<p>So I've found myself in the enviable position of having to choose between my three top colleges: Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. Honestly, even after being accepted EA to Stanford, I didn't expect to be admitted to Yale and Harvard as well. I'm thrilled, but also totally lost!</p>
<p>I'm primarily interested in humanities and social sciences-- maybe International Studies, Linguistics, Anthropology, or Comparative Literature. I also want to study languages like Spanish, Hindi, and Turkish. </p>
<p>I am really looking for an academically rigorous school with an INTELLECTUAL, not pre-professional, student body. I want to be surrounded with interesting, not overly competitive people who are smart but don't take themselves too seriously. </p>
<p>I know there are similar threads, but I haven't found a lot that aren't science/math/tech so I thought I'd give it a shot. Obviously, I'm visiting all three again so hopefully that will help me decide. But what kind of things should I be looking for at each college? Any known issues that I should look for? Which do you think I should pick?</p>
<p>Congrats on your offers! I have found myself in a similar position with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Although you are posting in Harvard’s forum, I am going to go against the grain and say: pick Stanford. First off, you probably really love Stanford for some reason enough to do EA (and even with all those extra essays! =P), but more importantly, Harvard and Yale, while excellent undergraduate educations, will not prepare you as much EDUCATION-wise as will Stanford. While the three schools are relatively grade-inflated compared to say, Princeton, MIT or Caltech, the education at Stanford is far superior. </p>
<p>This is not to bag on Harvard or Yale; it just seems as though most of your undergraduate benefit will come from connections made, and similar connections can be made through Stanford. This is like you said - very pre-professional. </p>
<p>And also, of course, Stanford is notorious for its “laid-back California vibe” with smart and relaxed people (although they are all secretly plotting to start their own tech center in the heart of Silicon Valley…jk)</p>
<p>Engineering - Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Yale is the order (MIT is number 1 but people are a bit more happy at Stanford).</p>
<p>Sciences - Caltech, MIT, Harvard/Stanford, Yale in that order. A lot of people who don’t go into medicine but become graduate students end up at Harvard from MIT and Caltech. For premed, MIT and Caltech might prove tough on your GPA. Yale seems to be really good at sending students to medical school.</p>
<p>First off, you can’t go wrong with any of those choices. If one feels right to you, choose that one. You can choose for any stupid reason you want, because there really isn’t any non-stupid reason to prefer one school over the others. Where would you like to live while you are in college? Which colors look best on you? Do you like going to football games? Do you care about the quality of the football you are watching? Do you like the suburbs or the city? Running? Rowing? Which has the best food? Those are all stupid reasons for choosing a college, and it’s fine if you make your decision on that basis.</p>
<p>The social/living thing: Yale and Harvard do this much better than Stanford. That’s not decisive because Stanford doesn’t do it horribly, it’s just a normal dorm system, and anyway you spend much more time outside there. People don’t know what they are missing, but they don’t get all misty-eyed about the dorms they lived in. My Stanford BA sister can’t even remember the names of all her roommates or the names of all the dorms she lived in. That’s almost unthinkable at Yale or Harvard. I think Yale’s system is better than Harvard’s, but everyone at Harvard disagrees.</p>
<p>They all have great literature studies now. (That wasn’t always true. Yale used to be much better than the others, and still has an edge, but only a slight one.) “Comparative Literature” can mean radically different things at different places. Sometimes it means “esoteric literary theory,” and sometimes it means “an easy way of double-majoring in two different national literatures.” So pay attention. Historically, Stanford and Harvard had the edge in Anthropology, but I don’t know anything about current strengths. HArvard has by far the biggest Linguistics program, but my Linguistics professor sister-in-law tells me that Yale is a hot shop these days. For International Relations, Harvard and Yale don’t offer it as a major separate from PoliSci/Government, and Stanford has a huge stand-alone program.</p>
<p>Turkish is something that may not get covered all the time. It’s worth doing some research if you really care about that.</p>
<p>Thank you all for your help! I just visited Yale and loved it, but I’ll have to see what I think of the other two schools when I visit. I’m leaning away from Harvard a little bit since apparently it’s a better graduate school than an undergraduate and supposedly it’s a bit more competitive and less collaborative. But we’ll see!</p>
<p>JHS-- Do you know anything about SLE, and whether or not that improves the residential experience at Stanford?</p>
<p>Eh. The first claim is questionable and the latter is blatantly untrue. Yes, there’s certainly competition amongst students for leadership positions and fellowships and so on, but it’s certainly no more so than at Yale or Stanford or really, any peer school. Or real life. I’m also not sure what you mean by ‘less collaborative’. Students regularly work together and help each other with problem sets; I proof-read a number of senior theses for friends and so on. </p>
<p>PM me if you want to hear a Harvard alum shill for his alma mater.</p>
<p>I generally dislike Columbia – see the New Yorker article about the Nadia Abu-el-Haj tenure controversy [Our</a> Local Correspondents: The Petition : The New Yorker](<a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/14/080414fa_fact_kramer]Our”>http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/14/080414fa_fact_kramer). That’s not an isolated incident. I think Columbia takes itself even more seriously than Harvard does, is uniquely politicized (on all sides), and is uniquely influenced by the unbelievable wealth and powerlust in the community that surrounds it. People there tend to shout at and about each other rather than engage in civil and scholarly discussion. Plus the campus, while beautiful, is a little claustrophobic, and represents one of the most obnoxious bits of landscape architecture ever, anywhere (the raising of ground level such that everything on campus is at roof-level of the surrounding neighborhood). Finally, I have heard a number of students there who didn’t have a lot of money say that they went through periods of real loneliness because social life revolves so heavily around doing expensive things around Manhattan. Of course, being in Manhattan, and in that neighborhood, is incredibly exciting, and Columbia has a first-rate faculty despite the horrible lack of collegiality, so I don’t think my negative attitude is going to hurt it any.</p>
<p>Anyone of them will do well for premed. If you are certain about medicine, Yale, uncertain and want to be persuaded not to do medicine, Stanford (I hear a very large number change their mind).</p>
<p>Yale is a machine at sending grads to law and medical schools. Harvard is good at everything besides engineering. Stanford is the clear option if you’re interested in engineering or entrepreneurship but lags behind H & Y at law/med/PhD production which may say something about the advising it offers in comparison.</p>
<p>JHS hit it on the nail. Choose based on something because literally anything can swing the pendulum to one side or the other.</p>
<p>Considering that you want to major in the liberal arts or the social sciences, you should definitely go to Harvard. It is the queen of the social sciences after all!</p>