(Source: Yale University website)
Yale University, in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, is made up of three academic components: the undergraduate Yale College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the professional schools like the Law, Medical, and Music Schools. Yale also boasts of some of the most impressive university libraries and collections of art and artifacts in the world.
Yale was founded in 1701 in Saybrook, Connecticut as the Collegiate School. In 1718 it was renamed after the Welsh merchant Elihu Yale as a gesture of gratitude for a donation. Yale’s given name was also adapted as a nickname for Yale students in the form of “Eli.
Currently, Yale has about 5,000 undergraduate students and 6,000 graduate and professional students. International students make up about 16% of the total student population, and about 9% of the undergraduate population.
Yale College seeks to provide a liberal arts education for its students while creating a strong sense of community and intimacy through a residential college system modelled after Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Undergraduates are assigned to live in 12 (soon 14) residential colleges, each with its own distinctive identity and social life.
Yale’s graduate and professional schools are also highly regarded for the research they produce and training they provide for their students. The English and History departments, for example, are well known for their scholarship, while the Law School and Drama School, among others, are at the very top of their fields.
The resources that Yale has made available to its students is partly made possible by savvy management of its finances, in particular the Yale endowment, which stands at about US$22.6 billion in mid 2008. The university has also put in place a need-blind admission policy, and pledged to exempt families earning less than US$60,000 annually from contributing to their child’s education. (For more information, visit the Student Financial & Administrative Services website.)
The City of New Haven
New Haven is the third largest municipality in Connecticut, situated along the coast of the Long Island Sound, about two hours away from New York City and three hours away from Boston.
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Founded in 1638, the city is one of the oldest planned cities in the United States, featuring a nine-square, #-shaped grid in the downtown area. While not the biggest of cities in New England, New Haven has seen extensive redevelopment over the past few decades, as its economic base shifted away from industrial production to the education and healthcare sectors. |
As the case for most New England coastal cities, New Haven’s climate is characterised by cool, occasionally-rainy spring (~March - May) and fall (~September-November) seasons. Summers are hot and marked with thunderstorms, similar to coastal Southeast Asia, while winter temperatures hover around freezing level with snowfalls.