So I am a parent of a sophomore at Yale (and an incoming freshman!) We live in a rural town with a “just ok” high school - nothing compared to the rigors of Stuyvesant HS that gibby’s kids went to. He was thoroughly unprepared for the rigors of Yale. My sophomore did face a “learning curve” getting used to the workload. In HS he was used to 1-2 hours of work outside of classes and had loads of free time to relax, hang with his friends, watch tv etc. At Yale he says he is working all day. He always says, “It is A LOT of work.” This semester his day starts at 9am and he works until 11:00pm doing his HW. He does pull a few all nighters a semester but he has learned to budget his time to keep them to a minimum. Last semester he was working until 4 am 4 nights a week. This happened because he did a poor job picking his classes and balancing out those with problem sets vs tests/papers. He did end up dropping the extra class that added the 3rd problem set and life improved. That being said, he LOVES Yale. He has never been happier. He says everyone works very hard and that the kids who were not accustomed to (in HS) the kind of work necessary to keep up with classes, all rise to the occasion and figure it out. He spends his weekends mostly free of work and has time to relax and enjoy life with his friends. And a lot of his socialization takes place DURING the week while working! Lots of study groups etc and he has made wonderfully close friendships with classmates. Please do not worry about the work. If Yale admits someone, they know they can do the work! Do not worry!
Trust me, having been that social science person having to deal with distribution requirements in the dark ages (1978-82), even a “gut” STEM class took more brain power than I wanted to expend. They are not a cakewalk, just don’t have the same rigor as a class that would count toward a STEM major. Also, like @IxnayBob stated somewhere upstream, kids struggle in the areas that are not in their wheelhouse. My D can become fluent in two languages by the end of sophomore year but whine incessantly about her Geometry in Nature class which still required a good deal of math (which she hates with a passion).
Just be careful to balance your worload especially for your first semester. Yale provides course reviews from students that can help you gauge the amount of work a given class is likely to have. You will adjust. The kids who went to demanding high schools just had to make the adjustment a few years earlier. Also don’t forget that Yale has tons of resources to help students-- use them. My daughter submitted drafts of essays to a teaching assistant first semester and got tons of useful feedback and suggestions that way, and continued the process with her profs in later years.
My D graduated from Yale last May, and she had to work very hard. It was so much more interesting than High School, that I don’t think she minded. Nobody has talked about reading between now and fall semester. I am working with a first generation college student headed to a good school, and am recommending reading a lot of good fiction over the summer. Well-written books and short stories help a person develop writing ability. I wouldn’t learn to skim good literature, but find something you might enjoy reading, and dive in and enjoy the clever use of language. In college, I took every single paper to the writing lab, and my writing got much better.
Someone mentioned not drinking too much. My D thought people were drinking to excess and worked at finding friends who kept things to a more moderate level.
I would heavily suggest to learn to skim. I’m not saying there’s no value in digesting well-written texts, but from my experience, a standard social science or humanities class would churn through a text or so per week, meaning that a courseload may have thousands of pages to read each week. It is highly impractical to pore over that. Your other work (papers, reading responses and problem sets) will suffer if you do.
Knowing what to read carefully, what to skim, and what to skip entirely is an important college skill. I think you have to pick this up by doing it, though.
^ I refer to this as reading list triage.
@am7311,
Don’t get super worried. MIT is much, much harder than Yale!
At Yale, they really do as much as they can to help you along.
That being said, Yale does have slightly more total classes needed to graduate: 36 total, which is 4.5 classes per semester, while some other colleges only require 4 classes per semester to graduate.
My D knew kiddos at Yale who did not go to “stellar” HSs. Yes, they struggled at first, but they survived.
After you receive your other RD acceptances, if Yale is still your first choice, then GO FOR IT! Be brave, and be willing to stumble! You will never know until you try. YOLO.
Continuing…
The workload will be a lot larger volume that you are used to. This means that you must learn to study EFFICIENTLY and EFFECTIVELY, which includes needing to skim because it would be impossible to do ALL of the assigned reading (this is the case at EVERY college, not just Yale).
So get this book
https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconventional/dp/0767922719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490870410&sr=8-1&keywords=how+to+be+a+straight+a+student
It will teach you strategies to study and prepare both EFFICIENTLY and EFFECTIVELY.
@YoHoYoHo I love book suggestions, thank you!! Would anyone advise against taking community college courses in the summer to get a stronger academic foundation and then taking the same course my freshman year at Yale? I know I won’t get credit for the course, but It’ll be fun because I love to learn and it’ll relieve a lot of the stress of going in to Yale with no preparation. I’m assuming taking the same class twice will look bad if the community college course carries onto my transcript though…
Personally, I think that it would be a great idea. Also, lots of kiddos retake classes that they had taken in HS if they want one breather / easy class mixed in with the more difficult classes. Examples: calculus, economics, etc. (also hardly anyone uses their APs to claim the college credit to reduce the credits to graduate from Yale). Maybe look at Yale’s course catalog on-line (not sure if non-students can access it?) to see what classes you could take in summer at a CC that would line up with a Yale class. If the course shows up on your final transcript twice, it might give you something interesting to talk about at your job interviews and would show your interviewer that you like to prepare ahead. I’m not sure if it’s possible to “audit” a CC class where you could ask for no college credits for it. You would have to learn about your options.
As for the foreign language requirement, I will offer a different perspective. DD chose to continue with Spanish which was the FL that she took in HS (to level 4 AP). She found the level 5 conversational Spanish class very easy…and fun!
On the other hand, if you’re the kind of student who might zone out taking a class twice, proceed with caution. My lowest grade (my only B) at Yale was in a class I had taken and done well in before freshman year. One of my best friends had the same experience.
My suggestion is to take it easy and enjoy your summer. You have worked your tail off for the last four years. You deserve some down time. You are in Yale so you have nothing to prove and I doubt that anything you could learn in a class over the summer at a CC could prepare you for Yale. That’s not to sound snooty, but it is true. Yale would not have accepted you if you could not do the work. So, take the summer, rest your brain, learn organizational habits so you don’t get overwhelmed at first, and, when the Blue Book comes out, look for classes that will ease you into your Yale experience. This is advice from both a Yale graduate and a current Yale parent.
A couple of random thoughts as I read this thread:
At freshman orientation, parent forums, and even the freshman assembly included lots of reassurance that Yale didn’t make any mistakes in their admissions process. Jonathan Holloway gave a rundown of the stats of the incoming class. How many were from private schools, how many from public, the number of legacy students, and the fact that many more students were the first ones in their family to attend college. All of them …were glistening.
At the parent forum, they were very up front that most incoming students were used to being the very best at at least something, if not everything. That would likely stop st Yale. Some students would equate this with failure. It caused my husband to say to our son, rather coarsest, “Remember, if you’re the dumbest person to ever graduate from here… you’ve still got a Yale degree!”
Something that my son recently reflected on was that a Yale-bound high school student is more than likely used to “doing it all.” At Yale you simply can’t. When he arrived, he couldn’t imagine not having music, chess, sports and extra-curricular academic pursuits in his life. Once here, he found that he was satisfied, and stretched thinly enough, with Yale Political Union, voice lessons for credit, and church. Rather than participate in intramurals, he just attends sporting events as a spectator when he can. Chess and music ensembles are more or less gone.