<p>So Yale seems to have it all. Beautiful people, beautiful campus. I visited with a friend who was studying D.S. (Directed Studies), sat in on a philosophy lecture, and enjoyed my experience. Yale just felt "right."</p>
<p>However, I am irked by the caliber of the sciences program at Yale. For example, I read somewhere that science majors at Yale have to go to Science Hill, a part of the campus that is separate from the others. Trivial as that may seem to you, I feel like that might be representative of sciences at Yale. With a much more humanities-oriented focus, Yalies seem to respect science majors less than they would a humanities major, for example. There are certainly fewer science majors and I have heard the argument about more faculty and resources available, but I would prefer a larger community of science-oriented peers intent on innovation (like at MIT, for example). </p>
<p>A couple articles on science education at Yale have troubled me. One is this: Steiner:</a> Don?t recruit, retool | Yale Daily News. The other is this: State</a> cuts stall Yale nanotech center | Yale Daily News. As a student interested in nanotechnology, prospective to major in some bio/chem field, I feel like Yale's sciences are not up to par compared to those of HPMS. I realize Yale is in the process of a massive funding project in the sciences but I will not be enjoying the benefits of those buildings/resources. I will be starting my freshman year next fall and those resources would not be available during my time. </p>
<p>The other place I am considering seriously is MIT, but I know the social life at Yale will be much better for me. The thing that is putting MIT over the top for me right now is its superior sciences program. I think I would receive a much better science education at MIT. But I would love some commentary on Yale's science program. I am a rising senior who is deciding where to apply early and information on this subject will be very beneficial for me.</p>
<p>Your post addresses 2 different problems that are not necessarily related.</p>
<ol>
<li>Is Yale an equal of HPMS in terms of undergrad science education?</li>
<li>Does Yale have a “community of science-oriented peers intent on innovation” comparable to HPMS?</li>
</ol>
<p>To the first question, I say yes. I hope you realize your concern about Science Hill is going a little over the top. It takes 10 minutes to reach the top of Science Hill. That’s a whopping 5 minutes longer than it takes to reach many other class buildings. Plus, buildings on Science Hill are new. Where else are they supposed to put them? Farther.</p>
<p>Also, I’m sure you have heard plenty about the abundance of research opportunities at Yale, which is the main reason I consider Yale to be an excellent place for an undergrad science education. HPMS probably have a slight edge in research quality and output, but as an undergrad, are you really going to be involved in the extremely high-level research that might actually distinguish MIT from Yale? To quote another forumer:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To put it more concretely, in my second semester of freshman year, I e-mailed a couple of professors at the Yale School of Medicine (an important resource that Princeton and MIT don’t have; Harvard > Yale = Stanford for med school) about research. Got positive responses from all of them, chose the lab I liked best, and now I’m working on a project nobody else in the lab is working on under the supervision of the professor. I’m not working with grad students or post-docs (the case for most people), all of my guidance comes directly from the professor himself. This is not the case for everyone at Yale, but I think it is a good representation of Yale’s undergrad focus. The immediate interest from all the professors I e-mailed is also a good indication of this focus.</p>
<p>As for question 2, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Yale’s science environment is like MIT’s. In fact, no school has that kind of environment outside of maybe Caltech and Stanford (Harvard and Princeton are a lot more like Yale, really). But I do think I should point out that your impression that science majors are less respected at Yale is definitely wrong. Not sure where you got that from, because I’ve never heard of anything remotely like that at Yale.</p>
<p>While Yale’s science environment is not going to be similar to MIT’s, it should be noted that this does not mean Yale’s science students aren’t strong.</p>
<p>You may have some impressive achievements yourself, but trust me, there are plenty of science-oriented students at Yale that have done the same.</p>
<p>This is not to say you shouldn’t choose MIT over Yale. MIT is probably better at science than Yale is. But I don’t think the difference is significant at the undergraduate level unless you’re really looking for an environment like MIT’s. But hey, Yale has a unique environment too, that’s why those stellar science students chose Yale over HPMS, that’s why I chose Yale over Stanford, and that’s probably why you liked Yale so much.</p>
<p>All in all, I don’t think you should let your (in my opinion, misguided) concerns about science at Yale deter you. Plus, this is only the application process … you can still apply to both.</p>
<p>Thank for your post. I am trying to decide where to apply early and if I get in I must attend (school policy). I am also interested in biological/chemical engineering and from what I’ve heard, Yale’s engineering departments are not that great (unless I’m wrong). Could you give me any info about Yale’s computer science department? Also, I’m very interested in nanotechnology as I indicated in my previous post, and Yale seems to not have much going on in that field. And I’m not interested in medicine so the lack of a medical school isn’t that big a deal to me. Almost all MIT students have participated in UROP so I doubt the research opportunities will be any fewer. MIT’s community creative spirit is very unique (as you said, probably only similar at CalTech + Stanford), but I also love Yale’s chillness and overall happiness. That said, I believe I will be pushed to my limits more so at MIT than at Yale. Also, Boston is a much better college city and setting in general than New Haven in my opinion. I think I will benefit from a community where many of my peers are driven to succeed and innovate in science.</p>
<p>I think YeloPen answered most of your questions, but just a few more comments:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Science Hill: seriously, the amount of time you spend walking there will be completely negligible compared to the amount of time you will spend in lab if you are at all serious about science. I wouldn’t consider this an issue at all.</p></li>
<li><p>Respect: everybody knows science classes are more rigorous than humanities ones. I think this is fairly widely accepted.</p></li>
<li><p>Challenging yourself: The truth is that Yale introductory science classes suck. Having said that, however, keep in mind that everybody who’s actually serious about science places out of them and if you really want to go into research later on you can easily be on 300/400 level courses by sophomore year and grad seminars by junior/senior years. In any case, at the end of the day, as a scientist your greatest challenges come not from your classes but from the intensity of your research, which only you can determine. At the undergraduate level funding is really not an issue, since you are unlikely to require such enormous grants that lab PIs actually take cost into consideration when accepting you into their laboratories. As long as you make it into a well-established laboratory (i.e. your PI is friends with all the key figures in their field and has enough publications in Nature/Science that they won’t be on your back 24/7), how well you do and how intellectually rewarding you find your undergraduate career will be entirely up to the sophistication of your thoughts and the sincerity of your dedication (and luck, which is always welcomed in the laboratory).</p></li>
<li><p>The social life: Having attended MIT parties, I strongly recommend Yale if you resemble at all a normal person. This is not to bash MIT kids; it’s just a very, very distinctive subculture that I instinctively knew wasn’t for me. Honestly, if MIT was the right choice for you, you would have found its culture irresistible (as some do).</p></li>
<li><p>I agree Boston is way prettier than New Haven. There’s just no getting around that It is insanely cold though.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>@scaryfiredemon Your concern in number 4 is my greatest problem with MIT. Apparently MIT students “party hard” but I honestly can’t imagine what that would entail. I do indeed resemble a normal person and MIT’s culture is not my favorite. Thanks for your post. Can you elaborate on what you thought of the MIT subculture? (Like what, specifically, drove you away?)</p>
<p>So I want to first acknowledge that there are probably some very sociable people at MIT who are well-versed in the art of conversation and who would entirely overshadow many Yalies at a party or a networking session. I haven’t attended MIT and only know a handful of students from there, and my experience with its social atmosphere is anecdotal at best.</p>
<p>I think that MIT students, in general, lack a certain social grace. Personally I don’t care at all for arbitrary social conventions or gratuitous tactfulness, but I got the impression that the general atmosphere at MIT does not encourage you to mature in your social interactions but rather indulges a sense of self-congratulatory hermitage. You have of course heard stories from MIT/Caltech graduates who say that they had been very introverted in HS and became more outgoing in college, but I suspect that this might have been a more efficient process at Yale, where they would have been, if not close friends with, at least surrounded by political science majors, aspiring consultants, and pre-laws who emphasize and nurture the deliberate development of camaraderie. I was once suspicious because it felt as though Yalies sacrifice deep friendships for superficial connections and leadership experiences, but honestly it seems that Yalies are actually just really enthusiatic (almost naively so) about everything they do, and their acknowledgement of the value of networking and social contacts does not detract from their sincerity.</p>
<p>So you might ask, why does this matter to me if I’m a science major? It doesn’t really, if you plan on working at the very frontier of astrophysics, where the field is heavily dominated by MIT/Caltech-types anyway. If you think you might be interested in something a bit more mundanely applicable, though, like biochemistry, biotechnology, bio/chemical engineering, etc., sooner or later you’ll have to learn the insidious truth that the top PIs all know each other, that their PIs all knew each other too, and that whether your paper gets published in Nature or, I dunno, some random pharmacology journal in Asia, is maybe 60% actual work and 40% wheel-greasing and introduction-BSing-about-clinical-relevance. All else held equal, the sociable, better-liked, well-connected scientist will find it much easier to get published in better journals early on, to get tenure in academia (or even a tenure track position, the way things are going nowadays), or to climb over the nerdy Scientist IV’s in industry to get that Chief Scientist position. Or, if you really want to make a difference, get investors to fund you for that brilliant engineering idea of yours.</p>
<p>I did say “all else held equal”, though. You yourself will have to do more research about just how much of an extra edge MIT might give you on your grad testing scores and weigh that against the more subtle yet just as important (and way more fun) skills that a Yale education will impart.</p>
<p>Lastly I realize that this isn’t actually a discussion about ultimately choosing between the two schools but rather about early applications. So just fyi, if your background is science-heavy, you will probably have an easier time impressing the Yale adcoms and interviewers.</p>
<p>PS: It also just really disconcerted me that my MIT interviewer kept on trying to reassure me that there are normal people at MIT, even though I never brought up the subject…</p>
<p>Before all of you bias people go unceasingly negative on MIT, a school that many of you acknowledge know very little about, please take time to understand the other side of the wall, one that you probably never bothered to look at. I’m saying this because I’m pretty sure many of you would get mad if you heard somebody say that one shouldn’t go to Yale because it’s located in New Haven and there have been murders on and near campus at Yale. I means seriously, who would want to join a school where there are people in labs that are murderers?[Murder</a> of Annie Le - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Annie_Le]Murder”>Murder of Annie Le - Wikipedia)
Who would want to go to a school where you don’t feel safe walking around at night. <a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/may/24/new-haven-fourth-most-dangerous-city-us-according-/[/url]”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/may/24/new-haven-fourth-most-dangerous-city-us-according-/</a> I mean when I was in Cambridge, I took a 8 mile run at 11:00pm into Boston and got lost but I still felt safe and eventually found my way back to the Mass Ave Bridge. Safer place to live > Social scene.
Some of you probably are probably mad at me right now but STOP and think for a second. Then you would realize that you are feeling how a MIT kid feels when you guys talk falsely about their school. Have any of you guy’s attended MIT? Have any of you guys actually spend a prolong period of time at MIT (like a summer?)? If you haven’t, then you are not qualified to say that their social scene sucks. Experience it first and then come back and talk. Don’t go with the “I THINK” or “I FEEL”, I’m pretty sure you don’t write argumentative papers for your professors using those words. If you think that MIT kid’s don’t have a social life, then why is it that 1/4 of their students participate in Greek life? Why is it that they have some pretty cool clubs like the MIT Laboratory for Chocolate Science where you get to play with Chocolate making for fun? Why is it that they have some wicked sweet intramural programs such as where you can get a unofficial pirate license by taking rifling, sailing and fencing?
Before all of you guys try to justify your actions, read this thread <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/1176465-social-life-mit.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/1176465-social-life-mit.html</a>
I mean seriously, Yale students just try to use reason to justify their “social life” because they really don’t have one other than ponder the philosophical meaning of life or whether we really know what we know. Oh hey, since Yale has such good humanities, shouldn’t you guys who “know so much” about MIT be thinking the question, “How do we know what we know?” Think about it.</p>
<p>P.S. I don’t hate Yale, in fact I love the campus and the school. The reason why I say all these negative things is to help some of you understand what it feels like to have some misleading rumors spread about the school you care about. Hopefully this helps people understand to not go assume what others say is true but instead go and understand the other side.</p>
<p>First of all I want to apologise if I came across as offensive; I completely understand that I did over-generalise, but unfortunately this is a tactic that cannot be avoided when making decisions on insufficient information. I wanted to give OP a sense of the problems that were on my mind when I had to make a decision between MIT, Yale, and a couple of other schools. Again, I honestly believe that there are many MIT students who would crush many Yalies with their social adeptness and would not dream of confusing the mean for the individual.</p>
<p>Secondly, I understand that you do not attend Yale and consequently do not feel personally connected to the tragedy that befell our campus two years ago. It sickens me, however, that you seem entirely comfortable to cite, in an inconsequential argument about the social atmospheres at different universities, the heinous murder of Annie Le, the shock of which still lingers on the minds of those who knew her. You wrote so valiantly of giving thought to one’s words before uttering them–good advice, no doubt–yet you began your post with such a callous, insensitive violation of your own rule. I do not want to think of the possibility that you might in fact be sadistic and took delight in anticipating the despondence your words might inspire, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that, in your rage over school stereotypes, it simply slipped your mind that it might be grossly cruel–not to mention socially moronic–to attack others using traumatic memories. For your sake, in any case, I truly hope you learn to suppress this urge before your social conduct becomes of consequence in the real world.</p>
<p>Lastly, I wanted to clarify a few points that you may have misunderstood. I don’t think either I or the other Yalie poster ever insinuated that MIT students do not have a social life. It is fair to say, however, that the MIT social atmosphere is different from the Yale one, with which I am certain you would agree. In particular, since you brought up Greek life, the Greek scene radically varies from school to school. The fact that Penn State is more mainstream than Yalies does not make them better, just as the fact that Yale is more mainstream than MIT does not make us better. The OP has to find the place where he will feel most welcome. For many students it may as well be MIT and none of us intends to judge them for it. The Yale population tends to exhibit social grace because it is a highly self-selected group with hopes to enter politics, law, and business, and social grace is an indispensable skill for those fields. I have chosen medicine over those fields precisely because I find the definition of professionalism and success in those fields superficial and alarming, but it would be a damn lie if I claimed to be better than those students in social interactions. It is their trade, their way of life, and I do not feel ashamed that they best me at it. Being amazing scientific innovators is the MIT tag; you cannot and should not expect to be more social than Penn State, more aristocratic than Oxford, or more philosophical than Amherst, all while still being the best institute of science and technology in the world. It is up to the OP and all the other aspiring college students to determine the values that are most important to him/her, just as we did once upon a time, and it would have been more useful to him had you provided a more informative picture of what MIT has to offer rather than a simple criticism of the contributions that others have made.</p>
<p>Aside from your pretty insensitive comment about Annie Le (whose murder actually has nothing to do with New Haven), who says people are more comfortable at night in Cambridge than in New Haven? That’s your personal opinion. In fact, if you look up “most dangerous college campuses,” MIT is more often on those lists than Yale is, by a lot (based on crime rates). Maybe you think Cambridge is fine and dandy at night, but not everyone will agree. I personally have never felt unsafe in New Haven before, night or day.</p>
<p>I understand your point about not stereotyping schools, because I get irritated when people question Yale’s science programs, and I’m sure you get irritated when people question MIT’s social scene. But I don’t think that was the best way to make your point.</p>
<p>To respond to the OP, if you are interested in biomedical engineering, Yale has a great BME program. Even in terms of rankings, it places well (rankings vary a lot, so I’m not a huge fan of them, but for NRC rankings I believe Yale BME is tied for first). I’m don’t know about chemical engineering specifically, but I’m sure you know that Yale is expanding its engineering program and accepting more engineering students. In the past, Yale’s engineering departments have not been well-known, but that’s mostly because of size, not quality. In fact (not that I endorse this ranking at all), one ranking had Yale engineering as number 1 based on impact per paper; it had the least papers of any of the top schools, but per paper, it had the most impact by their metrics. My freshman organic chemistry class last year was filled with prospective chemical engineers, so the changes are already very noticeable.</p>
<p>My personal opinion is that you shouldn’t choose an undergrad school at this level on academics, but rather on feel. It’s Yale, it has a stellar science program, a great BME program, and an expanding engineering program. You obviously love it and didn’t like MIT that much. MIT might push you academically, but will you be happy? I don’t think Yale will limit you at all, especially if you’re interested in bio, biochem, BME, etc. as bio is Yale’s strength in science.</p>
<p>I used to be a prospective chemical engineering major, and I chose Yale over Stanford because I fell in love with the school. I’m not a chemical engineering major anymore, but I definitely have never regretted my choice at all because I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.</p>
<p>Also, why do you have attend the school that you are admitted early to? Whose policy is that? Your high school’s? Because it sure isn’t Yale’s or MIT’s. They are both EA, i.e. non-binding.</p>
<p>“My personal opinion is that you shouldn’t choose an undergrad school at this level on academics, but rather on feel.”</p>
<p>Quite right… People spending hours comparing specific departments at undergrad level are wasting their time. At this level it is far more important to have prof who are good teachers and are willing to spend time with you, than to have profs with the most amazing credentials. Obviously at Yale, they will have amazing credentials anyway, and you get the benefit of them spending more time with you than many profs do at other top schools.</p>
<p>The quote from YeloPen at the top is from me, and I really believe that the lack of masters/doctorate students in the sciences is a great plus for undergrads. We get the profs time and research positions…</p>
<p>There won’t be any significant difference at the undergrad level. I’m guessing you plan on going to grad school, and that’s where it’ll matter most. For undergrad, go where you feel more comfortable. It’s one of your last chances to just have fun before you enter the “real world.” Personally, I preferred a campus community that had diverse academic interests, but MIT’s science focus could be better for you. It’s up to you. I did feel that the science community at Yale was pretty strong, and it seems to be stronger for the incoming freshman class. When I was at BDD, a very large number of the prospective students I talked to were future science majors. That’s not exactly a scientific survey, but some other people I met noticed the same thing. I also didn’t get any vibe that science majors were disrespected. I actually noticed a lot of respect for them because of how much more strenuous a science courseload is. Yale has this public image as a humanities-focused school, but its science program is just as strong, especially when you take into account the undergrad focus. I’m a science major btw.</p>
<p>I think Yale’s science reputation suffers because its humanities are probably the best in the world. </p>
<p>As above, they have put a lot of effort into changing that false perception - a couple of articles in the YDN about how they targeted science/engineering majors in the EA round this year, as well as pump lots of money into engineering.</p>
<p>Another 2015 science major here, so will know more later.</p>
It is insanely cold though.</p></li>