Yale University

Yale is both a small college and a large research university. The College is surrounded by eleven distinguished graduate and professional schools, and its students partake in the intellectual stimulation and excitement of a major international center of learning. The faculty is known for its special devotion to undergraduate teaching. Many of Yale’s most distinguished senior professors teach introductory courses as well as advanced seminars to undergraduates. In fact, all tenured professors of Arts and Sciences are required to teach undergraduate students. Faculty members are accessible to students and take a great deal of interest in working closely with undergraduates. Yale’s curriculum allows students to achieve both breadth and specialization across several disciplines. Students are expected to explore three important areas of knowledge – the arts and humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences – even as they probe the depth of a major field. While exploring several subject areas, students are also expected to sharpen their writing, quantitative, and foreign language skills. Yale’s unique residential college system organizes the student body into twelve small and intimate communities. Students are affiliated with the same residential college throughout their four years at Yale and beyond. As members of a residential college, students experience the living situation of a small school while still enjoying the cultural and scholarly resources of a large university. In assigning students to residential colleges, Yale seeks to create a microcosm of the larger community within each college, capturing the true diversity of the larger student population. Each residential college is a community where students live, eat, socialize, and pursue academic and extracurricular activities. Yale students are actively involved in the New Haven community, benefiting from and enhancing the city’s many cultural, recreational, and political opportunities. New Haven boasts diverse and abundant resources in the arts. There is a vibrant cultural and artistic life in the city, a myriad of opportunities both academic and social, and a plethora of places to eat and have fun. New Haven is part of a Yale education: the experience of contemporary urban life broadens students’ perspectives and helps prepare them for life after college. Yale students have a long tradition of intense involvement with extracurricular activity. Life in Yale College provides endless opportunities for students beyond the classroom. Opportunities in theater, music, volunteer service, politics and government, publications, and athletics enrich the undergraduate curriculum and endow Yale College with a special energy and spirit of commitment. Perhaps the first thing that students notice about their college is the caliber of their fellow students. There are talented artists, student government leaders, star athletes, passionate activists, award-winning poets, prize-winning scientists, and people who are just simply “well-rounded.” Because Yale students come from such a wide range of ethnic, religious, cultural, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, there is a remarkable exchange of ideas. Yale is a major research university that focuses primarily on undergraduate education and encourages students to become energetic citizens of their communities, the nation, and the world.