If there’s one lesson we hope this book teaches you, it is that Yale—like most top-tier liberal arts colleges—does not want its applicants to be one person. This exposition of fifty Yale students is not intended to tell you to try to become just like them. On the contrary, we are here to show you how breathtakingly different from one another Yale students are and that there is no particular attribute or background anyone has to have to be admitted here—other than intellectual passion and excitement about engaging with the world. There is, in other words, no one “Yale type” whom admissions officers seek among the tens of thousands of college applications that flood in each year. There is no moment when an admissions officer throws your Yale application into the garbage because your parents didn’t go to college, or because you didn’t have enough community service on your application, or because nobody from your high school has ever gone to a school like Yale before. If they did, then a class of roughly sixteen-hundred identical first-year students would stream into the Gothic courtyards of Yale every year.
The wide-ranging undergraduate curriculum that exposes Yale students to all manner of academic experiences each year would be criminally underutilized if incoming classes were so homogenous. Our fourteen residential colleges would be indistinguishable in their traditions, architecture, and subtle quirks. And forget about the thousands of goofy homemade graduation caps that we see at Commencement each May. Where there is no diversity of interests or backgrounds, there is definitely no Yale. (And we at the Yale Daily News, for absence of anything interesting to write about, would definitely be out of a job.)
But, thankfully, Yale is a vibrant, dynamic, and powerfully diverse place. Yale’s fourteen residential colleges, analogous to student dorms, each offers its own special microcosm of the wider undergraduate community. You do not apply for a spot in a residential college. Instead, incoming students are sorted into colleges at random such that each college, such as Branford or Silliman, represents the full diversity of the Yale undergraduate community as a whole. There is no “athlete” college, or “nerd” or “party” or “science” college, because every college has all of these students, living side by side in intimate suites. Each college has its own wild band of students, held together by sheer love of their newfound, completely arbitrary home, filled with other classmates who adhere to no uniform creed or life path.
We also take our liberal arts identity very seriously. You do not, as you will surely hear, come to Yale to just study computer science or theater. You come here to develop your own intellectual curiosity and let that take the wheel. Most Yale students take approximately thirty-six courses over their four years. With hardly a tenth of students pursuing a double major, and no minors available at Yale, a typical Yale student spends about one third of their time completing their major requirements—and then spends the remaining two thirds taking classes from all over the university. With the rise of interdisciplinary majors at Yale, like Computing & the Arts; Ethics, Politics, & Economics; and Mathematics & Philosophy, even a student’s major courses might be spread across many departments. Some students may also elect to take more than four years to complete their undergraduate degree. The university is relatively flexible with students taking a semester or two off, whether it be for gap year traveling, for working, or for health or personal reasons.
We haven’t even mentioned all the extracurricular interests that come alive at night—and even sometimes during the day—at Yale. Dwight Hall, America’s oldest collegiate public service institution, supports student organizations that lead community service efforts across southern Connecticut. Mechanical engineers, designers, and “makers” collaborate twenty-four hours a day in the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design (CEID), a staffed and well-resourced makerspace for students to pursue personal, extracurricular, or academic projects using sophisticated machinery. Yale is the only place in the world, students joke, where 2D printing costs ten cents per page, but 3D printing is free. Singers, debaters, aspiring doctors, software engineers—all of them find their niche here through the hundreds of active student groups at Yale.
You will find students in this book who hail from radically different worlds, spanning everywhere from the public schools of New Haven to America’s rural heartland to Singapore. You will learn about what brought them to apply to Yale and, hopefully, that revelation will help inform your own decision to apply to Yale or any other college on your radar. You will read the college essays written by these students and, very quickly, witness not only how a compelling college application looks, but also how the thrust of any successful essay in the college admissions process hinges on some level of emotional vulnerability: Schools, Yale as well as others, want to see you as not only eloquent but as honest and mature as well.
Do not try to be the perfect applicant. No admissions committee, anywhere, believes that any high school student is perfect. It is far easier, and far more convincing, to just show yourself to be someone who will uniquely contribute to Yale’s community and to convey that you see something special about Yale that will help you to advance in life toward your larger goals. A response to “Why does Yale appeal to you?” should include more than just a perfunctory mention of Yale’s residential college system or its liberal arts curriculum; it should show why a Yale education matters to you.
Challenge yourself to reach a moment of genuine realization about your life. Let the profiles and essays in this book inspire you, but do not let them cage in your own approach to Yale. Once again, Yale did not accept these people because they checked off specific boxes for what the ideal Yale candidate looks like. They were accepted because these applicants showed how much they want to experience while at Yale, what they want to give to Yale, and why they need to go to Yale to truly realize their potential.
Developing a strong college application is not about making your best effort to copy the essays of successful applicants who have come before you. It is, however, about taking a chance on your own self, and we genuinely believe that reading this book will help all college applicants, not just those who apply to Yale, realize what they need to draw out of themselves to put together the college application that best communicates the value of who they are. As we said in the beginning, anyone—and we mean anyone—can apply to Yale. That means you, too. We wish you the best of luck.
—The Staff of the Yale Daily News