the Sam Jackson College Experience

Congratulations to those of you who were admitted; I hope that you will matriculate and join me here in New Haven. To those of you who were waitlisted: take a breath, consider your other options. Along with those who were rejected this afternoon, it is important to remember that the dirty secret of college admissions is that almost universally, everyone is happy wherever they end up, and the choice of college neither defines life course nor undergraduate happiness in most respects. You make the experience your own, and it doesn’t matter where you do it so much as how ready you are to take the opportunities before you.

I would especially appreciate it if you many lurking readers who have been reading my blog at one or another time during your application process – to Yale or elsewhere – came forward and said hello. If you got into Yale and have more questions, please comment or e-mail me — one wonderful reader just did, and will get an adoring mention in an upcoming post as a prize. Whether you are Emma Watson or just some other person who was accepted, I am happy to answer questions.

And, just because you didn’t get into the college of your choice, be it Yale or somewhere else, please don’t log off and stop reading – I really appreciate more voices in the conversation about college admissions in general, so please stay and share your thoughts, experiences, and feelings.

[See also what I wrote last year, essentially the same but with a quote from another Yale '11]

A reader recently wrote me wondering whether or not Yale is in a real crime zone, and I thought I would post my reply here for all to see. Other Yalies, New Haveners want to chime in with comments? I welcome questions in general, so please feel free to send more in. Happy to help.

> Elizabeth wrote:
> Hi Sam
>
> I took my daughter to visit Yale and she loved it. My husband has some
> issues with Yale and I don’t know quite what to believe. He knows two recent
> grads who insist that New Haven is a serious crime haven and getting worse. Is
> it?

I’m glad your daughter liked Yale – it’s a great place! – and I hope she saw New Haven as offering the potential for a good college experience. Then-president Kingman Brewster Jr. said, some 40 years ago, that the problems of New Haven were an advantage for Yale because they promoted community and cohesiveness, which may have been true – today, things are much better both for Yale, New Haven, and the town-gown relations.

So, on to your principal question: the safety of New Haven, or lack thereof. If we’re looking at New Haven in terms of crime statistics, you’ll find it is not so much worse than many other places with well-regarded schools; I’m from the Boston area and would go to Harvard Square ever since I was young with my friends, and there are certainly fewer panhandlers and homeless people around during the day; at night, while Harvard Square felt safer, my Harvard friends receive just as many unsettling crime notices in their inboxes as we do (for one particular comparison which I can speak to from personal experience). New Haven has some risks to it, but it is a very safe place as look as people keep their heads about them.For that matter, while many of my female friends make it a common habit to walk alone in bad places late at night, they have not had any unfortunate incidents – this isn’t to say that none exist, but just to emphasize that your daughter is not going to be seen on the nightly news if just once she goes alone for a falafel pick-me-up at 2 am or to visit a friend on the other side of campus.

While there have been a few unfortunate higher profile incidents at Yale in the two years that I have been here, for the most part incidents involving students occur on the far periphery of campus — graduate students living farther away and the like. Central campus is well protected, well lit, and generally quite safe at all hours. This isn’t Penn, where gangs of children were robbing people in broad daylight. What’s more, our lovely ivory tower environment offers another layer of protection; while it’s not exactly perfect protection, the gated courtyards in which we live our lives really insulate us from any of the city’s jagged edges. What’s more, the University does offer extensive shuttle se rvices both on schedule and on-call; in addition, security is available to act as escorts to take students from point A to point B safely. (This is what tour guides no doubt told you; for students unwilling to wait long enough for these resources to make their way to them in the event of non-emergencies, walking may be the only immediate option).

That said, can bad things happen, and do they?  Of course – but, as I mentioned at the start, general misconceptions about the true dangers of New Haven aside (overstated and outdated) there are good restaurants, there are nice places to go, but there is not *too* much. I would personally be happier in a busier place, but there is something to be said for the fact that everyone cannot so easily melt away from campus after class, as they do in New York City — although many people, including myself, go to NYC often. In any case, I’m not sure what other issues your husband has with Yale — is it just to do with supposed crime problems? Let me know if I can answer any more of your questions, and if you need help finding raw numbers about the safety of Yale, I can try to find the FBI-required reporting statistics for you (flawed though they may be, New Haven’s violent crime numbers are generally on the decline, and segmented geographically are really not so bad).

Thanks again for reading and for asking questions, I really appreciate it!

Addendum: Thanks to a Yale senior friend from the New Haven area who, in discussing the safety of New Haven, mentioned the humorous nickname [largely in jest] which I had never heard before, ‘pistol-wavin’-new-haven.’ Again, not representative.

43 Folders is one of my favorite “productivity” sites on the web – unlike many of the others, it’s somewhere I can go and know that I can actually learn something about how to use my time / life / neurons more efficiently and more happily. I was reading the other week a post by Merlin Mann from some time ago titled “What Makes a Good Blog?” outlining some of the key principles he saw as key to having a blog really be worth reading.

He went into more depth with his list, but I will reprise the titled bullets here. He says good blogs should have 1. a voice 2. focused obsessions 3. attention * interest 4. paragraphs 5. style and curation 6. weirdness 7. the ability to make you want to start your own blog 8. trying-ness 9. rule-breaking . My efforts to condense his paragraphs into single nouns doesn’t work perfectly, but I think the idea is clear. My own blog fails at the current moment on a great many of these counts, and in some respects perhaps never lived up to all of them. While I think there are definitely exceptions to the rules here, I think that his are good guidelines to think about, fine criteria for blog judging.

What does this mean for me and my blog? Aside from the fact that I am committing that fatal sin right now, by blogging about blogging (!), my personal authorship creates a problem for the blog because while I give it a voice, today I have trouble executing focused obsession about college admissions and higher education marketing. Is this something that I am still passionate about? Yes, absolutely. But more importantly, it is not a niche that I want to focus on exclusively forever — I don’t want to be stuck in a rut, and I feel that in many ways the higher education blogosphere is not moving in any exciting directions. The integration of technology and education, and technology and marketing, is never-ending; yet somehow the same topics feel stale, perhaps because they come up again, and again, and again. So, this has been a serious de-motivation in blogging; a vicious cycle which produces less content, which leads to less interaction, which leads to less content-creation, and brings us to the level of stagnation you see here today.

So, I’m not trying enough, and I’m finding myself wanting to focus on other obsessions — if I had any that I wanted to focus on strictly enough. What I’d like is a platform where I could post my thoughts about a related series of subjects and get a good interaction with the online community going – but the problem I have today is that too many of my blog-readers are now (or have always been) less interested in that and more interested in “finding the angles” — either “how to get into yale” or “how to market to kids who want to get into yale” — less about talking about the issues, less even about Q&A! Is it my own fault that I have generated so many lurkers? Come out of the dark, readers!

This post is a little unfocused because I’m quite sick, but I wanted to try to write about it and have people share their thoughts about what they would like to see from the blog. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t write it so much for my own personal satisfaction so as to help others and to instigate discussions, so what others think after reading does have a big impact! Please let me know.