<p>I think YeloPen answered most of your questions, but just a few more comments:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Science Hill: seriously, the amount of time you spend walking there will be completely negligible compared to the amount of time you will spend in lab if you are at all serious about science. I wouldn’t consider this an issue at all.</p></li>
<li><p>Respect: everybody knows science classes are more rigorous than humanities ones. I think this is fairly widely accepted.</p></li>
<li><p>Challenging yourself: The truth is that Yale introductory science classes suck. Having said that, however, keep in mind that everybody who’s actually serious about science places out of them and if you really want to go into research later on you can easily be on 300/400 level courses by sophomore year and grad seminars by junior/senior years. In any case, at the end of the day, as a scientist your greatest challenges come not from your classes but from the intensity of your research, which only you can determine. At the undergraduate level funding is really not an issue, since you are unlikely to require such enormous grants that lab PIs actually take cost into consideration when accepting you into their laboratories. As long as you make it into a well-established laboratory (i.e. your PI is friends with all the key figures in their field and has enough publications in Nature/Science that they won’t be on your back 24/7), how well you do and how intellectually rewarding you find your undergraduate career will be entirely up to the sophistication of your thoughts and the sincerity of your dedication (and luck, which is always welcomed in the laboratory).</p></li>
<li><p>The social life: Having attended MIT parties, I strongly recommend Yale if you resemble at all a normal person. This is not to bash MIT kids; it’s just a very, very distinctive subculture that I instinctively knew wasn’t for me. Honestly, if MIT was the right choice for you, you would have found its culture irresistible (as some do).</p></li>
<li><p>I agree Boston is way prettier than New Haven. There’s just no getting around that 
It is insanely cold though.</p></li>
</ol>