Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

Over spring break, there was no lounging around at home or hanging around town with friends for me. No, this year, I was going to do something of great importance to the rest of my life: college visits! [insert dramatic music here]

Of all the colleges that I visited (about seven, if I remember correctly), there were some that really stood out to me.

Yale, in New Haven, Conn., was definitely one of them.

New Haven looks like a very nice town, a cozy place to have a college experience if you aren’t looking for a huge bustling city. It also isn’t so small that one could get easily bored or used to it.

“Quaint commercial districts, serene residential streets, the famous New Haven Green, and landmarks of American history are only a few of the highlights of a place that has given the world the hamburger, the lollipop, the corkscrew, and the world’s best pizza,” states Yale’s Web site.

Arriving too late to attend the regular campus tour due to traffic jams around New York City, I managed to sidle in on time to get a tour around Yale’s Science Hill.

I saw a beautiful campus with plenty of resources for its students. Did you know that Yale has a particle accelerator reserved only for the uses of undergrads? No competition with graduate students or professors.

Yale, like Princeton, has senior projects and a good teacher-student ratio (7:1). Santiago (our information session guy) told some amazing stories about the teacher-student relationships that I’m still trying to absorb.

Did I mention that research chances and research internships sound really possible/good there? It’s really easy for a student to just jump on board and get some experience working with a professor.

One downside to Yale is that students don’t seem to go out of New Haven all that often, but that would entirely depend on the student wouldn’t it? Another possible negative would be that New Haven is pretty quaint and quiet — perhaps too quaint and quiet for my tastes. Also, the science college at Yale is extremely extremely small. About only 300 people are accepted out of thousands who apply.

But, in my opinion, Yale’s pros outweigh its cons, and it’s definitely on my list of colleges I’m going to reach for.

I really wish that I’d had more time to check out these colleges. So many places, so little time. I swear, Yale’s tour/info session was the best out of all of them. The students in charge of the tour and the information session completely sold Yale to all the prospective students attending.

I still don’t know. Where do I see myself? What do I see that would have me fit in on a college campus? I’m still looking to see if there’s a proper comic book store at each school …

— Linda Song