<p>There’s a [url=<a href=“http://www.newresidentialcolleges.yale.edu/index.html]website[/url”>http://www.newresidentialcolleges.yale.edu/index.html]website[/url</a>] about two new residential colleges that are going to be built, but it looks like the decision was made before the economic downturn. I’ve heard that Yale’s endowment took a big hit; do they still plan to build these colleges? Most of the info on the website seems a bit old. If they do build them, I guess it’d mean a bigger student body and good news for people applying to yale in like 4 years.</p>
<p>Also, I heard about a big renovation project started a while ago for all the colleges, is that still going on?</p>
<p>The college-building is on hold, but I think it is expected to go forward in the medium-term future. The issue is probably not so much the hit the endowment took, as it being harder than expected to raise new, dedicated money for this project. And, yes, the point of building two new colleges is to expand undergraduate class sizes by about 300 to roughly that of Harvard. So, eventually sort of good news for applicants, although the extra acceptances that will involve would represent about 1.5% of current application levels – it won’t be a whole lot of good news for the average applicant.</p>
<p>The refurbishing project, as I understand it, is almost done.</p>
<p>“Each incoming freshman is randomly placed into the best residential college”</p>
<p>^ I really like that! Very apt. You may have said it before, but I never saw it, so I’m glad you repeated it. I plan to use it to make people think I am clever, too.</p>
<p>“Before freshman year, all incoming undergraduates are assigned to one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges. Students remain affiliated with their residential college for all four years (and beyond). Yale makes every effort to represent the diversity of the entire undergraduate community within every residential college. In this sense each college is a microcosm of the larger student population. The residential college system offers students a familiar, comfortable living environment, personal interaction with faculty members and administrators, and exciting opportunities for academic and extracurricular exploration.”</p>
<p>It’s random in the sense that there isn’t an athletic college, an arts college, etc. I don’t think there’s any attempt to match particular students with the right college–just an effort to have each be a cross-section.</p>
<p>(I will have to admit, however, that there is probably a secret program to assign only the best people to JE, because that is the only way to explain why it is always the best.)</p>
<p>I also heard that people who live in a college under renovation are moved for a whole year to somewhere else; is there another dorm building that houses these displaced people? And does which house your in matter with regards to freshman housing?</p>
<p>Yes, there is “swing space” inhabited by the students whose college is being renovated (currently, it’s Morse).
Most freshmen live on the Old Campus in dorms affiliated with their residential colleges. Thus, all the students in that dorm (or that part of the dorm) are in the same college. At two of the colleges, Silliman and Timothy Dwight, freshmen live in the college from the beginning. Integration into the college is pretty much immediate, though. It used to be that freshmen ate most of their meals at Commons, but it appears to me that many of them now eat a lot more of their meals in their colleges, particularly if they are near the Old Campus.</p>
<p>For those non-Elis reading this, the two colleges that are most different from the others in terms of architecture are Morse and Stiles, which have a modern, irregular “peanut brittle” look as opposed to the pseudogothic or colonial look of the other colleges. This causes those in other colleges to look down upon them somewhat, but their inhabitants still insist that those colleges are, in fact, the best.</p>
<p>For those students associated with Stiles and Morse who didn’t like the fact that they were assigned there, I would be curious to see whether they will feel the same way after the renovations are completed. My guess (and hope) is that they will far surpass what anybody is expecting. When ES and MC were built, they were done on the cheap, relatively. Even in this down environment, ES and MC are not being renovated on the cheap.</p>
<p>Jonathan Edwards’ renovations were to be finished in the Summer of 08. At the beginning of classes, a few rooms hadn’t been completed. Yale housed a handful of students at the Omni Hotel (about two blocks away) for 2-3 months, I think. They had maid service and access to all the hotel’s amenities. No need to make beds!</p>
<p>Bottom Line: There is nothing like Yale’s Residential College System anywhere, period. Whatever RC you’re in is the best. Just read the T-shirts: “Our group of randomly selected students is better than your group of randomly selected students” written on the back with the college name on the front. These were distributed to freshmen on move-in day.</p>
<p>One of the interesting aspects of the system is that the colleges DO develop personalities, through the natural variations you get with random selection, but those personalities are very fluid and subject to change in a relatively short period of time. When I was a freshman, my college was essentially the English Majors On Acid college, and its most distinctive feature was a weekly Master’s Tea where tea was hard to come by but whiskey sours were served by the punchbowl, and (after a few whiskey sours) the master’s wife could sometimes be persuaded to sing naughty songs from the '20s (when she had clearly been hot stuff). (Sample lyric: “Eddie took me to see the Coit Memorial Tower / He said it reminded him of his hidden power.”) Within two years, we were unquestionably the Jock College, with a round table in our dining hall that would often feature four or five team captains and a couple of Olympians. But we also had two future TV stars, a guy who would win his first Pulitzer Prize within five years of graduation, three future Supreme Court clerks (and one future top law school dean), one of the most prominent campus feminists, the originator of those "A Day In The Life Of . . . " books, and a future top political strategist, along with any number of English majors, on acid or not. It was a lot of fun, and I still feel close to a lot of those people.</p>
<p>I was in Stiles and had a single room for 3 years. The only bad part was that the tunnels didn’t connect all the parts so you had to go outside to reach the dining hall in bad weather. Well, that and the lack of thresholds for the doorways because dust would blow in under the door - and sound too. </p>
<p>When I was there, they still had the radiant floor heat. It was amazing. I got rid of my bed frame, dug up a 2nd mattress and lived on heated floor. It was sooo nice to rest to your butt on a warm spot on the floor. We also had nicer bathrooms than the old colleges, great built-in desks and walk-in closets.</p>
<p>And the moose. We had the A. Bartlett Giamatti Memorial Moose.</p>
<p>Thanks xrCalico23! The RS sounds exactly like the one at my school except better because it’s live-in =D
… ohhh now I want 15th Dec even more!!!</p>