How do you deal with academic stress and anxiety at Caltech?

Out in the depths of space lie phenomena beyond our understanding. They lie in the realm of quantum gravity, the insides of black holes, wormholes, and gravitational waves. Kip Thorne (BS 62’, Blacker) and Lia Halloran explore these topics through the mediums of verse and art in their new book, The Warped Side of Our Universe.

In the last couple of years, ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have surged into the spotlight as “hot topics” across various domains. From our daily interactions on social media to headline news, these conversational artificial intelligence entities have become prominent features of our lives as well as in the classroom.

Caltech’s men’s and women’s cross country teams competed in the championship meet for the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) this past Saturday, October 28th. The men’s team competed in a 8K course and the women’s team in a 6K course.

A group of graduate students and postdocs at Caltech have begun the process of unionizing. They have collected over 450 union cards, a supermajority of the grad students. While union cards are not a guarantee of a vote in a union election, they are a good predictor. The next step in the process is filing for a union election, where the graduate student body and the postdocs will vote on whether they want to unionize.

Following the C/GPU majority support rally at Caltech Hall, discussions about grad and postdoc unionization have become increasingly urgent. We are writing to endorse the movement to form a labor union for graduate students and postdocs at Caltech. Our research is diverse, spanning microbiology, environmental science, systems biology, quantum optics, and gravitational physics. Forming a union would empower us to negotiate better working conditions, which in turn will improve our ability to produce world-class research and teach world-class students. We can learn from our colleagues at institutions like University of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California, and MIT to build a strong union that supports all grads and postdocs—both by making concrete gains at the bargaining table and building a stronger community.

Caltech is known for its rigorous academic environment, but beneath the surface lies a community of student-athletes who defy the odds daily, balancing their passion for their sport with the demands of academic life. One such athlete is Sam Small, a junior BioE major, minoring in Chemistry. His journey provides an enlightening perspective on what it’s like to be a student-athlete at Caltech.

Following two letters recently published on the Tech, we write to you in our role as Directors of the Graduate Student Council to address concerns about the moderation of the gradstudents@caltech.edu mailing list, which we manage.

This past week marked the conclusion of one of Caltech’s many traditions: interhouse dodgeball. Interhouse sports have been a Caltech tradition for as long as records can show, dating back to at least the 1950s, if not earlier. And, as the first interhouse sport of the year, interhouse dodgeball is an excellent opportunity to integrate the freshly rotated first year students into this long standing interhouse and intrahouse culture, all of which is accomplished by pitting them against each other on the tennis courts.

This past Sunday, thousands in and around the Pasadena area left their cars at home and dusted off their rollerblades, skateboards, and bikes to take the (hopefully not) once in a lifetime chance to traverse the closed Arroyo Seco Parkway. The six lanes and six miles of the winding freeway were closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m on Sunday.