Cultural Atmosphere: Harvard vs. Yale

Lirazel
Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:12:45 +0000

My main comment is that there is no reason that this question should be addressed to Harvard 2012, vs. Harvard-in-general, and should be moved.

(Bearing in mind that I haven’t actually spent more than a week at Harvard yet.) I have always thought that Yale was more than a little cult-ish, personally, in terms of their enthusiasm. I know some people like it, but after being told more than once a week for a semester that I should apply to Yale (no) by someone who hadn’t even gotten in yet, I was like…still no. Every week, I would say no, every week, “Lirazel, apply to Yale!” “FRIEND C YOU ARE NOT EVEN ACCEPTED YET WHY ARE YOU SO LOYAL” “Yale is the best college on the planet!!!11!! (stoner-face)” And she kept telling me to apply to Yale into March of this year! The deadline, by the way, is still January 1. (She was HS '09). And that seems typical (if a /little/ bit more than usual)! The Yale subforum/my friends going to Yale/the cute but campy Yale music video/whatever is all like…ahh no thank you. Too much excitement. I want to go to college, not summer camp. Don’t get me wrong, I am so excited about going to Harvard. I came away from the visit days in awe that it was better by orders of magnitude than I had imagined college could be. Like, the activities fair–I could see how it could be frightening, as it was really intense, but everyone was so enthusiastic (sometimes frighteningly so…but science fiction clubs are that way everywhere) about their clubs, and there were so many of them! And the talent show! Oh, hi, we’re Harvard’s 1920s-30s-and-40s male a capella group. Why? Because we’re Harvard and we /can/ have a capella groups that specific! Oh, hi, we’re a 40-person break-dancing troupe, of whom 5-6 are nearly professional. Oh, hi, we’re the African drum group that is really intense. Or East or South Asian dancing. So where some people do see Yale as culturally richer (I do understand that point of view), I personally see Yale as Harvard + spiked Kool-aid, and Harvard is as vibrant as I could ever want.