’s DiscoTech? It stands for Discover Caltech, our annual admitted students yield event. It’s a multiday program where you get to meet all your future classmates and are introduced to all the cool stuff happening on campus. You’ll see demos from research groups in a variety of different fields, have a mock club fair to get a sense of the extracurriculars possible, and of course get to tour Los Angeles.
The most salient thing for me from my time at DiscoTech was, unironically, the friends I made. It’ll be a hectic few days for sure, but you’ll meet a bunch of people and become really close with some of them. Even if they don’t end up committing, you’ll find yourself rooting for them in whatever endeavors they have anyway. In my case, I met this really cool mechanical engineer aspirant Aiden, and we spent a lot of our time going to events together or playing foosball.
As the story goes, we both committed to Caltech, and in the fall we rotated into Page House together! Nowadays he’s the treasurer of Page, and we’re both part of the same friend group. Circling back to DiscoTech though, you get to see a bunch of cool things off campus, one of which is the Griffith Observatory. If you’re a tourist coming to LA for the first time wondering what sights there are to see, this is one of them. You have a clear view of the Hollywood sign, the sprawling downtown, and of course the observatory itself.
For me, DiscoTech was a slam-dunk. I saw the Europa Clipper spacecraft inside NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before it launched, learned about all the cool physics research going on, and made some close friends that have followed me through my time at Caltech. And in case you think everything’s a psyop from the admissions office to get you here, you’ll have plenty of time to talk to current students that won’t hold back. You’ll hear the ravings about this prof’s work or this House’s events, but also some of the shaky considerations some current students had when they thought about coming here in the first place. It’ll really give you a holistic view of Caltech, but definitely leave you tired as well. Just make sure you don’t fall asleep on the bus to downtown LA, lest you get sniped by one of your ‘friends’.
