<p>is it too cliche to talk about the gothic architecture and residential college system in the why yale paragraph?</p>
<p>If your applying for their architecture, no. But remember, this says What in PARTICULAR interested you about Yale. There are several aspects and reasons why most people apply, so the admin officers I would imagine expect a lot of cliche answers. Hence, it is not required.</p>
<p>You are going to a specific college because it has pretty buildings? Unless you are an arch major (and a bit even if you are) that is a **** reason… Res college system is better but I would guess that 50% of people use it.</p>
<p>I used the fact that is has one of the greatest liberal arts programs in the world and paired that with my passion for basically everything lol.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a bad answer, but you have to have some good justification for that.</p>
<p>I think its alright if you can’t think of anything better but I would recommend doing a little research on the Yale website and finding some specific program you would want to do to talk about.</p>
<p>i want to be an english major, so i talked about some of their courses instead. is that ok? i mean, thats the only thing i wrote about but i think its more specific and it shows that i did some research</p>
<p>Courses are good. I said that while there were a couple of unis of Yales calibre, one specific course only Yale offered and so it stood out.</p>
<p>Agreed, specific courses/programs are good. I want to major in molecular bio, so I talked about particular bio courses that interest me and certain Yale faculty with whom I would like to conduct research.</p>
<p>The administration already knows that they are going to get cliche answers, all they want to see is that you have some type of idea of why you want to apply to Yale. If they wanted original answers they would’ve made the question “why wouldn’t you want to apply to Yale?” Listing programs and classes that you are interested is ok, but when you really think about it, any of the other Ivy League’s can provide those classes and resources (unless we are talking about VERY obscure courses), no matter how much you want to twist and turn the argument to make it unique. It really doesn’t matter what you put in, as long as it’s what you truly feel about the school.</p>
<p>Can cliche answers hurt you though? I mean for Yale I think I manages a pretty original answer saying that I’m from a New Haven public school and I want to bridge the cultural gap between New Haven and Yale–but for some other ivies I had some difficulty with this question and really just put down some generic answers…</p>
<p>In my opinion, they emphasize residential colleges so much that they probably want it to be part of your reason for applying. It may be cliche, but if it’s the truth, I doubt it could hurt. They definitely won’t reject/accept you based on that. </p>
<p>Not to change the thread, but I had a quick question: on the print preview, it says that you should write the code of your chosen major. There isn’t really a place to put that. Are you just ignoring it?</p>
<p>I mean, I mentioned RCs and such in passing, but my response mainly focused on the professor of clarinet at the school of music (grad school) and him being one of the most famous performers and educators in the world and how I’d love to meet/play/learn from him. Turns out he doesn’t do very much undergrad teaching but I got to play for him and chat 
</p>
<p>I think something like that is truly unique to Yale and demonstrates specific interest and research.</p>
<p>If there isn’t a space on the supplement to do it, then don’t do it.</p>