Undergrad focus at Yale

Colleges and Universities A-Z Yale University
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<p>I am a very outgoing person, but I still fear that I might be lost in the shuffle of a big university. However, I also want the amazing resources that Yale has to offer. I have heard that Yale and Princeton have the most undergrad focus of HYPS.</p>

<p>How would you say Yale scores on the undergraduate focus, separating freshman/sophomore and junior/senior years, in relation to a liberal arts college like Williams, Swarthmore, or Amherst. How big would you say your average intro classes were and how many of them were a)taught by TAs and b)taught by good TAs that speak english. Are the professors dedicated teachers, or are they mostly researchers?</p>

<p>When do most people really get to know their professors, begin to do research, and when do you feel like you know a professor well enough to get a recommendation?</p>

<p>Given my concerns, what other schools do you think I should be looking at? Do you have a preference between Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst? (I am leaning away from Swarthmore)</p>

<p>THANKS!</p>

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<p>bump (10char)</p>

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<p>One reason you’re not getting a lot of answers is that this topic gets hashed and re-hashed so thoroughly on CC that everyone gets tired of it. There was a recent thread on the Parent’s Forum called something like “Are LACs considered second rate?” which went on for pages and had lots of discussion of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams. You should read that.</p>

<p>My bottom line: Of course LACs have more “undergraduate focus”. It’s all they do. I told a story in a different thread here recently about how someone lots of people thought was a great scholar was denied tenure at Swarthmore because his teaching evaluations were “mixed”. At Harvard, Yale, and yes even Princeton undergraduate teaching evaluations are irrelevant to tenure decisions; at Swarthmore etc. they are near-determinative. That doesn’t mean that the teachers at HYP are bad – lots of them are great, and beyond great – but it means that teaching undergraduates isn’t the thing they do that is valued most highly by the institution.</p>

<p>So why does anyone go there to learn? Because the kinds of students who go to HYP don’t need, or even want, their hands held. They want to be where the best and the brightest are, where real research and scholarship are happening every day, and to measure themselves against those people and learn what they have to offer without being coddled. They would rather trade a little “undergraduate focus” for more action and a bigger community. If what you want is to sit in a classroom with only a few other students, who are all on your level, and whom you know well, and have a really smart, really skilled teacher guide you through the material, then a good LAC is for you. If you want access to people on the cutting edge of everything going on in their fields, even if you have to fight for it a little, then you want Harvard or Yale (or numerous other places).</p>

<p>Graduate students are an integral part of any research university. The best universities have the best grad students. They enrich the experience of undergraduates, help the undergraduates get the most out of the professors. They’re a good thing, part of what you go to a university for. And if you are not going to buy into that, go to Amherst.</p>

<p>There are subtle differences in the “undergraduate focus” of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Princeton really has many fewer grad students than the others, so undergraduates are more central to the university’s mission. Harvard and Yale are really very similar, except that Yale probably has a slightly more engrained culture of professors paying attention to undergraduates, and Harvard has slightly more glitzy professors your Aunt Mabel may see on TV (which is why they are spending a little less time with their undergraduates).</p>

<p>Similarly, the differences among Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams are also subtle. Their locations are very different. Swarthmore is in a lovely suburb, but it’s a 20 minute train ride from a biggish city. Amherst itself is tiny, but it is in the middle of a group of towns that collectively constitute a small city with some 20,000 college students. Williams is really, truly isolated in a small town in the middle of the mountains. Swarthmore is un-sportsy, very Quakerly, and ostentatiously intellectual; the others value sports more and pacifism and big words less. They are preppier. Williams has a nifty tutorial system; at Amherst you can really, truly take classes at four other colleges, one of which is big enough to offer everything. (Swarthmore has something similar in theory, but it’s practiced less.) People’s choice among them (and other, similar LACs) usually comes down to style, location, and where they are accepted.</p>

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<p>Other than intro language courses, very few classes are taught primarily by graduate students. In large classes, however, a professor gives the lecture portion of the class and the small discussion groups that meet once a week are lead by TAs.</p>

<p>I’ll let a more current student answer the question about English language abilities. There were a couple of notoriously incomprehensible math and engineering TAs in my day, but not many. The vast majority of TAs were great.</p>

<p>At Yale, all professors have to teach an undergrad course every year. This means they can’t lock themselves away with their grad students. Yale is noted for its undergrad focus in part because of this–you don’t come to Yale unless you want to teach undergrads.</p>

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<p>So… let’s say I am really suited to the LAC philosophy but choose Yale’s financial aid. (Hypothetically assuming acceptance to both Y and a top LAC, for the sake of this question.) How can I make for myself an LAC-style education at Yale?</p>

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<p>JHS, I found that your post above is quite interesting and I agree at most points you have brought up.</p>

<p>I found that the residential college system starting from the first year is very good. The kids have a “default” group of friends they likely hang out with from day one. It helps the transition to college life, especially for OOS students.</p>

<p>Although my kid may be considered as a “good” student academically if you judge him soleby by his numbers, I do not think he has taken advantage of the huge resources Yale has to offer. At one time, he said to us that he went there mostly for the activities outside of the classroom, with many interesting peer students. We are somewhat puzzled by his statement. It is as if he values his peer students there, more than Yale institution and professors. He also seems to be more attached to his residential college than to Yale University itself, for some unknown reason.</p>

<p>When he applied for college a few year ago, he seriously considered going to some of the LACs you mentioned (esp. Swarthmore, as he is not into sport, and its location is the best among these LACs.) As of today, our intuition tells us that he has made a right choice, but we could not explain why. Maybe one thing I can think of is that if he went to an LAC, it is less likely that he will meet so many interesting peers. Also, he enjoys the life in New Haven, which is a good college town. He is generally not impressed by the large science classes, but most professors are great. Some TAs in the science area are not so great.</p>

<p>^ Yea, the financial aid is great. We really appreciate that Yale takes care of those of us who are not that well-off. This is definitely one of a good memories my kid will have after he graduates :slight_smile: The worst memory is probably the long travel from/to the college (and the not-so-reliable CTlimo service!)</p>

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<p>Keilexandra: I think that Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst et al. (and Grinnell!) have financial aid on a par with Yale’s, although I may be wrong about that. I certainly have met students at Swarthmore who came from VERY challenging financial circumstances. Where the LACs may fall down a bit is with higher-income families ($70,000 - $100,000).</p>

<p>Anyway, I am the wrong person to ask about turning Yale into a LAC, since I think Yale is pretty perfect already. The Residential Colleges provide a LAC-like social experience if you want it. A program like Directed Studies gives you a freshman year of all seminars. </p>

<p>English-speaking grad students: I’ve also told before the story of my cousin, a grad student at another Ivy, who said, “I really hate teaching. There’s only one thing I like about it – Watching how my students’ initial excitement that they have a native English-speaking TA slowly and inexorably turns into the realization that they would have been much better off with a TA who only spoke Chinese but who gave a crap about them.”</p>

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<p>^ Yep, that’s exactly where I fall… income ~80k. LACs are barely affordable, Yale would be quite comfortably affordable. And my parents much prefer Y’s prestige.</p>

<p>Directed Studies sounds very interesting except for the focus on Western canon. I am not a classicist or much interested in classics or Western history; if only there was a Directed Studies in the Postcolonial Canon.</p>

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<p>Keilexandra, we may have had this conversation before. I know you are anti-core. But if you are interested in “the Postcolonial Canon” I encourage you to get yourself some systematic background in the Dead White Men Canon, too. Trying to understand postcolonial literature without knowing the Western canon is like trying to understand Renaissance literature without knowing anything about Latin literature. It’s not like you can’t do it, but you can’t do it without missing a lot. Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie (to pick three denizens of the Postcolonial Canon) didn’t grow up reading Morrison, Garcia, and Rushdie; they read Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Flaubert, and Faulkner. And when they started writing, they didn’t compose toasts, vallenatos, or Araqi poetry. Instead, they chose that most parochially Western of forms, the novel. The postcolonial lit world exists in a complex, ongoing conversation with the European (and American) tradition, and it you don’t know that tradition then you’re listening to only one side of a dialogue between what are ultimately lovers.</p>

<p>But . . . you don’t need Yale or DS to do that. You may need a university, though. Look carefully at the faculties and course offerings of LACs. All of them are going to have someone interested in postcolonial literature on faculty, but hardly any of them will have two such someones. Maybe over the course of a couple years there will be three or four courses offered in the field. Universities with good literary studies are going to be offering 4-5 times as much.</p>

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<p>^ I concede the point. Certainly, as an English major, I’ll study lots of Western canon; but it bothers me that Directed Studies is SO Western, ALL (or almost all) of the time. It is possible to study the Western canon with a constant comparative tangent alongside; I’m not seeing that in DS. I talked about the postcolonial canon, but I suppose for me personally I’m most interested in the comparative lit side (which, I know, is also difficult to find at LACs).</p>

<p>Is DS at Yale solely a freshman thing? Any tips (not addressing JHS specifically here) on how to “make” Yale LAC-like, academically, in later years–especially in a popular major and huge department like English?</p>

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<p>Are you interested in doing the writing concentration within English? If so, that would help to make the department feel smaller. Also, they offer many workshop style writing courses for anyone, no matter what your major. My D took beginning and hopes to take intermed fiction next year. There’s also the Daily Themes course, which is unique (I think) to Y, although it is bigger than a workshop.</p>

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<p>^ I’ll definitely be taking writing workshop courses, but I don’t plan to concentrate in it, no. I am thinking about switching to Comparative Lit, which tends to offer more flexibility and is a smaller department. (But then it’s impossible to get into the workshop courses, as a non-English major…)</p>

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<p>so I am interested in math, but my school doesn’t offer calc or other advanced math subjects so I am taking calc next year at my local college. It is clear that I will be behind the people who won a gold medal in the math olympiad, but is there a real chance for attention at yale? I really hope to get a PhD from another top institution in math in the future.</p>

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<p>anyone…</p>

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<p>ESL – The lack of advanced math at your high school won’t hurt you. Colleges are going to evaluate your application in the context of the opportunities available to you at your high school. Top colleges want to see that you’ve taken full advantage of those opportunities. You’ve exhausted the opportunities at your high school for math and are demonstrating your enthusiasm for the subject by taking calc at a local college. Colleges value that kind of inititiative.</p>

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<p>Not true, my D got into both Intro and Intermediate Fiction workshops as an undeclared sophomore. Many of the people in her workshop were not English majors. Your writing samples are more important than your major.</p>

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<p>^ Interesting. Thank you for clarifying the difference between rhetoric and practice. I believe the written policy is that English majors have priority.</p>

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<p>I must be missing where they state that English majors have priority for writing workshops (I know other schools have this policy), all I can find is this reference during a discussion of the Writing Concentration:</p>

<p>[Department</a> of English | Yale University](<a href=“Welcome | English”>Welcome | English)</p>

<p>"Many students take a creative writing course or two as part of larger study in the liberal arts, or they take English 120, “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” or Yale’s famous course, “Daily Themes,” in which students write 300 words daily and attend a weekly lecture and weekly tutorial to test their non-fiction powers or improve their writing fluency.</p>

<p>Writing Workshops are open to all students on the basis of the instructor’s judgment of their work. Instructions for the submission of writing samples for admission to creative writing seminars and workshops are available in LC 107. Students may in some cases arrange a tutorial in writing (English 470), normally after having taken intermediate and advanced writing courses. All students interested in creative writing courses should also consult the current listing of residential college seminars."</p>

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<p>Yeah. My knowledge on this is not current at all, but certainly historically there was absolutely no notion that you had to be an English major to take creative writing courses. Daily Themes especially was filled with non-English majors.</p>

<p>I gather that they may now have some kind of creative writing concentration within the English major, which would tend to concentrate the writing types into the English major. But it would be a real sea-change in the ethos of the place to say that you had to be an English major to take writing courses.</p>