<p>bluescreen, I encourage you to read my post in your other thread!</p>
<p>To respond to several of these Yale critiques:
- Weather is not an end-all-be-all. I gave up the Bay Area (and Stanford’s weather to come east to Yale and have never had any doubts. Yale is a little colder, but it is SO WONDERFUL that I don’t mind the seasons at all. You should decide on more important factors than weather!
- Safety. New Haven is perfectly safe, as is Palo Alto. The two murders at Yale this year had absolutely nothing to do with safety issues at Yale or New Haven–they are a statistical oddity. The murders were preplanned, motivated murders, and they have already caught the acquaintances who murdered the employees. Yale has spent so many hundreds of million into making the area around Yale safe that it is just like any other city (the bad areas are far away).
- Stuffy atmosphere. Yale is pretentious in that it has gothic architecture and a long history, but it is NOT a pretentious student body. The old Yale elitism is long, long since gone–and it has been replaced with a down-to-earth, diverse, and friendly student body supported by financial aid etc. Elitism is frowned upon. As for the idea that only a university in the West is willing to look at “new ideas,” that distinction’s silly.</p>
<p>You have two excellent schools to choose from. I would seriously consider what you want to study, the extracurriculars you want to participate in, and culture you want to be in. You may feel a bit more at “home” at Yale as a NYC poli sci major interested in law school. You may also like that you’ll be a little bit more “different” at Stanford. Etc.</p>