A New Perspective of New Haven

Yale is magnificent. I was in awe of the beautiful architecture and the amazing history of the campus. The tour began with an entertaining admissions video about Yale entitled, “That's Why I Chose Yale.” The video was very well produced and gave a great overview of the college experience Yale offers.

The tour of Yale included much of the history of the institution such as the fact that Yale graduate Nathan Hale was the first (and worst) spy in American history, a Yale football coach invented modern American football and the architect that created many of Yale’s buildings poured acid on the walls to make them look older.

Yale is known to be one of the best institutions in the world – and it showed. The city of New Haven was quite nice to walk around in and boasts the largest number of restaurants per square mile of any city in the US.

Our dinner at Milo’s tonight was spectacular. Our guests, including two University of Pennsylvania and two Yale University alums, were incredibly engaging. My Luu, a Yale graduate and president of the Yale Alumni Association in New York City, spoke a lot about her experience at Yale and the reasons why she loved her alma mater. She stressed the importance of presenting an application that differentiated you from the thousands of other students applying and recommended applying to a limited number of schools (3-5) in order to turn in a high quality application.

Ben, a graduate from Penn and a Teach for America teacher, was also very engaging. He is also from Northern California. He advised us to consider having a theme for our college application. Ben has been working as a high school teacher in the Bronx and is going to leave in a month or two for South Africa. He is a Fulbright Scholar who plans to work in a university in South Africa and research how education works in a country that has about 7 official languages. I thought the premise of his research was incredibly interesting and I am curious to hear what he finds.