Why I chose Yale over Harvard (by a current student)

Colleges and Universities A-Z Yale University
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<p>Dear GeraldM,</p>

<p>I am aware of all the things that you have just mentioned - but it is still incredibly true in the eyes of an international student from Asia that getting into Oxbridge is very very much easier that getting into HYPSM. I myself applied to Cambridge Corpus Christi for Mathematics, and I was given a conditional offer (IB 42/45 + STEP 1). While the conditional offer for pure sciences and math in Cam is baffling… Personal opinion - I really dont find it that hard to get into Cambridge. Perhaps Oxford is different? I don’t know, didn’t apply there.</p>

<p>I finished my entire UCAS application within 5 hours (vs. 1.5 months for CommonApp)
I applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech. And I only got into 1 of those.
My peers who are in Cambridge really dont strike me as truly very outstanding individuals (although they are very very very good in academics, as in churning out As, A*s and 100 marks), as compared to my seniors in MIT who are international olympiad medalists. Also to point out, in SE Asia (I’ve studied in Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, this scenario is true for all these countries), cross admits of Cambridge and MIT or Cambridge and Stanford - ALWAYS choose MIT or Stanford. Most Cambridge people I know over at the UK are Harvard and MIT rejects.</p>

<p>Also to point out, if someone from my country got into MIT - that person almost always comes out on TV/newspaper. Cambridge? Never. Because its quite common.</p>

<p>No offense to Oxbridge, they are both wonderful schools. But again - personal opinion (as someone who applied to both) - US schools are harder to get in.</p>

<p>Sorry for digressing. This has nothing to do with H and Y.</p>

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<p>Johan - your experience is just that, one experience. Top US schools and Oxbridge are looking for very different things, and are tuned to very different educational systems. The American education system, for example, is much less specialized before university than the system in Britain and many other European and Asian countries (possibly including Malaysia, I wouldn’t know). I don’t know much about the SE Asian educational system but I believe it’s much more similar to the UK system (with equivalents of A-levels and the like) that make it easy for Oxbridge to compare to their home applicants. And maybe for whatever reason US schools do have unusually high standards for SE Asian and other types of international applicants (I can think of several reasons this might be true). The fact that MIT is harder to get into than Oxbridge for Malaysians doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s harder to get into in general.</p>

<p>Allow me to counter your anecdotal evidence (and you should work on that if you plan to study maths here, which is the hardest undergrad maths course in the world) with some of my own: I got into most of the top undergrad schools in the States, including Yale (which was actively recruiting me for science), Caltech (which offered me a full ride), and MIT (which gave me absolutely no special consideration :(). My application to do NatSci at Cambridge, however, was turned down without an interview. I’d imagine most of the people I know who got into similar schools would have also been turned down from Cambridge, and I’d note that since I’ve been here I’ve only met one American undergrad (in Law). So I found getting into MIT surprisingly easy, and Cambridge rather difficult (at least until I finished my undergrad). Extrapolate from that, Mr Small Number Statistician :p</p>

<p>As for these unimpressive people you’ve met who go to Cambridge, and these international Olympiad winners at MIT - man, there are people who snuck in (and plenty of them) at every good university. Even MIT. Not everyone there is an Olympiad medalist, and more than a few of them plain make you wonder how they got in. It’s the case at every good school.</p>

<p>Anyway, I’m not sure how much selectivity really matters. Cambridge seems very much like Yale or any other top US school to me; there are plenty of brilliant people, and some who seem to have sneaked in under the radar. The fact that all of the smartest people in the UK (and many international countries) are coming either to here or to Oxford, just the way that the smartest people in the US are getting divvied up amongst Yale, that place near Boston, MIT, etc., means these places have as high a quality pool as you could ask for. Trying to make distinctions among them at that point seems like a pretty meaningless exercise to me.</p>

<p>In other news, if you’re doing the Maths tripos here next year, feel free to send me a PM and say hi when you get here, I’ll hopefully be doing my PhD at DAMTP so I’m happy to buy you a coffee at CMS or something :)</p>

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<p>Agree with GuitarManARS,</p>

<p>Basically at the top (Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxbridge, Stanford, Berkeley etc), the difference between the quality of the student and education is not much (negligible, maybe?). I don’t think going to one or the other is going to put you in a major disadvantage in gradschool or career prospects. </p>

<p>Back to the main topic, Going to Harvard or Yale (or Oxford) isn’t going to be a tremendous difference. It all boils down to what you do at the school - not which school you attend. </p>

<p>But then, ceteris paribus, I prefer the American style learning environment and college life, thats why I chose the US over the UK (Yale over Cambridge, specifically, despite the 1 year delay which I’m not very happy about, lol) :)</p>

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<p>JohanKris: Ok, so you’re the best of the best, the ultimate genius, as for You, getting into Cambridge was easy. Have to say, it was easy for me too (not as an undergrad), equally easy than getting into Princeton. But I’m not that pompous to say that getting into Cambridge or Princeton is easy in general; none of the things you mentioned adduced to sustain this hypothesis, based on your own experience. Anyway, it seems you really dislike Oxbridge: as you said, these were great universities 200 years ago, but not nowadays. Then one is tempted to speculate then why on Earth these two universities ranked consistently in the World Top 10…? Surely a mistake, that every single university ranking shares… :)</p>

<p>GuitarManARS have to point: such anecdotal evidence, based on one’s friends, if far from being convincing. I know people who choose Brown over Princeton or Yale, so based on my friends, Brown is a better school than Princeton or Yale. In reality, it hardly is. I also know people who were rejected by Cambridge, and accepted to many top notch schools like Stanford or MIT. I know people who got accepted to Oxford while rejected by Columbia. I don’t think any of this matters…</p>

<p>Regarding test scores and academic achievements: despite my insufficient familiarity with the undergraduate admissions at US universities, in case of grad schools, it seems for me that the US universities are the ones fell in love with test scores, and test scores only. If you have great scores without a fantastic CV, you might get in. If you have an astonishing CV, without proper test scores, then there’s no way to enter a grad school even at Penn State (which is a very good flagship of course, but not Ivy League and the like), not to mention HYP. In case of Oxbridge, it’s quite the contrary: your CV that matters, and not the scores. Just one example: to get into a grad school dealing with humanities at the States, you need to do a general GRE test. A test that requires you to know American English probably better than the native speakers (ohh, well, you don’t really need to know the language itself, just memorize the whole dictionary; I’ve met many TA-s who were barely capale of speaking English, not to mention their terrible accents), and do high school level maths. High school level maths, I repeat, for humanities. And people say that the US schools are not obsessed with test scores. Bah.</p>

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<p>The thing I am worried about Yale is the location. Here me out on this. When I visited Harvard my first time, I didn’t fall in love with Harvard. I fell in love with Cambridge. The place was amazing, extremely walkable, safe, fun and much more vibrant than I figured. Plus there’s Boston, the world’s biggest college city.</p>

<p>The thing with Yale is New Haven. I know several Yalies who were mugged. I can’t imagine it to beat Cambridge. What do you guys think? Can you convince me otherwise?</p>

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<p>I love Cambridge, but while it may appear to be “safe”, crime does exist – as it does everywhere. See:
<a href=“http://www2.cambridgema.gov/CityOfCambridge_Content/documents/BridgeStat_August2011_FINAL.pdf[/url]”>http://www2.cambridgema.gov/CityOfCambridge_Content/documents/BridgeStat_August2011_FINAL.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Also see: <a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/26/police-cambridge-harvard-crime/[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/26/police-cambridge-harvard-crime/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I think interpretations of New Haven are highly subjective. As someone who lives near Washington D.C., New Haven did not strike me as the crime-ridden wasteland that it’s made out to be. It’s a city with its fair share of problems; I’d be shocked to find an urban area that isn’t similar in that respect. I found New Haven to be beautiful, a smaller scale urban area with its own distinct style. If you use common sense (avoid walking alone on outskirts really late, etc.), you should be okay, I believe.</p>

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