Yale University

Yale is what you make of it. If you really want, you can smooth sail through easy courses and graduate with a 3.7+ GPA. You can also choose to get more bang for your buck (the annual tuition is over $40,000 now!) and load up on difficult courses. You can choose to devote yourself to tons of different extracurricular activities - sports, music, a cappella, debate, frats, journalism, senior societies, and much, much more. Or you can choose to be invisible. I wouldn't trade my non-academic exploits for a higher GPA, but a 3.9 is very important to some people, especially those looking to go to med school or law school. I think about 20% of Yale undergrads go on to law/med schools... I am not completely certain.

I was drawn to Yale because of its campus and the atmosphere. The beauty of this campus is stunning, especially during the summer. It's wonderful to be around so many talented and quirky people. There are occasional a**holes but that's to be expected at any blue-blood school. In fact, the general population is very open-minded and above all, way too liberal. My views were considered fairly liberal back in my home town, but then I discovered that I fall into the moderate/conservative range here. Although I don't really have a problem with this, Yale COULD use little more political diversity.

What I like the least about Yale is its offering of intro level courses. They are really boring and unstimulating. Sitting in large intro classes - mostly in natural and social sciences - feels like I am back in my overcrowded high school chemistry class. Small intro classes can be good (depends on the prof. or the TA), but they are very inconsistent. Two sections of a same class can turn out to be completely different in teaching quality, difficulty, size, and grade generousity. Keep in mind that this isn't really a big problem once you finish your freshman year (and who cares about classes during freshman year? A lot of people are too busy partying and acquiring fine taste for Dubra and Keystone Light - burying themselves in holes that they will have to work out of for the rest of their college careers).

Classes get much better (and harder) once you get into the 200 level or above. As an afterthought, I am very glad I decided to come here. My other top choices were University of Chicago and Harvard (yes, not all Yalies are Harvard rejects :p) I can't really say what my experiences would have been at those places, but I found a near-perfect balance of academics, extracurriculars, and social life at Yale. No room for sleep though.

3rd Year Male -- Class 2006

Collaboration/Competitive: A+, Faculty Accessibility: B+