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<p>Oh, very frequently. Depending on the size of your class, you might be able to work with people in your building on the problem sets, or you can reach out to your classmates via email lists (and there are plenty) to set up study groups. Also, you can check your answers with students at office hours and help sessions. There are plenty of opportunities!</p>
<p>Do you think there is a difference in quality among the student bodies of HYP? Given the yield percentages, it seems to me that the top applicants with cross-admittance would tend to choose H and Y over P.</p>
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<p>Truth. I have a midterm paper due Tuesday, an in-class midterm on Wednesday, another paper due at the end of the week…why am I posting this instead of working on them? Who knows</p>
<p>What is the social scene like? Is there a strong sense of community? What are the students like- are they outgoing/friendly? Is it easy to meet new people or do students keep to their own group of friends and not mix around? How would you rate the happiness and satisfaction of the student body on the whole?</p>
<p>I would really love to hear current students’ perspective on this. Dwight, Calico, Hanna, Ksarmand- It’d be great if all of you could answer based on your individual experiences!</p>
<p>I was accepted to Yale EA, and the one thing I’ve heard from every Yalie is about the amazing sense of community that exists there. I was told that it’s lacking in comparison at Princeton and particularly Harvard, so I’d love to know your thoughts. Based on what I saw of the Housing Day videos, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all, but I still want to know more.</p>
<p>“Do you think there is a difference in quality among the student bodies of HYP?”</p>
<p>No. IMHO, there’s a slightly different flavor at P vs. H&Y. But I don’t think they are distinguishable in terms of quality.</p>
<p>I had a tremendous sense of community at Harvard within the Veritones (my a cappella group) and within Leverett House. People who aren’t transfers usually also have a tight-knit blocking group and a sense of community within their class that develops freshman year; I didn’t have that. But overall the community happens within the smaller groups, and most people have more than one that’s important to them.</p>
<p>Are Harvard undergraduate courses as good as you expected as a high school senior? How do you think it compares to the courses of similarly tiered institutions (like, idk, Yale 
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<p>Hello Harvardians, </p>
<p>I am an international. I was talking to an alumni from my country and he indicated that Harvard and Princeton are not completely need-blind for internationals. The Dean has to work accordingly under the roof of the budget he has been allocated for that year for undergraduate students. Is that true? Do you know about this? Do top US universities just claim to be “need-blind” to attract students so that they can boast-off their minute admit-rate?</p>
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<p>Well I don’t know anything about Yale courses because my only experience of them is some Civil War lecture I went to during Bulldog Days.</p>
<p>In the non-science realm, Harvard courses are what you make of them. I’ve taken some classes where I did literally 0 reading from Week 2 until the end of the class and relied on test-taking ability and various prayers to supernatural deities (not sure which one ended up helping me but it was a pretty sunny day when I took my final so I’ve narrowed it down to Amun-Ra and Apollo). Of course you’re not doing to get anything out of them if you do that. I’ve also taken classes where I’ve done all of the readings, asked questions during lecture, put extra time into papers, etc…and I got more out of those.</p>
<p>In the science realm I’m sure some of that applies too but since I’ve only taken a few of those classes maybe someone else can speak to them better.</p>
<p>Dwight - You seem to be a Political Science student. What is the career prospect of a Political Science Harvard graduate?</p>
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Harvard is as far from this as any educational institution on this planet can be. There are absolutely no limits on the amount of financial aid, even for international students.</p>
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Telling outright lies is not characteristic of the world’s leading universities.</p>
<p>^Absolutely</p>
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<p>I’m a Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations student.</p>
<p>The career prospects of a Government concentrator are entirely up to the Government concentrator, with some input from the state of the economy and luck. There’s really no other way to answer your question. For some jobs concentrations don’t really matter; for others they do. For some graduate schools (law school, med school[somewhat]) concentrations don’t matter, for others (graduate studies in medieval literature) they do.</p>
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You might find boasts about the size of their endowments which enable them to be need-blind!</p>
<p>Dwight, you said that even for Intls, that Harvard can give full aid. Well, this can seem entirely true - considering their last endowment figure I read was $27 Billion. What the hell do they do with the rest of that cash? It’s greater than some countries’ GDP.</p>
<p>But more importantly, what does Harvard look for in students? Especially internationals?
I mean, every second kid applying will be Class President, 4.0 GPA, 2400 SAT, Violin for 10 years, Varsity Captain of Football, State Champs, Science Olympiad, Model UN Founder, 1000 hours CS, and the list just goes on forever. But there surely should be some wildcard acceptances… can you elaborate on any, or do you think they’re very rare?</p>
<p>I’ve read that it costs Sewanee $75k a year to educate a student ([source](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/mccardell/]source[/url]”>Four Questions on How to Cut Tuition - The New York Times)</a>). Harvard probably spends around that much to educate a student too, if not more. Even if the student pays full tuition, Harvard is still at a loss there. Not that it would really matter…</p>
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<p>It is a great exaggeration to say that every second kid has a perfect GPA and SAT score. It often seems like every accepted student is perfect on the CC decisions threads, but many of the factors are subjective. What we do not see on this website are the essays, the teacher recommendations, the true commitments to various activities, etc.</p>
<p>A “wild card” acceptance is not necessarily a student who doesn’t have every single thing you mentioned.</p>
<p>The schools are crafting a class; they’re looking for various kinds of applicants. From those who apply, they pick the ones they want the most, admitting however many they need, based on historic yield and current trends, to end up at their target number of matriculants.</p>
<p>Sorry Jimmy and everyone else whose questions got ignored. I simply don’t know much about those topics to give you a definite answer.</p>
<p>I love the content of the LS courses, which is so relevant and applicable to all the current research being done in the life sciences. The teaching was a little questionable: you can have the most well known and knowledgeable faculty, but if they’re not good at entertaining undergrads, then listening to their talks may not be the most enjoyable experience. In addition to that, most people’s expectation for course quality is pretty high, and some compare these two intro courses to other ones in the department, so the two as a result pale in comparison.</p>
<p>felixfelicis-</p>
<p>I think students from top feeder schools often even have better qualifications than their counterparts from normal, average high schools. They have the chance to take more advanced courses, more extracurricular options, better counseling and admissions support system, etc. Coming from a terrible high school can offer slight advantage of its own, such as the possibility of coming from a less competitive or less represented area or having overcame adverse factors to reach high academic achievement. </p>
<p>Kaira-</p>
<p>Congrats on your EA acceptance :)!! Even during one of my initial visits to Harvard as a high school senior, I found that the people here are welcoming and friendly. Also, most people tend to love to help whenever you have some kind of question that needs to be answered, so it’s very pleasant to work together on problem sets and other course works as well.</p>
<p>With that said, as much as I love my entryway and my wonderful proctors who invite us to their living room every week for homemade brownies and cookies, I’m not completely satisfied with sense of community at Harvard. Freshmen are not a part of the residential House system that I love so much, and I feel that people mix around too much: I don’t see in person very often most of the people I know, even close friends, unless we specifically arrange to get together or if we’re taking the same classes. The sense of community here is probably more than at a large state school, not too much different from Yale, but less intimate than at a small LAC-----until, hopefully, you’re an upperclassman and get to move into Houses?</p>
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<p>There surely should not be any wildcard acceptance, when every single admitted student’s file has been read by so many members of the admissions committee! Like ccusser said, you don’t know everything about another person-----people don’t post every single detail about themselves even on those acceptance threads on CC.</p>
<p>An anecdote: after admission to a top university similar to Harvard, I signed into one of its online chats on a third party website. Since it was customary to use one’s real name, an admission officer, who was not even the one in charge of my region, immediately recognized me and started reciting off information from my application by memory, which was amazing and unsettling at the same time. Just shows how attentive they are and how many times they all read through every person’s application!</p>
<p>(Also, a cautionary tale about not providing more information about yourself online than you need to ;).)</p>