Caltech was a meat grinder like I could never have imagined.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Caltech is a very adventurous place. Part of the culture is that we tolerate people doing things that seem impossible, and also synthesizing and borrowing ideas across very kooky and unusual boundaries.
Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.
It had not yet been named Silicon Valley, but you had the defense industry, you had Hewlett-Packard. But you also had the counter-culture, the Bay Area. That entire brew came together in Steve Jobs.
I was fortunate that I came out to the Valley in 1979, when I came out to go to Stanford Business School, and my very first assignment as a teaching assistant for an investments professor was to - he told me go down to this computer company in Cupertino called Apple.
I got lucky because my dad moved us to Silicon Valley before it really was known worldwide as an important tech hub.
I was such a geek in school.
I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.
A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
I was a geek in high school.
CalArts was incredible for me. It's a school that I rave about and constantly want to give back to.