Newsletter Fall 2010-11
Reminder: Add Day is Approaching
Just a friendly reminder that the last day for adding courses and removing incompletes is this Friday, October 15th. Please remember to bring your add cards to the Registrar's Office by 5:00pm on Friday.
Annual Notification of FERPA
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) affords students certain rights with respect to their education records and the Institute is required to notify you of this. These rights include:
· The right to inspect and review their education records within 10 days of the day the Institute receives a request for access.
· The right to request an amendment to their education records that they believe are inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise in violation of the student's privacy rights under FERPA.
· The right to provide written consent before the Institute discloses personally identifiable information from the student's education records, except to the extent that FERPA authorizes disclosure without consent.
· The right to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education concerning alleged failures by the Institute to comply with the requirements of FERPA.
Additional information regarding FERPA including the Public Notification of Directory Information can be found on the Registrar's website at http://www.registrar.caltech.edu/ferpa.htm.
Race and Ethnicity Reporting Changes
The National Center for Education Statistics instituted changes effective for the fall 2010 term on how institutions report aggregate race and ethnicity data to the U.S. Department of Education. The new changes now allow for individuals to self-identify their ethnicity and race, and permits individuals to select more than one race to allow for multi-racial reporting. If students would like to re-identify using the new standards, please feel free to come by the Registrar’s Office.
New 2010-11 Catalog
The new 2010-11 catalog is available online at http://pr.caltech.edu/catalog/. There have been a few course changes that we wanted to bring to your attention. Ch 24ab has been split into Ch 24, Introduction to Biophysical Chemistry: Spectroscopy and Ch 25, Introduction to Biophysical Chemistry: Thermodynamics. The split is to accommodate different prerequisites for the two courses. Also, ChE 110ab is now ChE 118 and ChE 120. ChE 120 is considered a lab course and does not have ChE 118 as a pre-requisite.
Emergency Contact Information
Be sure your contact information is up to date on access.caltech so you can be reached in case there is an emergency! Most new students to Caltech have provided this information but if you are a continuing student, please be sure to check that we have the most current numbers on file for you.
Parent Contact Information
The Development Office at Caltech wants to keep in touch with your parents. To make sure they are invited to Caltech’s many special events and programs and receive all the Caltech news and information available, please add your parents to the mailing list at https://irsecure.caltech.edu/webforms/student_info/index.php/.
House Librarians
All eight undergraduate houses have their own House Librarian. The library hopes a more personal connection between the library and houses will lead you to seek out its resources and help when you need them. You can contact your house librarian with any library-related questions, big or small. Find out who your Librarian is!
REGIS Tips
To all of those seniors currently applying to graduate schools – remember that students can order their official transcripts through REGIS. Simply click on the Academic Information link in REGIS and then the Request for Official Transcript tab.
If any student needs an enrollment verification letter to prove they are a current student at Caltech, this can also be printed out through REGIS. Again, simply click on the Academic Information link in REGIS and press the Enrollment Verification button at the bottom of the page. Stop by the Registrar’s Office if you would like the official Institute seal applied to the letter.
The Top 5 most popular options
The top 5 options for the Bachelors degree account for 56% of the undergraduate student body (minus undeclared freshmen). They are: Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering (all types), and Computer Science. Bioengineering, which was created just two years ago, is already the eighth most popular option.
Of the PhD-seeking students, the top 5 options are Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Electrical Engineering and Chemical Engineering. These account for 48% of the PhD-seeking student body.
