The most basic questions, and ones that I think was ignored here, is setting and size. Williams is smaller and in the mountains. Yale is larger and not in the mountains.

Sometimes the basics are important. They were to me, though certainly not the entire picture.

One of the little snobbish pleasures of a Williams degree is being able to use it to evaluate whether someone knows anything about higher education by their recognition of it or lack thereof. — H. Webb Collings ‘75

ps — For what it is worth, I think that you will find one day that you made the right choice… hands down.

But the intelligence and/or means needed, to even qualify?
God-given and/or great good luck; a gift for which a modicum of humility might be in order.

I made the comparison to yale’s department…i think this thread (as frank has noted) grew way too big, way too fast and now is almost a mockery of itself. The comparison in no way was meant to (nor did it) impugn yale sociology, just to note that I was not making a yale biased comparison (like, say, comparing williams’ pre-law to yale’s pre-law–things in which yale has an institutional advantage beyond being larger).

The amount of “we love yale!” coming from yale first-year students is admirable, but it’s also a self-selected group of first-years (those who don’t really like it wouldn’t bother coming to a williams blog to defend/discuss it most likely). I don’t doubt your experience (just like I didn’t doubt your sociology department), but relax–it’s starting to come off as the type of bragging/defensiveness that makes people hate harvard students! lol.

Now that said, even on this post, I see an incredible amount of name dropping on the part of the Yale students posting here. There are a lot of famous Williams profs too (and i’m sure many of the Williams posters on this board have had classes with them) but you don’t hear any Williams students focusing on that. This was one thing that struck me as well on my campus visits–so much of the focus at Yale was “I’m taking a class with so-and-so…it’s big but he’s really brilliant!” whereas at Williams students gushed about a class’ quality rather than its teacher’s credentials.

Now, like we’ve been through before, Yale does employ more celeb profs than Williams. However, does this translate to better discussions? Does it translate to better lectures? In most cases, professors publish their most important work and then are hired by Yale (or Williams, for that matter). In almost all cases, celeb professors have already done their best work, and typically, that work was done at a different university. While there may be more celeb professors at Yale, I’m not sure that there are more rising star profs. And, while it might be cool to say you had a professor with Famous Professor X who published an important work 20 years ago, I would put money on Professor Y who is publishing important (albeit possibly slightly less fame-worthy) work now teaching a better class.

I didn’t intend to “bash”. I was just trying to point out that the recognizability of Harvard and Yale, is a status symbol to many of the alumni. And they grow accustomed to the advantages this status yields and learn to use it.

And many people are attracted to a ’status’ school for this reason. Not all of them, obviously…but possibly the ones that I know.

Williams has its own unique advantages; (IMO) having to do with the small size and the very personal and lifelong connections the alumni form with each other and with the school.

And we have our own observatory, which students get a great deal of access to.

Yale’s astronomy program is actually well-developed; we have an observatory on campus. Yale also owns a part of a telescope in Arizona, so students get to use it for their research.

This is impressive! Is this because so few students are enrolled or because there are so many faculty members? Luckily, I am not an astronomy major :)

Yale’s astronomy department has more faculty than students in it, so they also fawn over every student; students get a lot of personal attention. Same goes for many other majors, e.g. Czech,German or German Studies. However, according to my upperclassmen friends, students enrolled in larger majors still receive a lot of personal attention from their professors/faculty advisers etc.

And Schell was an editor at The New Yorker, not Harper’s; sorry, didn’t mean to misinform anyone!

I think it was another article, although I cannot think of a title right now; Schell writes for Harper’s on a regular basis, I believe he was an editor at some point. I subscribe to Foreign Affairs and a new issue has an article by Paul Kennedy (a prof from last semester). It is very strange to read these articles sometimes: Kennedy’s article if full of the exactly same terms he used for my international studies class, so it’s like going to class all over again.

On another note, using one’s college name is common amongst those who are insecure about themselves. I went to a symposium at Harvard Law School over the spring break; during a post-lecture discussion, one visitor mentioned he had gone to Cambridge even though it was *completely* irrelevant… (I guess a room full of Harvard students was making feel somewhat insecure) Unfortunately, I see it happen a lot. On the other hand, a close friend of mine who goes to Cambridge avoids mentioning it unless it is absolutely necessary.

The people I was sitting behind were insane, though.

I am terribly sorry; it must have been a very annoying experience.

I went to a book store in NYC some time ago. A new “Harper’s” had an article by my professor Jonathan Schell. As I was excitedly exclaiming “It’s so cool we get to take a class with him” (because it is really exciting to see your professor’s work published, especially if you are a freshman) to my boyfriend, I noticed a customer giving me a weird look. I was by no means attempting to show off my college, but it must have come across that way. So even though it wasn’t my intention, there may be someone venting about “those kids from prestigious school” out there…