<p>"Stanford WILL provide you with a better overall science education."</p>
<p>Maybe in grad school, Stanford may be better (although Yale has awesome grad school programs in many areas of science), but as an undergrad, Yale has unparalleled support for the undergraduate participation in the sciences.</p>
<p>Stanford: 8180 acres
Yale: 310 acres.</p>
<p>Usually, I won't ***** about size, but this is too much.. WHY IS STANFORD SO BIG?</p>
<p>Stanford is gorgeous...I think they must be counting the open space preserves and shopping center in this acreage. The inner campus is very accessible. Most kids bike to classes (although I always walked). It's a very very beautiful place.</p>
<p>By the way, all this Yale v Stanford stuff is really splitting hairs on a dog's back. Both schools will get anyone where they want to go. They are very different in terms of atmosphere, however, and that's just a matter of preference.</p>
<p>If I actually get in...<em>prays</em> I will be deciding between Gothic architecture and nice greenery. Mmmmm....... 8180 acres, so tempting.</p>
<p>Stanford is a wonderful university with many resources at the graduate level. In terms of undergraduate life, I hear that Stanford students have a great time. However, in terms of undergraduate education, Yale is really tops. You get alot of attention and have many resources at your fingertips. Stanford is huge, Yale is smaller and more cohesive. The residential college system is wonderful and really brings shapes your life. In terms of md admissions, I only know of my class at harvard which had 10 yalies and 3 stanford students. They were all great students and I don't think you could separate them. But the fact remains that there is some major distance between California and the east coast, which my skew the picture somewhat in terms of numbers (since I found that many people were reluctant to swtich coasts).</p>
<p>Zephyr, you need to stop belittling Yale's science program. You would have gone there over stanford, so its a tad disingenuous of you to be ex post facto crapping on Yale. The difference in undergrad science education is nominal at best (unless we're talking about a savant). Where Stanford really dominates is the graduate level, and Yale holds its own in terms of biology and medicine.</p>
<p>"In terms of md admissions, I only know of my class at harvard which had 10 yalies and 3 stanford students."
I have a bit of a problem, which you concede, with that because a lot of Stanford students end up at UCSF, Stanford and UCLA for medical school. Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much. </p>
<p>I think it is hard to say conclusively that "Yale is really tops" in undergraduate education.</p>
<p>And Stanford isn't that much larger than Yale: 6500 undergrads compared to 5300. That's not a huge difference.</p>
<p>It's becoming awfully childish to argue about number of HMS students who were Y vs S undergrads.</p>
<p>1) FWIW (probably very little), Harvard's medical school always has far more H undergrads than any other. S or Y are almost always #2, and the other is almost #3 (i.e. the 10 vs 3 year would be unusual).</p>
<p>2) S has "stronger" science departments than Y, but that has little if any correlation with the quality of education that you'd get there (or with the quality of students there compared to Y).</p>
<p>3) Having said that, it strikes me as odd to say that Y is "tops" simply because the undergraduate education is good and there are great opportunities for undergrads there. One could just as easily argue that many liberal arts colleges offer the exact same advantages ... and they probably do.</p>
<p>Location, location, location. I applied EA for Stanford and did not apply to Yale (though I am double legacy for Yale) because I am from California and didn't want to travel across the country for college. Weather is important to me, and I wanted a top school without leaving California. Interestingly, my parents who spent 15 years in New Haven, said they would choose Stanford over Yale if they were choosing again. Both attended Yale for college and medical school.</p>
<p>You make an excellent point with your "location, location, location!"</p>
<p>This is often the deciding factor when top students pick one elite over another.</p>
<p>Harvard Medical School DOES NOT MATTER. My family is full of MDs (SU med although all got into HMS). When you get out in the real world, no one knows or cares where you went. My brother is fond of saying that he shares an office with someone who went to UCSB for undergrad and some little known med school, and he makes the same salary as someone with a Harvard undergrad, SU Med/PhD degree/ Chief Resident. There's a lot of folklore out there that suggests it matters more than it does. You'll make the same $ as anyone else once you start working. An MD is an MD....Do you know where your internist went to school? I don't.</p>
<p>Unless you want to do academic medicine. Then, where you went to college and medical school (and residency) matter.</p>
<p>But in some ways, Stanford is too big to have a community feel</p>
<p>don't neglect to factor in sunscreen costs,...</p>
<p>Stanford is more known to have a community feel than other, smaller-sized, institutions on the East Coast.</p>
<p>"Harvard Medical School DOES NOT MATTER. My family is full of MDs (SU med although all got into HMS). When you get out in the real world, no one knows or cares where you went."</p>
<p>I realize this is straying off-topic. But to continue with it ... of course on some level it doesn't matter where a doctor attended medical school. By that line of reasoning, it doesn't matter where somebody went to college -- obviously people will "succeed" or "fail" based on their personal characteristics rather than their diplomas. However, it is overly simplistic to say that you can "make the same salary" as an MD regardless of school -- there is <em>much</em> more to education than how it affects your earning potential.</p>
<p>And incidentally, information about physicians' backgrounds is becoming much more widely available to patients via Internet and other accreditation bodies than ever before ... so anybody who uses Google can almost always find out where their doctor trained in <5 minutes.</p>
<p>Its not for nothing that most doctors post their diplomas and certificates on their office or waiting room wall. Patients take notice.</p>
<p>If u want to learn to treat gunshots, Mass. general is hard to beat.</p>
<p>"If u want to learn to treat gunshots, Mass. general is hard to beat."</p>
<p>Not even close to the truth. If you want to learn to treat gunshots, MGH isn't even the 2nd or 3rd best place in Boston to learn.</p>
<p>"Not even close to the truth. If you want to learn to treat gunshots, MGH isn't even the 2nd or 3rd best place in Boston to learn."</p>
<p>Yeah, but it's still Harvard.</p>