the Sam Jackson College Experience

Visit @ Yale University
July 17 2006

Oh Yale, arrayed before me with thine ivy-covered gothic (ivory?) towers of learning. What can I say? A lot, actually. I have photos too. Pictures link to my photogallery, where there are even more photos of this and other schools. Now, let’s begin. We’ll operate chronologically, minutiae included.

Yale was the first stop of seven on my weeklong July college visiting binge. Seven schools in six days meant hitting both Yale and Wesleyan in the same day, so we had to leave early–really early–to get to Yale by 9 am. New Haven isn’t that far from Boston, but we left enough time to be safe, which meant I got about three hours of sleep. Monday morning proved to not have very much traffic, thankfully, and so when we arrived we strolled around a little bit after locating the admissions office. Parking rating: excellent. There was an admissions parking lot which had spots to spare and was conveniently located.

In the interest of full disclosure: It’s important to remember throughout this report that this was the first day the East Coast was slaughtered with triple digit heat indices (in this case, 105 degrees) and this was something of a factor when it came to enjoying the tour and paying close attention.
We had some time to spare and so we strolled around some before heading to the Admissions Office, though we didn’t get all that far. Yale’s campus is actually 2.5 x .5 miles long . That size nearly dwarfs the rest of the ivy league, if you look at them superimposed on one another when drawn to the same scale. Yale’s campus redevelopment crew put together a nice document in which they happened to have all the campuses drawn on one such similar scale; it is accessible here: Yale Framework for Campus Planning. Maps begin on page 15.

Much, much more after the break… (thousands more words!)

photo disclaimer: sorry that photos are just “linked” right now, I’ll thumbnail them to size later, it’s just that to ensure quick page loads I don’t want huge numbers of photos until they’re been better web-optimized. links take you to the full source image at my photogallery, don’t worry. I know it’s annoying to flip back and forth, sorry! Wait a bit.

We were back before the 9 AM information session was slated to begin, but we were still ushered into a room to wait. It had decent molding (another thing I judge, coming from my lifetime spent in a Victorian) and a generally normal feel. Finely appointed, though not for a crowd over 40 people. It was certain that our group would be larger than that, and I didn’t imagine the Yale office would be so poorly appointed as to not predict a substantial number of visitors on any given monday in July. Correct: as it turned out we were first given a video presentation of Yale. Imagine a very glossy viewbook–good photos, good flavortext. Now flip the pages really fast.

Information session: After the video we were joined by our admissions representative, in this case Robert P. Jackson, who whisked us off to an air condition lecture hall where we had the information session. He’s in charge of California (Los Angeles), Hawaii, Nevada, New York (Bronx), Pacific Islands (Guam, etc.); not my region’s officer (Shoutout to Alison Doernberg!). Sadly for us all I did not have my index cards or writing utensil handy, so groggy was I that morning. Not that it turned out to matter very much: Jackson did not reveal anything really juicy. It was informative but didn’t reach too much outside freely accessible sources of information, though it was extra-precise and accurate (in terms of noting their acceptance rate or financial aid numbers, for example).

I would say that he fairly and accurately presented Yale as an institution, focusing more (as administrative officials are wont to do) on the administrative side of things, though what he said about student life was well-received. Jackson said that Yale looked first and foremost to student transcripts when considering applicants–grades and rigor. Not surprising, but worth knowing, even if was a little disheartening given my 2nd quintile lifetime performance to date. [picture of info session]

I think that there was the background reminder that Yale, this year the most selective Ivy, was very prestigious and selective. Comments on the superlative qualities of the students, while promoting the excellent student body, are getting a little old since all these schools have such qualified students. I am just saying that it wasn’t as warm as the presentation we got later on at say, Wesleyan–reasonable, given the differing crowds and schools. Yale is bigger and has to be a little bit farther away to keep its institutional perspective, I’d guess.

Tour: The tour–what better way to spend an hour and a half on a 95 degree cloudless super-humid day? None that I can imagine. As we waited for our escorts to appear I tried to take shelter in the eaves of the admissions building, and dragged myself over beneath a nearby tree to get a better look at the options when they showed up shortly thereafter: 10 am and already the sun was punishing. The choice was obvious: the middle candidate. Though shortest, she seemed neither too chatty nor too quiet, and seemed perfectly capable in any other regard.

Special notice here: Alex, the tour guide on the right in the hideous plaid with the nalgene, was a menace to our tour group! He kept butting in and being noisy on our path. Was not very sympathetic to the trouble he posed us, either. My friend Greta had him on her tour weeks later and reported similarly obnoxious behavior–I steered clear of his group. (I have also had similar reports from OTHER friends who encountered Alex…) [picture of tour guides]

Architecturally Yale seemed fairly consistent–at least, they were consistent in what they showed us as we scraped the surface. Remember, the campus has a perimeter big enough to make for great marathon practice. But, as at just about any big university I’ve seen so far, there are some newer engineering buildings with a distinctly modern style which bucks the norm. Our first stop was one of these; interesting looking. [picture of engineering building]

Still, I didn’t and don’t have any real interest in the Yale Engineering school, though it is quite good. Engineering just isn’t my cup of tea. Next we were taken to Bicentennial Hall, which as a structure didn’t seem to have been doing too much specifically. Of course, throughout all this we were hearing good details about Yale’s history and current life–don’t get me wrong. [picture of bicentennial hall]

Another good sign: esoteric art installations like this modern piece [picture of sculpture]. That was just in sight of the rare books library, which I have always loved from the first time I saw it featured in architectural magazines, books, and other interesting print places. I want to say I first saw it in Wired, but I’m not sure. The light-transmitting thing marble is fantastic; I’ve always liked that idea. [picture of rare books library]

Important Expectation Fulfilled: Entry into library system on tour. Past readers will know I was very, very upset by the way in which Harvard explained its exclusion of visitors from its libraries. Yale was very gracious (at least this summer) in guiding us right to one of the larger buildings, housing a big chunk of its enormous millions upon millions of volumes. This library was one intended to be something like a cathedral, and it looks like one. Fitting with the normal gothic look of the school, so not jarring. [picture of cathedral of books] I won’t go into too much depth about the insides of the library because they were predictably stellar, amazing, fantastic, all that jazz. Everything you’d expect from significant investments in the facilities.

When I was walking down a hallway in this library I was struck just by the view out the window at this little inner courtyard [picture of courtyard] and throughout the tour I was struck by the small details like this that made Yale aesthetically pleasing as much as it was. Then there are the details which so sharply show the sheer resources Yale has to offer, like this one of a reading room in the cathedral-library which is just foreign newspapers. This wasn’t even mentioned because people must forget it was there, but this indicates to me the resources a university like Yale has to offer. [picture of reading room]

Security at Yale seemed fine, as it does at everywhere I’ve visited. New Haven isn’t the safest place but the Yale campus is perfectly safe, as evidenced by these sturdy gates to keep out trouble. [picture of gates]

Food is something of a concern for me as I’ve only grown to resent the food some at boarding school and, worst of all, I know that we have it better off than at some Colleges. I didn’t get a good look at the food itself–and it was summer food, anyways–but the facilities at one of the commons dining hall seemed perfectly savvy. [picture of commons] That’s not to say that I liked everything they told us about the food system: I wasn’t crazy about their uninspiring approach to meal plans. Not the worst, not the best. More interesting (if riskier) were the descriptions of the dining halls which each residential college had. Some got gourmet organic while some were reputed to have… not gourmet organic. That sort of culinary russian roulette could prove troublesome after one was off the Old (freshman) Campus, but couldn’t be helped. There were good and bad possibilities. No one was able to explain the logistics of feeding so many people in each residential college in so small a dining small, but it must work out somehow. [picture of residential dining hall]

Residential Colleges are the name of the game at Yale and let me say, I want to play. Modeled after Oxford type arrangements, they’re very appealing as they thwart the dorm-bloat evidenced elsewhere and make communities-within-the-whole. It doesn’t hurt that they have really cool special programs that they throw (like dances with big budgets, or Master Teas). They were gorgeous, of course, full of little courtyards and cute nooks and crannies. Sadly we didn’t get a chance to see any rooms, but that’s not the norm at most places on visits, it’d appear. [picture of courtyard] One downer was that the common room–at least in the dorm we were in–seemed to be a little bit small. Still, it was a really, really, nice common room–it would only have been small if a large portion of the residential college were in there at once. [picture of common room]

Something of a conclusion:
Though Yale was sometimes a little bit overbearing with its impressive gothic architecture, I still loved the look of the campus. We finished with a trip to the “statue of sort-of-founder-generic-namesake” college statue that many tours tend to end with, in this case, a donor who met an untimely end but still contributed to the school. The quad this was located in had a lot of Explo! kids playing in it so it looked livelier. It was obviously well-loved and used during the year, as seen by the new grass that the facilities management was trying to coax to grow in.

Our tour guide was helpful, kind, and friendly, representing her school accurately, I hope. Nothing negative, only positives–the only downside was the heat. If I adjusted the experience to correct for the weather, it would have been amazing, no doubt; it was still a good picture of the school, and I’m sure that I’ll apply–though whether single-choice early action or regular, I’m not yet sure. Any posturing aside, the most important fact was that even without any students on campus, I was able to see myself there–walking through a quad, or just browsing the shelves of the library.

~

This is the third part of my at least 10 part series on College Visits–as many as I take.
Part 1 was MIT, which is available here: College Visit Report: MIT