David Anderson, a faculty member at Caltech, responded to my comment on the Pasadena area as follows. I thought this was a pretty good rebuttal, so I asked if I could post it, and he said no problem.
Hi Davi,
I just read your web comments. I think your
impression of Pasadena and the greater LA area as
a wasteland is way, way off the mark. I grew up
on the East Coast (NYC area), and had the same
impression about LA before I came out here, and
also during my brief visits. But Pasadena has
become an infinitely more interesting and
stimulating place over the last 17 years -
bookstores, coffee houses, movie theaters showing
first-run art films have sprung up, and, unlike
almost everywhere else in LA proper, Old Town is
a place you can actually stroll around as a
pedestrian. In addition, they just put in a
great light-rail line (the Gold line) that you
can take from Old Town to downtown LA, for
example. If you like hiking, within 10 minutes
you can be up on a trail in the mountains
overlooking Caltech. If you want to go to the
ocean, Santa Monica is a forty minute drive on
the freeway. If you want to go skiing or
snowboarding, Big Bear is 2 hrs away, Mammoth is
5 hrs. If you want music, Frank Gehry's new
concert hall for the LA Philharmonic is
spectacular. I'd be curious to know what "clubs"
you went to outside of LA.
I've been here long enough to know a lot of
people who've come through Caltech as grad
students, and later progressed onwards in their
careers, even to faculty positions. When I ask
them, they uniformly say that their time as a
grad student at Caltech was the most wonderful
period in their scientific careers.
Consider...
Seymour Benzer
David Baltimore (Nobel Prize)
Ed Lewis (Nobel Prize)
Roger Sperry (Nobel Prize)
Max Delbruck (Nobel Prize)
George Beadle (Nobel Prize)
Thomas Hunt Morgan (Nobel Prize)
If Pasadena was such a wasteland, why would these
brilliant, cultured people waste their time here
when they could be at any institution in the
world?