If I had attended Caltech remotely, I wouldn&#x27;t have lasted a semester. I had a lot of generous help from others, mostly fellow students, and sometimes a professor.<p>Besides, being around a pack of intelligent, highly motivated people (what their admissions select for) 24&#x2F;7 was incredibly fun. I mean, you&#x27;re around people who build CPUs out of 7400 ttl chips, people who build stereo equipment from scratch just because it&#x27;s fun, people who build a working railroad running through the dorms, and on and on. If you want to see what it was like, see the movie &quot;Real Genius&quot;, which was based on events at Caltech. The movie exaggerates, but not as much as you might think :-)<p>Edit: I also have to admit that the embarrassment of failing was a motivator that wouldn&#x27;t exist if I attended remotely, along with the shared camaraderie of working on and succeeding at something hard.