The Most Well-Rounded Undergraduate Experiences

Bay
Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:10:37 +0000

I’ll bite. Let’s compare your well-roundedness rankings on 2 elite universities which I did not attend but know a little about.

You ranked UC Berkeley as tied for 2nd place, with scores of 4.5, 5 and 5.

You ranked Yale way down at 39th place, with scores of 5, 3 and 2.

Athletic life:

Yale offers 33 different D1/Varsity sports for 5,200 students.
Cal offers 19 D1/Varsity sports for 25,500 students.
Obviously, a much higher percentage of students actually compete athletically at Yale.
For most sports (not football), athletes have the potential to compete at the same national level for both schools.
Cal has the Pac-10, great football and the Stanford-Cal rivalry. Yale has the Ivy-League, the Harvard-Yale football game and rivalry and hockey games.

I’d say Yale students are more well-rounded than Cal students in athletic life.

Social life:
Yale has its renowned residential college system where all students live together on a compact campus for all 4 years. Aside from vibrant housing social life, other available social organizations include 12 a cappella groups, 9 Greek houses, Secret Societies and 33 varsity athletic teams. Yale students have a reputation for being very happy.

Cal’s housing is an uncohesive mix of options on and off its more sprawling campus. I have heard that Greek life is vibrant at Cal. Other than that, I don’t know and haven’t heard anything else impressive about Cal’s social life other than its well-attended football games. Cal students are reputed to be competitive serious studiers.

I’d say Yale wins for the well-rounded social life.

I would re-score the 2 schools as:

UCBerkeley: 4.5, 3.5, 4

Yale: 5, 4.5, 3.5

This bumps Yale above Cal.

Just my two-cents. ;)