Stanford vs Yale

bluedevilmike
Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:56:49 +0000

Harvard’s problem is actually that they have too many advisors. The whole point of a committee letter is that schools need reliable communication from a repeat actor. So the fact that Harvard has something like fifteen premed advisors running around all the time is a flaw, not a virtue.

I can’t speak to Dartmouth, but the advice coming out of Stanford’s advising office is really truly terrible. We had a poster on these boards a while ago who was a student there, and the things she was describing were really horrible. And one of my good HS friends went there as a premed as well and routinely mocked their office. (She’s at HMS now, so obviously she did all right anyway.) It’s possible that they’re just that clueless about the importance of committee letters.

I suspect that it’s actually more of a bureaucratic turf sort of thing, but that’s just conjecture. (E.g. maybe current “dean” is too lazy to write letters but too entrenched to fire.)