tasp --> directed studies? (a chances thread)

Colleges & Universities Yale University
1

<p>background: i go to a tiny high school that is essentially st. john’s college for the 14-18 set. in other words: all core curriculum, all the time. i alternately hate and love this model. on the one hand, i learn about things i would never touch otherwise (catholic theology, counterpoint). on the other hand, i often get exasperated with the fairly arbitrary limits the curriculum imposes. directed studies at yale seems to offer the best compromise between requirements & choice-- at least in abstraction. can anyone (d.s. alum or otherwise) point me towards an inside perspective on directed studies? i’ve read the relevant threads here but none of them go into great depth & i don’t want to rely wholly on yale’s own website for the program.</p>

<p>but “oh!” perhaps you say. “i came to this thread to chance a real live tasper!” that you will also have the opportunity to do. applying scea and nervous already.</p>

<p>(i copied this template from a decision thread. if something is blank, ignore.)</p>

<p>Objective:[ul]
[<em>] SAT I (breakdown): 2400
[</em>] SAT II: 800 biology e, 800 literature, 800 latin, 800 math II, 800 world history (nonstandard curriculum, not obsessive-compulsive)
[<em>] Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 4.0, weighted I think 4.83—may be 5.0 with new policy
[</em>] Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): 1 of 53
[<em>] AP (place score in parenthesis): us govt, macro, micro, english lit, english lang, latin lit, latin vergil, physics b. my school doesn’t have ap, so i did the work on my own. it’s not that i love paying college board- i wanted at the time to take a gap year. now i’m not sure. i should mention that no one from my school had ever taken an ap exam before.
[</em>] IB (place score in parenthesis): none
[<em>] Senior Year Course Load: my school has a fixed curriculum like st. john’s college (md, nm). senior year is definitely the hardest. chem, calc bc, studio art/theater (semester long), combined humanities course, greek literature (in original), senior thesis (credit but no class time). taking ap exams in chem, calc bc, art history.
[</em>] Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.):
athletics: all-region in track and cross, all-state in track (3200m). that’s all-state for small schools- i’m being recruited in d3 but not d1.
classics: 2x natl winner of latin translation contest, oxford classical dictionary award from natl latin exam, highest honors on natl greek exam and natl mythology exam, 4x state jcl certamen champion, many other state awards
national history day: district and state champion, natl finalist (historical paper)
speech & debate: extemp toc qualifier, academic all-american, degree of premier distinction, extemp finalist at a well-known natl tournament, 2x state finalist in extemp and impromptu speaking
others: wellesley book award, minor essay contests, 4th regional science bowl, will be natl merit semifinalist[/ul]</p>

<p>Subjective:[ul]
[<em>] Extracurriculars (place leadership in parenthesis): jcl (state president, chapter president, 4 yrs), varsity cross (captain, 3 yrs), varsity track (3 yrs), speech & debate (captain, 4 yrs), science bowl (captain, 4 yrs), violin (7 yrs)
[</em>] Job/Work Experience: manage coffee bar at school senior yr, expect about 8 hrs/wk
[<em>] Volunteer/Community service: about 200 hrs. peer tutoring (4 yrs), direct & produce nativity play (3 yrs), translate & direct greek tragedy (in 11)
[</em>] Summer Activities: study abroad in austria after 10, tasp after 11
[<em>] Essays: as yet unwritten. at least one will be about my school, with its directed-studies-esque curriculum & ultraconservative faculty and students, & why i decided to stay there despite sometimes open hostility.
[</em>] Teacher Recommendation: one will be from a teacher who had me twice in 2-period combined courses. i don’t read my letters but we have a great relationship. other will be from my greek teacher meant mainly to vouch for my skill, which my transcript doesn’t represent (i did independent study which my school didn’t recognize)
[<em>] Counselor Rec: she thinks i walk on water
[</em>] Additional Rec: they have enough things to read already. will send a short excerpt from my translation of the play mentioned above (euripides’ bacchai) and an abstract of my natl history day paper.</p>

<p>[/ul]Other[ul]
[<em>] State (if domestic applicant): arizona
[</em>] School Type: very small charter with fixed liberal arts curriculum. interesting place but very conservative. most faculty and students are either calvinists or very strict catholics & the atmosphere is a fairly strange one. it was the right place for me though. most students go to religious schools or our state schools, which are decent.
[<em>] Ethnicity: i mark white and other. wasp but my first language is spanish.
[</em>] Gender: female
[<em>] Income Bracket: well off. my parents teach at a state school but not in lucrative fields. my grandparents died and left us massive but totally illiquid assets so probably no financial aid
[</em>] Hooks (URM, first generation college, etc.): tasp (sunday!!), greek</p>

<p>[/ul]Reflection[ul]
[<em>] Strengths: serious humanist, underpopulated major (6 classics graduates last year), interesting kind of life story
[</em>] Weaknesses: my ec’s could be substantially better
[/ul]</p>

2

<p>oh my god…</p>

3

<p>I’m not going to comment on your chances. TASP is a good indication that you look good in a competitive pool, and you don’t need to improve your grades or test scores. I’m sure your application will be taken seriously.</p>

<p>Given your background, I’m not certain whether you really want to do DS, which might well be more of the same. My wife and I (she also a TASPer) were in DS decades ago, and liked it a lot, but neither of us had anything like a great-books-type educational background. What DS was, at least back then, was a set of very straightforward survey courses taught in seminars. The students were smart, of course, and most of the teachers were good, but it would have been a massive waste of time for me if I had already studied more than a quarter of the material with any degree of rigor.</p>

<p>For perspective, you might want to compare the DS courses to the courses available in the Chicago core curriculum. In general, Chicago takes a much edgier approach to core studies.</p>

4

<p>i’ve spent a lot of time cuddling up with the chicago catalog, and in general, i’m not an enormous fan of what i see. core curricula attract me because i want to know that i have something important to talk about (or some paper to complain about) with any classmate i run into. so, i feel like if there is a core, it should be either rigid and optional (e.g. directed studies, stanford sle) or completely rigid (e.g. columbia). the chinese-menu approach at chicago seems like a no man’s land.</p>

<p>not to say i won’t apply to chicago- its classics department is excellent. only hyp, berkeley, and michigan are more productive, & all of them are 2 or 3 times its size.</p>

5

<p>I would be shocked if you didn’t get in. You’d have to write mediocre essays and have bad recs. Yale is more or less yours to lose. </p>

<p>Opinions on DS vary substantially… It’s a highly self selected group, and for the most part people who commit to it are people who enjoy it. If lots and lots of history/philosophy/lit is for you, go for it. One shortcoming is that you discuss books like War and Peace in a week. I didn’t do DS, but i know people who were frustrated by reading so much and discussing comparatively little. The work load really doesn’t seem as bad to me as people say it is. One essay a week for three of your classes isn’t an overwhelming amount, nor is ~100-200 pages/day. Having at least three seminars each semester is great, and if you’re OK with a rigid course schedule (6 credits determined + 1 other has to be language or quantitative reasoning for distribution requirements), it could be good for you. Often they pre-admit people with a strong interest in classics, so you might not even have to apply.</p>

6

<p>…are you Jesus? You’re in.</p>

7

<p>once again,
oh my god.</p>

8

<p>As for the chances, I hope you and the rest of CCers learn to stay away from that game when you have perfect scores and perfect grades. Honestly, it just makes you look like someone who is insecure about their perfection - ie a jerk.</p>

<p>In all fairness, War and Peace does get two weeks of discussion! But yeah, it sounds like DS would just be repeating high school for you (except perhaps that the papers might be different from what you’ve done in the past). Check out the reading lists online and see if you’ve hit most of them. If not, DS is worth it, though with your great background you might dominate the discussion and quickly earn the title of “section a-hole”, which is in some ways good, in other ways bad. And yes, you will occasionally be frustrated by how little time there is to discuss such great works.</p>

9

<p>Oh my God.</p>

10

<p>Do you honestly need a chances thread, or are you just bragging about your stats?</p>

11

<p>I wasn’t suggesting that the Chicago core is better than DS, or that you should go to Chicago (although of course you should look at it if you are interested in classics). I was just using it to illustrate that all core curricula are not created equal. DS may consist overwhelmingly of things you have already studied, while that would probably not be true of the Chicago courses.</p>

12

<p>honestly i included the chances part to make people read the thread. the topic is obscure enough it’s not going to get a response without an attractive rhetorical strategy. i want responses, therefore i post my stats. the downside is that a) it obviously makes me look arrogant and b) it attracts unhelpful posts like most of the above. otoh it does no harm to the world at large if people want to compare me to jesus and it helps me significantly to hear from d.s. alumni.</p>

13

<p>you really think making it a chances thread attracts posters? funny, I would think the exact opposite, and I feel like most of the posters here would too -we’ve all seen 5000 chances threads, find nothing unique in and don’t care about most of them, and no one who isn’t actually sitting on the committee can tell you with any sort of reasonable probability anyway - why again are people drawn to that?</p>

14

<p>There is no arrogance in your tone or words. I’m planning to do directed studies this coming year so I can’t really give you any information on that yet. You will be preadmitted to DS(I wrote only a slightly philosophical essay and was preadmitted being a pure math/science person). See you at Yale sometime.</p>

15

<p>your EC’s could be substantially better?
lol, omg, I’d love to meet you</p>

16

<p>This might sound stupid, but…what’s tasp?</p>

17

<p>^ nevermind. As it turns out, search keys are useful.</p>

18

<p>I personally really don’t think DS is a good idea… I ended up with 90% DS friends just through my major (literature) and other ec’s. You can read those same books in other classes, or take the European Literary Tradition. Same idea, same tough discussion, but you are freer to take other classes… which is why/how I ended up with a WGSS double major.</p>

19

<p>@yalie2007, what is WGSS double major?</p>

<p>As a parent, after discussing with the freshman dean during Bulldog days, I somehow believe that DS represents the best that Yale has to offer, especially for people in science. However, fitting your schedule can be very difficult, if you would like to major in EECS, to do music lessons and to get pretty far in a second language. D1 was talking about doing DS and Math230 at the same time. That might be a little crazy.</p>

20

<p>I think WGSS is Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies</p>