Walter, are you in the Bay Area? If so, you should totally check out our alumni happy hours :)
Hear! Hear! to the 'once a Techer, always a Techer' mentality.
The other key thing about the honor code was the lack of proctored exams. I took most of my frosh ones at 3 am in the student SciFi library (SPECTRE, ftw)
I'm in the Seattle area. The Caltech alum community here is pretty small :-(
I read with bemusement the various articles and laments about rampant cheating in colleges. And yet this cheating was completely absent at Caltech. Even the failing students did not cheat, it never occurred to them.
Perhaps that's also why I place no value on my piece of paper degree or GPA. I think it's moldering in the basement somewhere. What I value is the experience at Caltech and what I learned there. Reading the catalog of what classes I could take next semester was like picking which dessert you wanted at a banquet; the only regret was my stomach was only so large. Cheating would have gotten me nothing that I wanted.
I also read about students complaining that their college courses aren't "relevant", who wonder what the point is, that they'll never use that knowledge, etc., then graduate and wonder why they can't get a job. It seems pretty obvious to me why they can't.
Hear! Hear! to the 'once a Techer, always a Techer' mentality.
The other key thing about the honor code was the lack of proctored exams. I took most of my frosh ones at 3 am in the student SciFi library (SPECTRE, ftw)