<p>I was reading a thread on the Princeton board, and it inspired me to start one here. I would certainly consider myself an ardent Yale fan, but I want the whole story. Yale has a lot of advantages- a friendly student body, residential colleges, great professors, etc. But, like any institution, there are also things that need some work. What are your thoughts for an admitted student?</p>
<p>Hmmm....weather, maybe? This is actually REALLY hard.</p>
<p>the city it's in....</p>
<p>new haven is sketchy... outside a bathroom at a starbucks outside of campus some guy approached a groups of friends (girls) and said," hey are you over eighteen? i have this really hot guy friend... do you want to hook up with him?"</p>
<p>Does the city usually get a bad rep just from people who mainly live in relatively safe places/smaller cities? Because I looked up crime stats for New Haven, and they are below the national average - and definitely below where I live (Orlando).</p>
<p>Yeah, i think the New Haven thing is just a reputation that's stuck. I mean, there are muggings around campus every once in a while, but usually that happens to grad students who are wandering around the city. If you mostly stay on central campus (which just about everyone does) it's really not a big deal. Also there's no way New Haven's any more dangerous than NYC or Philadelphia, or lots of other cities with colleges.</p>
<p>it's probably true that new haven is safer than NYC or philadelphia but new haven is also a lot smaller.....</p>
<p>I was in New Haven for a month during summer. There were constant police sirens and a sea of homeless people on the green. Other than that, the area around New Haven seemed just fine.</p>
<p>Anything else? Atmosphere-wise, or maybe academically?</p>
<p>Weather I can deal with. Where I'm from, we get days off of school because it's dangerous to leave the house in the ultra-cold (-33 with windchill!)!!!</p>
<p>My daughter has complained that it has been difficult to satisfy the writing requirement. Requirements were changed before her year and for a class to be considered a writing intensive class, the professors have to do extra stuff to justify it as a writing intensive class. So some professors don't qualify their classes as writing intensive as a result, even though you may be writing substantial papers in the class. It may have gotten better over the past year or so however. She hasn't had trouble fulfilling any of her other requirements.</p>
<p>Grade inflation. But then again that's a plus to some -- for me it's a minus because it keeps me less motivated and disciplined to know that in the end, it'll probably turn out allright, so I don't always bring my top game.</p>
<p>I transferred from a community college, so I miss the diversity of age and socioeconomic class, and also the more active atmosphere in class.</p>
<p>To be honest, I wasn't expecting it to be this great. I'm floored -- it's hard to really pinpoint any clear negatives.</p>
<p>Worst thing about Yale...that I had to graduate.</p>
<p>It's been awhile since my Yale undergrad days, but what I recall most as a problem was the ease of falling into an extremely hard academic routine. Each of my teachers seemed to believe that his or her class should be the center of my life and mind. The result was that I was often too exhausted to be excited, and sometimes felt the weight of the work like the thick walls of the colleges.</p>
<p>Almost all of this was pressure on myself, not with other students. And it came from the passion of the teachers more often than not. So am a right to complain about it?</p>
<p>New Haven. It's not so much that it's any more unsafe than any other city, but just that it's neither a great city (like NY or Chicago) or a nice college town. It's a medium-size, somewhat gritty city without a lot of features that are good for college students. It has improved somewhat, with more student-oriented businesses around the campus.</p>
<p>New Haven still has a bad reputation among some people (mostly people who live outside the area, as well as Harvard graduates, particularly journalists, who are bitter about Yale's Ivy League record-low acceptance rate last year) because until somewhat recently it used to be a more typical small, industrial city with a pretty lame downtown. These days it's a major technology/financial services center with 1000s of biotech jobs paying $100K+, million-dollar condos and hundreds of restaurants, upscale bars and clubs filling just about every storefront in the downtown. Also, Yale is growing at a breakneck pace, as you might imagine given than their endowment went from $18 billion to $22 billion last year and over the past 15 years has been consistently growing faster than that of any other university on the planet. New Haven is most often compared to a "miniature New York City." Unfortunately, the prices have been skyrocketing to match. The fact that the main hospital is building a $500M new Cancer Center, staffed by hundreds of radiologists, or the fact that the nearby Sikorsky is hiring hundreds and hundreds of engineers, certainly doesn't help matters. You'll see construction everywhere not only because of Yale (which is spending $400M+ per YEAR on it) but also because Bob Stern is designing a 20-story luxury highrise with a 5-star hotel inside and a 32-story luxury apartment tower is about to break ground a few blocks away.</p>
<p>Also, there are pluses aside from the downtown area, which could easily be considered one of the best college towns in the United States and attracts tens of thousands of students from area colleges every weekend (so much so that some of the streets have to be shut down to traffic late at night). First of all, the city itself has some great neighborhoods, several of them filled with million-dollar Victorian mansions, gourmet grocers and French bakeries that rival anything in Europe, in addition to large immigrant neighborhoods that provide a lot more diversity than you'll find in many cities several times the size. The region in general is also great, with a very high quality of life (e.g., short commutes, extremely high salaries relative to housing cost) because it's on the edge of a major metropolitan area rather than in the middle of one - drive or bike for just 10 minutes and you can be in the middle of horse farms, picking apples, cycling along the shore, hiking 100s of miles of mountain trails, or lounging on the beach. If you're in Boston or NYC, you can't do things like that by any stretch of the imagination. </p>
<p>Safetywise, Yale has an extremely safe campus, especially if you take the same kinds of precautions that you should take at any campus, urban or rural. Rural campuses sometimes have major crimes, too. And even if you decide to wander throughout the city every day, you're honestly much better off an an urban campus than at a suburban or rural one where you will be tempted to get in a car more often -- the risk of injury from auto accidents is statistically about 200 times greater than the risk of any random crime, even in the middle of a typical city. Also, New Haven itself is not really a typical city - it is an unusually safe one. There are 850,000 people in the New Haven metropolitan area, and the city of New Haven has had 12 murders as of December this year. Philadelphia has had 400 murders and Baltimore has had 300 murders. Their metropolitan areas are bigger than New Haven, of course, but not THAT much bigger. Of course there are always good parts and bad parts, but the point is that it isn't the kind of city you might be thinking of.</p>
<p>Plus, from New Haven you can get to New York City via a cheap local commuter train and there are about 45 trains running per day, so it's very easy. How many college towns can say that? To be honest, New York City makes Boston look like a really boring hamlet by comparison. There is really just no comparison. I mean, I wouldn't want to go to college in NYC, because it would totally kill all campus life and turn the campus into a graveyard (visit Columbia for 2-3 days including a weekend and compare it to the same thing at Yale), but having it very close is an asset that very few -- if any -- college towns can match. I would always prefer a college in a great college town within 60 miles of New York City over a college anywhere else, including one in the middle of a medium-sized city like Boston.</p>
<p>Amen. I actually like the Have. It doesn't beat San Francisco, Sarajevo or Stockholm, but on the other hand, college wouldn't be college if there was too much pull from the outside to have the social life scattered. It's this perfect medium.</p>
<p>As for safety, I've no idea how people can wander around 3AM drunk, alone and in unknown neighborhoods, and then actually get surprised by the occasional mugging. Any urban area requires some thinking ahead and common sense precaution.</p>
<p>Stockholm is pretty freaking awesome, maybe even the best city in the world all around, but then again, it is a city of 1.5 million people, maybe a couple hundred thousand more if you really take all the surrounding farmland. The NYC metro (which includes New Haven) has 22 million.</p>
<p>Just a vibe I get... it seems that Yale students aren't as obsessed with academic performance as Harvard and Princeton students are. Does this hurt the academic rigor, or does it just provide further evidence of Yale's collaborative nature?</p>
<p>I haven't found the writing requirement hard to satisfy at all. I absolutely loathe writing papers, but i got a credit for a roman history class i took last semester (only 2 papers!) and i'll probably get one next semester for a science class. The distribution requirements are really easy... it's major requirements that suck!</p>
<p>In response to bmwdan, there's definitely a contingent of students who are very concerned about their grades. That shouldn't come as a surprise, considering how competitive admission is. But in general the attitude is very relaxed. It really depends on the people you associate with... if you're a stressed out person who squeals for joy when you get an A, you're probably going to have similar friends.</p>
<p>bump bump bump</p>
<p>so, there doesn't seem like there's really anything bad about Yale...</p>
<p>I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!</p>