the Sam Jackson College Experience

I will keep this short and focus on the content here, folks, because it’s amazing. A few years back I wrote an angry letter to Yale Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel for not being forward-looking enough with the admissions office. I will soon have to draft him a letter of congratulations for his support of this great  student-led, student-created effort to create a fantastic Yale admissions music video. Much of what I’ve ever said on the blog about engaging branding and effective marketing comes together here in one fell swoop. More analysis of this later, and praise for the enterprising students who developed the video. For now, have a look and share your comments! You won’t regret it.

Hello readers! I am dusting off my blog at least briefly to inform visitors of a good opportunity that has crossed by inbox. iChapters, a vendor of digital textbooks, has a sweepstakes where five students will win up to $1000 in free textbooks. Enter here, take a look at the rules, and good luck. Seems like a nice clear-cut opportunity to help with ever-rising college costs.

I would like to write a post on ways to save money on textbooks using some clever tricks that I learned (#1: LOVE YOUR LIBRARY) and will try to do that sometime soon too. Otherwise, the blogging might stay paused until I get to China.

As usual, please feel free to send me any questions or comments, and you can now call me too, if you’d like! Which apparently no one does.

Bulldog Days 2008 are upon us here at Yale, and the campus is teeming with excited admits and their families. I did not attend Bulldog Days as a prefrosh last year, and I found myself conflicted about it: I had applied the Yale early, been accepted, and not applied to anywhere else. Taking time away from my internship to go the New Haven might have vindicated my decision, but what if it left a sour taste in my mouth? Yale turned out to be just about everything I hoped it to be, Bulldog Days or not.

There is a lot going on for Bulldog Days, which happily means I have many opportunities to profit from free improv shows and plentiful other student group-led events designed to entice and enthrall admitted students, catching their interest a year early to cement their favor and boost participation in the fall.

The campus is supposed to be “dry” during BDD, and prefrosh are supposed to be kept too busy with fun events to get into much trouble; hopefully that will for the most part hold true, because people should leave with happy memories, not bitter trauma. So, to the 2012 prospectives: enjoy Yale! Visit classes! Welcome, Hope you like it here! For those of you who couldn’t make it, don’t worry. You’ll have lots of chances to get to know your peers and Yale!

Photo courtesy Anna Ershova

About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and you can search for trends and comparisons over time using this new tool. Very cool, right?

Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.

My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook’s demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.

The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.

In general, the same observations as before apply… just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.

Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).

I discovered an interesting pattern while playing around with Google Trends: if you compare ‘Yale University’ and ‘Harvard University’ with the tool, there is an eerie similarity in their trend lines. Even minor up and down ticks are mirrored across search terms. See for yourself: trends chart below, Harvard in red, Yale in blue.

The trend is clearer for Google search data, but there are still some pretty strange similarities for the news references (below the main chart). I understand that every time one school does something, the other feels compelled to respond, but the fact that these trends link together so closely is very interesting. My first question was whether much of this might just be seasonal–fluctuations in the course of the admissions cycle. To test this, I compared Yale with a few other schools, trying to eliminate large sports schools as a factor. Georgetown vs. Yale produced fairly similar results to Yale v. Harvard, but not with the same level of overlap.

Years ago I did this same comparison with Phillips Exeter Academy vs. Philips Andover Academy (interestingly, historically they were once prominent feeder schools for Harvard and Yale, respectively) but the results there were not numerous enough to show any significant overlap; the numbers there were probably inflated by vanity searches from the students at either school.

Other interesting trends to take from this data: search volume for both of these terms has declined continually over the years, relatively speaking. Why is this? Is it because people are better able to use the school sites and don’t do as much searching, or is it because of a methodological feature whereby their search volume stays stable but relative to other terms decreases? It’s not clear, but it’s an interesting trend all the same.

International attention is something else to compare. If all the queries came from Australian applicants, hypothetically, that would shift things in the calendar because of their different school cycles. But more realistically, it’s just an interesting reflection of foreign interest. Harvard predictably comes out ahead, but check out these countries which are ranked by how much people are searching for Yale (Harvard comparison):

Google lets us get even more precise, though: down to city level. This is really interesting because we see the rate at which Yale students search for themselves compared to how much Harvard students search for things about Yale. If we then compare this to another chart, showing how often Harvard searches for Harvard, we see that Yale–via New Haven–doesn’t even make the top ten. In other words, Harvard is by some measures more interested in Yale than Yale is in Harvard. Inferiority complex much? : ) (Yes, I realize this is methodologically flawed… just joking).

Finally, we can compare the international chart with a language chart. English is first, then Chinese, then, surprisingly enough, Italian.

Very interesting for a few minutes googling! I highly recommend playing around with google trends and exploring interesting things about your own favorite words, or trends, or schools. Dogs and Puppies beat Cats and Kittens, etc. Have fun, and don’t draw too many sweeping statistical conclusions : )