jaquelinejanson

Presently Yale is my No. 1 choice school, but I read some pretty harsh critiques on Yale this morning at this blog:

are these criticisms valid? And most importantly, are the students at Yale happy?

jaquelinejanson

these are her criticisms:

YALE. Prefrosh: read if you dare to actually be an informed person.
So I see that someone in Norway has visited my blog, and I'm assuming it's due to my recent advertisement on the college admit board websites, and not my huge Norwegian fanbase. And up until now I haven't done a lot of college reminiscing because I assumed all the people who know me are sick and tired of hearing me whine, but i feel like I owe it to N.Weejee (hope you don't mind that's your new nickname) and to other kids who are lost in that hurricane of horrible called the college admissions process to give you what you came for:

Yale.... YALE yale. Is a place. just like any other place. And the fact that those four little letters have made you visit a blog of a person you've never met and who has zero net legitimacy (though I appreciate your faith) shows a spec of how powerful a name can be. And I'm not going to tell you it's not a name that opens doors- it's this little invisible tattoo that you can shine a special IvyLeague certification light on if your intelligence is ever in doubt. People who are looking to hire you will raise their eyebrow. And maybe you'll get the job.

If you want to conquer the financial world it's probably helpful to have gone to Yale. But please think of it as just what i described- a badge, a hoop to jump through, an obstacle course, and nothing more. Yale is not the utopia it makes itself out to be kids, it simply isn't, and if you have any little nibbling doubts when you start going on campus tours and realize that they are all the same, and that every place has a *stellar* social life and *super* diversity and *amazing* classes with *passionate* teachers then you should listen to me when I say: college is a business. A branding. You are paying 40 grand a year to go to a hyped up summercamp where instead of relaxing you have to do all sorts of busywork.

So great- we always knew most of school was a waste of our time. Almost no institution has the budget to give you a teacher who has time to really learn your interests innate abilities talents flaws and unique information assimilation style, so instead of having an apprenticeship system, instead of really figuring out how your brain works and giving you the tools to rock it, they make you take lots of tests that are all calibrated exactly the same even though every person in the room is completely different, and if you do well, then you get a gold star or something. Good job kid, you've done what you are told, even if it is boring and unproductive and uncreative, and therefore you get all sorts of high numbers. High numbers are better than low numbers, and because the system is not designed to treat people as individuals, they have to rank you all, low to high.

And you bath there at the top of your highschool- you get honors and whatnot, you get elected to positions with little or no opportunity for real change, but you get to put them on your resume. And then one day, you are baptized into the cruel cruel reality that now you must leave this safe place where you are on top and compete blindly with millions of others who are just as, if not more talented than you in every way. And even if they are not, some of them can afford to buy the types of services they provide in Westchester- $30,000 for guaranteed Ivy League admission (or your money back). The system isn't flawed, and it's no longer about learning, it's about earning.

Yale has a 28 billion dollar endowment. 28 billion dollars. And still, they couldn't find the funding to keep my junior year room from flooding with toilet water. Thrice. When the plumber came up to fix it after 2 days of my screaming on the phone, he laughed and shook his head, "every year for 9 years I keep tellin' em to fix this room or it'll flood in the fall." Whaaaaaaat? Nobody complains because it's Yale. If you don't like it, go to a state school. You're only here for 4 years and the facilities becomes a laugh, a test, we bond in squalor and everyone thinks it's pretty funny after a while- then they don't petition to fix it because if they had to deal with it for a year why can't you? And you will, little freshman, you will.

I came to yale expecting a utopia and found New Haven which is literally a fake gothic pouch of pretentiousness wrapped in ghetto. Want to witness the brutal effects of forced gentrification? The thrills of living with a community of people who hate themselves so much they study all day to keep the voices quiet surrounded by a community of people who hate them so much they hold you up with knives and guns? Come to New Haven.
One thing I will say for New Haven, the food, is actually quite impressive. That's the food in NH, not at Yale, where the food is provided by the same people who have the biggest prison food contract in the country. We're eating prison food and believe me, you can taste it.

"But the professors! FAMOUS people teach at yale!" Ya, famous people live in Hollywood too but that doesn't mean you should go there expecting to become enlightened. Yale professors are required to teach, unlike at other colleges where they can hold up in their offices doing research and banging grad students. Yale likes to advertise this as some wild benefit, but in reality it means you have disgruntled people who are forced to teach to keep tenure when all they really want to do is, well anything but teach. They dust off a 30 year old syllabus and stand up and a podium twice a week and read from a script they wrote back when they still had hair and you sit there wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork for not realizing the whole charade sooner.

I am a fair judge and I will give Yale one thing: shopping period is really great, 2 weeks to do whatever you want and visit all sorts of classes to figure out what kind you should take. Great. Great in theory, but if you want to take anything that actually seems cool with a teacher who is actually not an incompetent jurassic hack, you need to SUIT UP on the first day of class. You have to get there early, shmooze, and do possibly all of the following things in some combination:
be friends with the department head
be friends with the teacher
be a senior majoring in the class major writing a paper about exactly the topic covered
be really lucky

For some of the best classes I ever shopped there were roughly 250 people gunning for 12 spots. And those 250 people, as I mentioned before, are the top golden poos in all their regions, sometimes in their entire countries, so you are constantly having to assert the fact that you're the best, even when you've gotten into Yale. And you might be. But you know what?

nobody cares.

The advisership system is, in general, a joke- a new person every year who is so busy you could have changed gender and species before coming in to ask them to sign your schedule for a second time, and they wouldn't notice. And this is the average kids, this is my experience, I'm not saying there isn't a single competent adviser, but I'm saying that IF YOU, LIKE ME expected to show up to the golden gates of an Ivy where people would be skipping through Shakespearean meadows reciting quadratic equations, skimming over the vast pond of philosophical ponderances sampling the fruits of the literatti trees, you are living in a fantasy and it's time to snap out of it. You'll only be hurt by your optimism.

Schools are businesses. I should know- I worked for yale in the admissions office all 4 years. And I learned that there are parts of the official tour that are banned. That the map instructions they give you to get here take you a loooong circuitous way through cottage grad student housing, instead of the fast way straight through the ghetto. We spend millions of dollars a year on outreach and admissions packaging because we, like cigarettes, are going to convince you that we are going to make you super cool, super sexy, super fantastic, even if we're lying straight to your face.

So if you've gotten to the end of this post you're either my father, or someone who feels intrigued by hearing someone tell them that the strange feelings they're feeling about this 'big decision' are well founded. Ask me questions. Please ask me what you want to know about working in admissions, about being a yalie, because these are the things I wish someone had told me. Yale is not utopia, it's not a dump either. I'm not saying that I didnt appreciate my educaiton- Learning is great.

But you can learn where people care about your brain and your uniqueness. You can learn at a place where not everyone wants to slit their wrists because the pressure to be the best is so overwhelming and the competition so impossibly steep. YOU CAN LEARN AT A PLACE THAT IS THE BEST FOR YOU. Everyone goes around saying yale is one of the best. The best at what? The best at advertising. There is no objective best, and the fact that people think that way just shows how deep rooted the linearly ranked system is. If you want to be your GPA, if you don't have a personality or any desire to be anything other than top poop, then Yale is the best for you. But if not, then yale is just another school, a school in a bad neighborhood with lots of benefits and lots of flaws, and you need to strip away the name and actually look at the facts. I didn't do that. I saw Yale- and i was sold instantly. And sometimes I wish I could have looked at all the schools totally unbiased, without the names... Yale would not have ended up being even near my first choice. It wasn't the best for me.

But again- I'm not saying it's not the best for you, I'm just suggesting that if you get into 5 schools including Yale, Yale should not automatically win just because it's Yale. Do some thinking and soul searching, and decide what you are willing to sacrifice for a name brand. It might be your integrity. your social life. your educational satisfaction. your time. your money...

Please ask me questions- I'm always excited to share what I wish I had known.

Also- college is important, but here is a list of people who didn't graduate from a college:

Shakespeare
Darwin
Bill Gates
Aristotle
George Washington
Jesus


Think about it. College isn't magic- it's an expensive holding tank.
And I, for one, didn't learn anything SO AMAZING in college that I couldn't have learned with a library card and a big helping of dedication and curiosity. Make it fun. Make it worth your while. Make it about what you want instead of what you want people to think about you, because living your life in designer jeans, worrying about what people think all day long, simply isn't very productive, and if you're a smartie IV hopeful, you'll know I'm right.

xo
H

Cato91

The question "are students at Yale happy?" is a bit like asking "Are Americans happy?" There are unhappy Yalies, and there are happy Yalies; there are unhappy Americans, and there are happy Americans.

A better question is "Will you at Yale be happy?" Yes, if many students are miserable, you are more likely to be miserable as well. But remember, the misery has method: something about Yale makes them unhappy. If it exists, try to find it, and apply it to your life. Look at the specific elements of what makes Yale Yale and determine whether they will make you happy or unhappy.

I hope I don't sound too lecture-y...

But to answer your question, I have heard that Yalies in general are very happy.

T26E4

My first thoughts on that blogger is "would she have been happy ANYWHERE?"
I agree with the basic tenet of her notes however: don't make Yale no. 1 just because of its reputation. Check it out. Talk to students, talk to recent alumni. For me, by November of my Sr. year, I had already been accepted to a fantastic college (rolling admissions) and was going to apply to two additional top engineering colleges. A friend suggested I investigate Brown so this opened the door to my Ivy/east coast inquiries. Come Thanksgiving, I drove a friend (whom I had a crush on) to a Yale info session put on by the local Yale Club. Three students spoke (home for break). They blew me away with their energy and description of Y. They sold me. I went home and pulled the Yale app from beneath the mountain of college literature in my closet. I started on the app that night.

Once I arrived, it exceeded all my expectations. Like Cato said, there were unhappy students when I was there. I recall a young woman from rural TX who withdrew about ten days into Freshman year. Those of us who met her briefly were incredulous. But who were we to say what was right for her? I can tell you (FWIW) that New Haven were four of the best years of my life -- rich in intellectual opportunities, rich social interactions which have yielded me a dozen lifelong friends, rich in self discovery and maturity.

Good luck to you!

PS: if you want some objective responses, read the "Yale Parents Thread" on this page. See what some parents are saying about their sons' and daughters' experiences.

roflc0pter

Wow. I won't deny that the author is bitter, but is what she said about the classes true? Is it really that difficult to get into a class? Are the professors really unenthusiastic?

jaquelinejanson

thank you T26E4 for your comment.
I just wanted to see what other people felt about Yale, and if their experience at Yale has been as bad as "Hannah" has described, because this person does sound extremely biased.

and Cato91 - I enjoy being in small, tight-knit communities, where people actually care for each other if one of them gets sick. I come from a small highschool of 500 people, give or take 50, where everyone knows each other and gets along great. I enjoy small discussions, not big lectures or classes where notes are simply put up in a powerpoint presentation and the students have to copy them down. Given these, will I be happy at Yale? (if I was lucky enough to get accepted, of course)

jaquelinejanson

(If I am lucky enough to get accepted, of course. There's a very realistic chance that I will not be accepted at all)

T26E4

roflc0pter: There are about 1700 courses available to undergrads. In the upper tier courses, they are usually reserved for those who are majoring in the class due to the need to keep the seminars small. But these are relatively few. You can imagine the sign up list for Tony Blair's seminar. I'd imagine PoliSci/History/Econ folks would get first dibs. A Chemistry major probably doesn't stand much of a chance to get in the PM's class.

From personal experience, there was never a single class that I wanted that I didn't get in.

drummerdude_07

Wow, what a sad, sad, person. Learn at a place that is best for you? Well, sure, but don't you have to get an education before you even know what is best for you?

I don't know what classes she was trying to take, or with what professors, but in my 2 years I'd say I disagree 100% with her contentions about the academic experience. THe professors are amazingly accesible- I had high school teachers who were less willing to talk to me! I've had ample opportunities to take tiny, high-level seminars with some of our best faculty. And I'm only a sophomore.

And of course there's ghetto areas in New Haven. It's a city!

I grant her that one shouldn't think that Yale is going to be entirely frolicking in the clouds with cute, fluffy bunnys. But why berate Yale simply because you failed to properly take advantage of the opportunities it granted you?

If you really want to complain about being sold a name that no longer measures up to its bloated reputation, take a look a little further north. There's a reason that Yalies are happier than their Cambridge counterparts.

drummerdude_07

"In the upper tier courses, they are usually reserved for those who are majoring in the class due to the need to keep the seminars small."

This is often true on paper, and is in practice true in certain departments, but the reality is that qualified non-major freshmen and sophomores regularly get into and take upper level seminars- even ones that aren't open to them according to the blue book. This is further proof that our professors are open and accomodating.

drummerdude_07

Also, the idea that the food is bad is utterly ludicrous. I would hate to see this girl at a state school, because our food is universally praised as amazing as college dining halls go.

T26E4

drummer: i missed the part about the food: there was only so much I could take. LOL It's hard to believe she actually attended given how far out she was!

I wonder if she'll change her tune when her own kids start poking around at their "legacy" status. Hahaha

wjb

I'll just note that the author of this diatribe is due to publish her first book, entitled "Everything Sucks."

Hannah Friedman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yasmin

^ahhh, the irony

Nick017

I love people who complain 100% of the time, it makes my pessimism and cynicism seem so mild and normal. The worst people are those who tell you things that are probably true, but tell it all pretentiously, like they were letting you in on some great fact that will liberate you. Everyone who has ever payed for college knows its a business and everyone who went to yale would be the first to tell you it was worth it primarily because of the networking done. And this idea of the top poop... Granted, the possibility of HPYS does turn level headed people into college-whores, but I'm guessing that OP managed to with her obnoxious personality, suck all of the poop around her like a magnet, and repel the many level headed, fun Yaliens away.