<p>Bring it on. I used CC so much in high school, so I thought I'd help everyone out if there's anything you need. I'm up for pretty much anything, though I prefer questions about the school to admissions questions that no one this side of Jeff Brenzel can answer anyway. A warning, though: I've only been here a little over a month.</p>
<p>what is your overall impression of the social atmosphere? I'm from the west coast and i've never even been to the east coast, but i keep hearing that lots of kids at the ivy league schools back there can be cold/proud, and they act elitist. is there any truth at all to this, or is it just an exaggeration? is the student body pretty unified or are there just lots of little cliques?</p>
<p>Can't say about other Ivies but Yalies tend to be very social. Are there elitist folks? Sure. But the overall feel of Y is very convivial. A product of the Residential college system.</p>
<p>e.g. the Greek system at Y is pretty minimal. People don't feel they have to join up w/any particular identity because there are so many facets to enjoy.</p>
<p>I just ret'd today from a visit. It was parents' weekend and great weather. The campus was jumpin!</p>
<p>(unfortunately my college, JE is fully fortified with scaffolding. It's JE's turn to be renovated)</p>
<p>I was worried about elitism too, coming from a small town in the Midwest. But I really don't think it's a problem. Everyone seems to get along quite well, and the party scene/social life is very egalitarian. Of course, there are always a few snootier types, but the campus tends to kind of shun/ignore them. The party line at Yale is that if you want real intellectual or social elitism, go to Harvard or Princeton. If you want a fun time, cooperation with peers, and a good education, go to Yale. You can judge for yourself the veracity or lack thereof of these claims.
Now, If you really want to smoke a pipe in a tweed jacket with bow tie while discussing the evils of the proletariat culture, you could probably find a group in which to do it, but those groups are very rare. As for cliques, I suppose it's true that you end up hanging out most with the people in your extracurricular groups like any college (or high school for that matter), but because of the suite-style housing and residential college system (not to mention classes) you will always be on friendly terms with a huge range of people.</p>
<p>Oh, and as for regional stereotypes, in the Midwest, and I'd guess also in the Mountain West and the South, people would view the "west coast" and the "east coast" as roughly equal in snobbishness and elitism, though they are definitely of different styles.</p>
<p>Does Yale favor the SAT over the ACT?</p>
<p>No! Almost nobody favors the SAT! In fact, if anything, I've heard on CC that some colleges seem to like the ACT more. But with Yale, I wouldn't recommend sending the ACT without any SAT II's, even though they say you can. This is especially the case if you are coming from an SAT area.</p>
<p>Here's what Yale says about tests</p>
<p>"Which standardized tests does Yale require?
Yale requires either the SAT I or the ACT. Students who submit scores for the SAT I are also required to take two of the SAT II Subject Tests. They may take any two subject tests of their choosing. The middle 50 percent of Yale's entering class this year had scores between 700 and 790 on both the verbal and the math sections of the SAT I.</p>
<p>In evaluating SAT or ACT results, does Yale consider scores from previous test dates?
Yes, in the sense that readers of the application will see all of the test results that are in your file, since you are asked to self-report your scores from all test dates. The formal admissions committee that meets to vote on applications, however, will see only the highest score you received on any individual test, if you have repeated any of the tests. For the SAT I, the admissions committee will consider the highest score from each of the test's three sections. For the ACT, the admissions committee will consider the highest composite score.</p>
<p>Does Yale require the writing sample on the ACT and SAT I?
Yes."</p>
<p>Woah I live in NY and I wa splanning to onyl send my ACT score....should I really send in my sat 2's and why?????/</p>
<p>I've heard that they get puzzled when you send only the ACT. It's easier for them to evaluate you next to others if you can compare the subject test scores also. It also might look like you are trying to hide something. But really, not personally having anything to do with the admissions here, I don't really know why.</p>
<p>Should you send them? Well, are they terrible? I'd say nothing in the high 600's or better will hurt you, so definitely do it unless they are something that actually warrants being hidden. There's never anything wrong with them having more information, unless you've built your app. such that you play up yourself as, say, a "crazy math genius" yet you only got a 650 on the SAT II. That would be a problem. So, again, if they aren't that bad and they don't ruin an angle you are taking somewhere else on the app, do it.</p>
<p>How long were your essays? Would you think 569 words is pushing it?</p>
<p>Again, from Yale's admissions website regarding essay length:</p>
<p>"My essays are more than 500 words each. Is that OK?</p>
<p>We ask that you respect the word limits we suggest. Will we read the words beyond 500? Yes. But if your essays are much longer than 500 words, understand that you will not help yourself by seeming to have ignored our request."</p>
<p>I have a question- what is life at Yale like for people who are committed to being substance-free? Can you get by without running into a lot of drinking and/or drugs? This is the only thing that I am a little worried about in college...</p>
<p>Drummerdude can give you a more updated reply but during my time there, the overall maturity of your fellow students allowed people to be whom they chose to be. Sure there were the keg parties but there was so much to do besides what the "mainstream" seemed to be doing. Any given night, there would be plays, recitals, concerts movies etc. that drew vast nos. of the student population. Some schools' social lives revolved around which frat or sorority was holding what bash that night. Not so at Yale.</p>
<p>My best friend there was committed to not being involved w/alcohol after Soph year. He never seemed the oddball and we respected him too much to make him feel weird about it.</p>
<p>Illicit drug use as not public at all. I'm sure it occurred but I can count on one hand the times I witnessed it myself in four years. The drug scene seemed very small to me.</p>
<p>I think you're correct to be concerned at some schools where the culture of "partying" is pervasive. At Y, the alternatives to drinking and drugs are many.</p>
<p>From what my sophomore D has told me, that's absolutely right. She drinks very little and doesn't use drugs, but says that has been no hindrance at all to an active social life. She has gone to her share of parties, and says that as long as you're not castigating people for drinking they couldn't care less whether you are or not. And there are many, many things to do on campus that don't involve partying.</p>
<p>Hi from another freshman! </p>
<p>Yale's campus is decidedly social... that's one of the big reasons i chose to come here. There's some partying on thursdays and sundays, but i think for the majority it's a friday/saturday affair. There's definitely a wide spectrum of students, some who never leave their room and some who are out every night, but by and large the majority falls evenly between the two. The frat scene is small but a good source of parties, especially for freshmen that aren't living in the residential colleges yet. With that said, i don't particularly enjoy the frat parties and they aren't nearly as popular as they are at other colleges. A lot goes on at old campus, the freshman quad, so it's usually easy to find a few parties on a given night within a minute of your suite. </p>
<p>It's completely acceptable to drink/not drink. I have plenty of friends who don't drink and there's no social pressure whatsoever (at least among my circles of friends, i wouldn't exactly advise rushing Delta Kappa Epsilon if you plan on abstaining from alcohol...) for them to do so. With that said, the majority of people do drink and it's very easy to find (free) alcohol on campus if that's what you're looking for. Actually, one of the residential colleges has an annual event where the different classes (08, 09, etc...) compete to finish their own keg first. So... if you're in Pierson you can look forward to keg wars :-) </p>
<p>In a month i haven't seen any drug use yet, if that gives you any idea of the drug scene here. With that said, i'm sure there's recreational pot use, and even some heavier stuff, and i suspect things like adderall and other stimulants are used. The drug scene isn't highly visible, and never having partaken i can only suspect that it exists.</p>
<p>From what I've observed, Yale is such an intellectual and vibrant campus (much moreso than any of the other top 25 colleges) -- there is so much going on there that there's not even enough <em>time</em> to really use drugs or drink much. Drinking that takes place is mostly "social" drinking - in the context of large parties and other events, often just one or two drinks over the course of the evening, and where there is no pressure to drink yourself since most people are doing a bunch of other things besides just drinking, such as trying to hit up five parties within the course of an hour or participating in some kind of dance, discussion or other "event." </p>
<p>Other top campuses are very different from Yale, because they aren't even a fraction as socially vibrant - alcohol is the only thing going, so there is pressure to either drink with everyone else, or withdraw to your room and play video games.</p>
<p>That's not to say there isn't plenty of free-flowing booze at Yale if you want it. In fact, Yale, unlike virtually any other college, is well known for actually <em>encouraging</em> parties and social events with alcohol on its campus, even when it is known that underage students are drinking. It's just that they are PUBLIC events, set within a social context, so they are more about the "event" than about the drinking itself. Many people go, some drink and some don't and it's not the center of the action because 1,000 other people are there. Having public partying actually reduces alcohol consumption significantly, by discouraging private binge drinking in people's rooms or off campus. In other words, the college acknowledges, at a high level, that many students are going to drink even if they aren't supposed to, so they try to encourage that it happens in a safer and more open way rather than within the confines of someone's room. This is not only safer, but it helps to build a sense of community on the campus, rather than a "clique campus" (which is what you find elsewhere).</p>
<p>Just don't expect everyone else you know to be standing around a keg all night or locked up in their rooms chugging cheap bottles of pineapple-coconut-banana-strawberry rum, like what you find at other campuses. Honestly, the difference in the quality of social life between Yale and most other places is much greater than you might think.</p>
<p>ItsAllJibberish, don't worry about word limits as long as the words are useful and necessary to get your point across. My 2nd essay was over 750 words long. After I turned it in, I saw that warning on their site and thought I was screwed, but apparently they don't mind if it's a good essay.</p>
<p>As for alcohol, I think it's a huge thing on campus, and there might be some peer pressure depending on what kind of people you hang around, though it won't be intense and probably not constant after it's been established that you are not a drinker. It seems that everyone says about their school that there are tons of alternatives, which is true. But let's be honest, after the show, concert, or whatever ends at 10 o'clock, people don't go to bed or go to the library to do homework - I would venture that most hit the party scene. And I also think there is a high correlation between those that don't drink and those that have a very constrained "social life", and I might include myself in that in some capacity.</p>
<p>You may very well find it difficult to keep substance free, as I find that here it is less that there are drinkers and non-drinkers as there are different levels of drinkers. You can party hard on the weekends and get wasted a lot (tons of this), you can get drunk occassionally and in the company of friends that you trust to take care of you (a fair amount of this), you can have a casual drink or two every now and then (especially at a political party debate or extracurricular event) like me, or you can not drink at all (I know perhaps 3 people in this category, not even the religiously devout totally abstain in my experience). Whichever category you are in, it's probably not going to cramp your social life, unless you want to be in an extracurricular group (frats, most acapella groups, etc.) that does LOTS of heavy drinking</p>
<p>drummer: it also changes as you go along at Y. Fr and So. year for my circle of friends: lots of partying. Jr and Sr year: occasional but not as ridiculous as the first two yrs</p>
<p>This might also be a biased perspective on alcohol, because I, like many Yalies, didn't drink at all in high school, didn't hang out with people who did, and had a very moralizing and negative opinion about it. For me and for a lot of others, you sort of get more relaxed about it in college because, well, it's a fact of life, and you see that not everyone getting drunk is a moron whom you have no respect for, which is oftentimes the case in high school.</p>
<p>For a small, select group of others, this lack of exposure means you have no self control, and go out and get bombed every weekend to the point where you can't walk or talk anymore and your suitemates have to literally drag you back to bed or to DUH.</p>