Caltech (California) reviews

All of the budget cuts are annoying and bad for morale. Advisors seem to be very self-absorbed and very few are good mentors. Caltech is so small that if you're not interested in working on one of the very few topics that are the specialties of the professors there, you're sort of screwed. (This is particularly troublesome if you *think* you know what you want to work on, and then change your mind after the first year. The possibilities for a new advisor are very limited.) They also keep reducing the health insurance benefits for grad students.

Caltech is overloaded with administration and bureaucracy. For an institution this small and this focused on one thing - science and engineering - there is a remarkable amount of overhead associated with the Administration. My research laboratory provides a enormous amount of money to the Institute for services and administration, but any time there is a facilities problem or a management issue it takes days or weeks to resolve. As a graduate student, I feel constantly hamstrung by this overhead and unable to focus on science.