<p>i'm from cali and (this is gonna stupid but...) my biggest fear about yale is the weather. how many months does it snow? is it depressing to people like me from cali? also how long is your winter break? cuz if i'd be home in cali from december to mid-january or something and it only snows until february, i think i could manage. lol.</p>
<p>Novembers without snow are very uncommon in the Northeast, but it’s rarely more than an inch or so, and it melts really fast. December is when it typically starts to snow, but the intense winter really begins in January and starts to conclude in early March. I don’t know about New Haven, but I live in a Canadian city just a couple of hours north of the border (it actually snows more south of the border than it does here), and I’d say that winter officially ends around the last week of March. That’s when all of the snow finishes melting (it literally takes like a week for it to melt) and stops freezing over.</p>
<p>Come on, it’s just snow.</p>
<p>Ditto as what rockermcr said. I’m from Canada (we get less snow than some cities in the south, but we get around the same temperatures). The snow isn’t bad, it’s the cold that gets you. I was stuck outside yesterday for about 3 hours waiting in line and all I had on was a woolcoat and a light shirt (stupid me). Lost all feeling in my toes and hands at the 2.5 hour mark. I was about -5C, so around 23, 24F, but it gets colder near the new year. I like the snow though.</p>
<p>Now if I could have snow without the cold…</p>
<p>@whitecadillac, I totally understand you, I’m from Florida. However, I lived in NJ until I was 15 and I can tell you that the weather won’t be too awful for you to handle. Connecticutt really isn’t that far north - it’s winters have nothing on how cold it gets in upstate NY/Michigan/Minnesota, etc. I’m not even sure if it’ll dip below zero - if so, it’ll be rare.</p>
<p>As long as you’re equipped with the right clothing, you’ll be fine 
Make sure to buy a winter coat, some snow boots, and maybe a pair of long underwear for when you’ll inevitably want to go sledding when it snows out.</p>
<p>Don’t be afraid of snow, embrace it, it’s fun!</p>
<p>The weather is quite depressing, not gonna lie. Lately it’s been getting dark before 5. That + cold + finals = sadness.</p>
<p>Yeah, the weather here sucks. I’m from NYC and the cold doesn’t get to me. Honestly, I don’t think it’s that bad. What’s REALLY bad is how much it frickin’ rains. It’s ridiculous and ****es me off. In terms of snow, it has yet to really snow here. None of the “snow” we’ve had qualifies.</p>
<p>In conclusion, the cold is manageable (but maybe not from someone from cali…) and the rain SUCKS!</p>
<p>The rain does suck. This is no lie.</p>
<p>I live about two hours south of New Havens, and it’s snowing here for the first time this year! Love snow. Too bad it’s Saturday and I don’t get a snow day.</p>
<p>Yeah, it always gets dark before 5 pm in winter. For the past three years and half I’ve been leaving home at 6:30 to get to school around 7o’clock and arriving home around 5pm, so for a couple months of every year I never get to see any actual daylight. I guess it can be kind of depressing.</p>
<p>It’s snowing now!!!</p>
<p>Yay for snow!</p>
<p>It’s not that bad–it rarely goes below 25 degrees in the winter. However, it’s nothing like California. It’s definitely manageable, though.</p>
<p>What you’ll notice is that it gets dark very early because New Haven is on the eastern end of the time zone - meaning it gets dark about an hour earlier than it does in say Detroit, which is on the western end of EST. By the middle of December, it’s getting dark a little after 3PM and that is depressing. It stays light longer of course into January, etc. but then February is typically the grey heart of NE winter, with lots of cloud cover and either snow or rain. The bottom line is that February usually sucks weather-wise.</p>
<p>Haha, I’m worried about the same thing. I live in AZ, so I can handle the heat. But I’ve only seen snow once in my life. However, if I manage to get into Yale I’d just deal with it. It’s all about new experiences, right? :)</p>
<p>Oh the weather at Yale is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we’ve no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
:)</p>
<p>New Haven is right on Long Island Sound. That is a largish body of water that does not freeze over, so it tends to limit how cold it can get there. Fronts tend to move northwest to southeast, especially in the winter, so the ocean doesn’t keep the cold out altogether. But New Haven has much less cold and snow than places like Ithaca or Williamstown. The snow comes and goes. There will always be a couple of significant snow storms at some point during a winter (meaning – some shovelling required, and people have snowball wars and sled down Science Hill), but generally there isn’t snow on the ground for weeks at a time ever.</p>
<p>Two of my fondest memories of Yale involve snow: </p>
<p>The first was an evening I spent with a classmate’s very attractive sister, who was visiting from LA, and who had never seen snow falling before. This was the sparkly, big-flake kind of snow that makes everything look like Japanese art, and not windy or even too cold. There are lots of worse ways to spend time than accompanying a beautiful woman who is feeling transfixed by the beauty of the world. </p>
<p>The second was an afternoon in April (yes, as the song says, sometimes it snows in April, but not very much or for very long). I was with a group of people in the Master’s residence in Trumbull (I think – not so sure about that) listening to an old blues musician a folklore professor had brought up from the Mississippi Delta. He played a few standards, with everyone listening politely. Then he played a beautiful, sweet folk song, and as he was playing, snow started to fall on the flowering trees outside the windows, even though the sun was shining in from the west. It was an incredibly gorgeous moment – the music, the snow, the sun, the pink blossoms, the gothic windows. You could see everyone get all dreamy and relax. The musician let the song’s last chord hang in the air until it completely died . . . we were all utterly high on life. Then he said, simply, “That was white folks’ music. Now I’m going to play a little more in the black folks’ style.” And he launched into a completely raunchy, raucous blues full of boasting and sex. But now he had us all in the palm of his hand – we were totally busted for liking “white folks’ music”, but all the guards had come down. What a great performer! And it was still gorgeous outside with the snow, the sun, the blossoms.</p>