有关常春藤盟校的访谈

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Fishville's Notes: In virtually every civilization, a dream for many parents to have is to witness our kids who grew up in our humble household to become a contributing member in the society. We have a few of these moments so far after our son graduated from college. Now we would like to share an example as he participated in a talk show on Ivy League colleges. This was part of his professional duties from his first job when he worked as an entry-level consultant for a San Francisco based college consulting company. He left there in the spring of this year to pursue his "real" career down the road. We have to confess that we were excited initially to watch this conversation on screen because it demonstrated a kid who usually running inside the house is not a child anymore. The general description on Ivy League's culture would be valuable for some of the high school students who may have a dream to go there. In that sense, we are deeply appreciated Michael, who is in the middle of his GRE preparation, to voluntarily make efforts to document the whole conversation into the written script containing both Chinese and English. It was for sure a tedious job for Michael to accomplish which we wish his efforts paid off. If there were typos or errors, it should be due to my proof reading.

有关常春藤盟校的访谈

M (Marian): 各位观众大家好，欢迎来到今天的《智胜看教育》节目，我是节目主持人Marian You——智胜教育的升学顾问. 今天来到我们节目当中的是我们智胜教育新加入智胜顾问团队的一位顾问，名叫Jason Wu。Hi, Jason!

J (Jason): Hi, Marian! Thanks for introducing me! My name is Jason. I graduated recently from Yale with a BA in English and I will be talking today about Ivy League schools.

M: So, Jason has already spoken out what we are going to talk about today. 刚刚Jason已经把我们这一期的话题已经讲出来了，我们今天要跟Jason一起聊的就是我们大家常常耳熟能详在茶余饭后会谈到的Ivy League常春藤名校，我今天叫Jason来谈这个话题也很适合他的背景，因为他刚刚也提到了他是耶鲁大学毕业的，耶鲁大学也是如雷贯耳的这样一个名校。我们平时数数来就好像在国内就讲北大、清华，在美国就讲哈佛、耶鲁，所以应该说是象牙塔顶尖的宝珠这样被你摘到了。所以我们很高兴今天Jason可以来到我们的节目当中。我想是因为他也提到他自己是Recently graduated，所以我相信四年五年前在高中准备所有的学习过程，然后考SAT，准备大学申请, 我想是不是也恍如昨日一样？就是也没有像很久以前，like not that long ago, right?

J: Yeah, it’s a pretty recent history for me，so I remember fairly clearly. I’ll be happy to talk about it.

M: OK! So do you want to start to talking about those?

J: Yeah! So the Ivy is a group of schools in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic part of the U.S.and it was originally like a football conference, so all of these schools are playing with each other when they play all of their football games. But now it’s become a broader category of schools and there is a reason for them to be categorized this way because they all have a lot in common. Ivy League schools tend to be hard to get into, focus on liberal arts and have a lot of history usually. So in that respect they are pretty different from a newer school like Duke and Stanford. They have a lot of links to the U.S.over times.

M: OK，所以你提到了他们的很多的focus在Liberal Arts方面，也提到了它们是很难进的，这个我们是很清楚，因为智胜作为一个升学咨询顾问公司，我们每年都帮助一、两百的学生来做大学申请，其中很多的学生, 家长都很想知道Ivy League，那么为什么我想在这一期节目当中来聊这些话题呢？因为我相信对Ivy League常春藤这个名字有的时候有一点——就是用我们讲的叫“迷思（Myth）”吧，所以有的时候可能就是“hearsay”, 就是听到的，但是到底we want to get closer, so maybe you can give us some information as an insider, like who has been to the system, who has gone to the school-Ivy school, who has gone to the whole process of choosing schools. Maybe you can give us some insights based on your experience and knowledge.

J: Yeah. I think there is a myth around Ivy schools and it probably goes a little bit overboard a lot of the times. There are really not that different from a lot of other schools and in many respects, probably the most important respects. But they do tend to have their own characters, so a lot of the colleges in the Ivy League are a little bit different. For example, Brown, which is in Providence, Rhode Island, it is very selective school. Last year, it was 11 percent of the applicants got in. But it’s more notable for having a really broad curricular focus and relatively loose requirement, so people can take classes pass and fail there and they don’t have to abide by a specific core curriculum. And it’s also known for being a very liberal school, a very socially active school.

While a school like Columbia, for example, is in New York City and it is much larger than Brown and has maybe twenty thousand students total if you counted all of the graduate students compared to eight thousands from Brown. And it has two years of core curriculum, so your first two years you are going to be studying great texts of Western literature, philosophy and you are going to be learning about art. So a lot of these schools, even they are grouped in this category, and they are playing each other in their football games and something like that. They have different focuses and they are pretty different schools.

M: Hmm, OK! You mentioned about Brown and Columbia. How about Yale, the school you went to?

J: Well, Yale is a great place. I just graduated in May and it was a wonderful four years and I recommended anyone to go there really. But Yeah it was a special place, the kids are really smart and all of my friends were really nice people and they didn’t really let the worth they had before impacts who they were, like at school. They were just normal people, so I think in any real high school you could have a dozen of kids who could just show up in Ivy League colleges and you wouldn't able to tell the differences. Maybe not all of them could get in, but they are pretty normal people for the most parts, but really nice and really interested in what they do.

M: Very nice and interested what they do. I don’t think everybody all knowing where they are pursuing. That’s a big differentiator. OK, I believe you also did research when you were applying schools, like four or five years ago. Can you tell us what kind of schools you had visited and what schools you were admitted, and why you were ended up of choosing Yale?

J: So, um, I grew up in St. Louis, I am from St. Louis, Missouriand my parents both work at WashingtonUniversityin St. Louis. So I just kind of grew up around colleges and when I was little they visited all those schools, like I was a little kid and like Asian tourist families taking pictures or something like that. So I have always been around this.

But when I came down to do research about on what schools that I want to apply to, I guess ranking is very a basic way to looking at it, but I did a lot more research on the schools. I looked down a website called collegeconfidential which is a forum for students, parents and admission officers to talk about schools. And I looked at a book called Fiske Guide to the Colleges which writes its profiles on each schools as I was trying to figure out what is right for me. So that kind of differing what I ended up of applying to and I didn’t really visit until I got in. You might want to visit beforehand to figure out what schools are right for you apply to, but visiting can be kind of expensive and time-consuming and once you got in, a lot of these schools will fund your visit, so I recommend doing that later. But for me, I ended up being between Yale…

M(画外音): 刚刚Jason讲的这一些经历都是他自己的选择学校时的经验，他当年是被耶鲁、斯坦福然后麻省理工还有Wash.U., 芝加哥大学和Amherst很多学校都录取。他发现在斯坦福因为他的朋友都是很用功地，在图书馆读书；而其他的学生看起来都是在到处玩耍，然后在耶鲁的时候他看到更多的学生在用功读书，Jason很了解自己是属于用功读书一行，所以他就去了一所比较严肃用功的学校。

Anyway, I think the good point when he was talking is 一个很好的观点就是，不管你听到的是什么，就是你对学校的了解based on ranking 排名也好，还是based on 那些文章的介绍啊、你看到的照片了，但是当你真正置身于那个环境当中的时候，他说是“Go with the gut feeling”. 我想就是说你的内心会有一种呼唤，你会认可一个学校，你会认同一个学校，你觉得认为这个学校是适合我的，You feel like home, right? 我相信找到这个感觉的时候你可能就找对了你要找的学校，但在那之前肯定还是要有很多的用功和准备，因为我相信Jason在中学阶段也是一个非常出色的学生，否则的话不会被这么多的名校录取。

J: I think I just got lucky.

M: Jason现在还很谦虚啊！广告过后我们再来跟Jason讨论其他的Ivy League名校，谢谢收看，我们广告过后继续回到智胜教育。

M: 大家好，欢迎回到智胜看教育，我是节目主持人Marian You，智胜教育的升学顾问。今天来到我们节目中做客的嘉宾是新加入我们顾问团队的Jason Wu。Hi Jason!

J: Hi! How are you?

M: Good! Thanks for coming to our program. 刚刚听到了你的这样一些申请的经过，我相信大家也一定觉得很有意思。另外我也想替我们的观众问一个我相信大家都比较关心的问题，你也提到了其实有很多的“迷思”，就是关于常春藤名校，大家最开始其实是起源于一个football team，但毕竟大家还是想去念书的，大家最关心的仍然还是学术方面的一个长项。那么在这八个学校当中就从你的Knowledge和你的经验来讲，你可不可以给大家简单介绍一下哪些学校在哪些学科方面有他们的特长和优势，what they really good at. 我相信that’s what our audiences want to know.

J: Yeah, so I guess I will start with Yale, because that’s what I have the most familiarity with. So I start English with Yale, which is a really great major for them. But you can kind of seeing the characters of schools in terms of what kinds of majors are popular. And for Yale, history is the most popular major, followed by political science, economics, English, biology and also psychology. But it’s definitely more humanity-orientated school, very political in a lot of ways, like for example, both Bushes went to Yale undergraduate and Clintonwas a Yale law graduate. While compared to the school like Harvard, the most popular major is economics and they are also good at English and history, very good. But you can just see a little bit of difference in the culture based on that. So I would say Harvard may be a little bit more pre-professional and also more students majored in the sciences there.

As far as other majors go, Cornell is really good at engineering. I think it is probably the best school in Ivy League as far as engineering goes. Whereas schools like Princetonis very good at physics, philosophy as well as English and history. You will find for the most part that almost all the Ivy League colleges are good at the humanity and they are good at English, history, foreign languages, that kind of things. But a couple of them have other programs too, for example, Universityof Pennsylvania, they have Wharton School of Business which is an amazing undergraduate business program and their popular major is finance. So you can see in that case there are more pre-professional school. They are more focused on preparing students in profession.

Then you get to schools like Brown, Dartmouth, and Columbia. They are also very humanity-focused. Dartmouthalso has a link to Wall Street, for example, Hank Paulson, George Bush’s last Secretary of Treasury, went to Dartmouth. And students who go to Dartmouthended up of having the highest average income after ten years. If you don’t count students who went to the graduate schools. This is because so many of their students ended up of going to finance. But if you are looking for a school that’s good at science, I would say Cornell, Harvard and Princetonthey are really good at sciences, good at hard sciences. And then most of the Ivy Leagues are good at biology and a number of other sciences. Ivy League as the whole are not the best schools for engineering although they often have engineering programs. But if you are doing engineering I recommend schools like MIT or Stanford instead.

M: So what would you see the strengths in schools like Stanford since it’s right around neighborhood, backyard and since so many students are eager to go to.

J: Yeah Stanford is good at almost everything. They are really good at engineering and they have great business programs. But they are also really good at basic humanity like English, philosophy and that kind of things. I would say that the biggest difference between Stanford and the Ivy League schools isn’t so much what it is good at but what it focuses. Because it closes to Silicon Valley, it has a really strong entrepreneur background, it’s very much like let's start a company, whereas the school like Yale, if someone is gonna to go to the business from Yale, they might go and join like a young start-up tech company, but they are more likely to go to a big established company, like Goldman Sachs or something like that. But there are exceptions, of course, the school like Harvard you get people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg who drop out and move out west. But the big differences between west coast vs. east coast, new schools vs. old schools, technology vs. history. So I think Stanford is more forward looking and the Ivy League are more about traditions and about studying the humanities.

M: I like the piece of you are mentioning, very interesting. 为大家简单地用中文recap一下，他刚刚基本上说所有的八所Ivy League schools它们各个学校的所长. 因为我也觉得作为我们的家长来讲应该是很希望了解，常常听到“常春藤名校”，可是好像都是一个一篮子的概念，每个学校在哪个专业上有哪些强项，其实大部分家长应该并不是很熟悉。从Jason他自己的经验来讲，他觉得首先从每个学校最popular的专业，就是说哪个专业是最受学生欢迎的，就很能看出这个学校的特点。比如耶鲁大学，他提到最popular的专业是历史系，还有政治系、心理学系。Did I miss anything?

J: English and Biology.

M: 还有英文和生物，所以有很强的人文学科的底蕴和感觉。其实说起来有点像在我们国内讲，有点像北大和人大这样的差别。像北大就是更加传统性的，讲究人文这种气氛的；像复旦大学和人民大学这种学校就更加focus在社会科学，更加practical的角度；像清华就更加工科这样的学校。所以，美国也一样，每个学校从外表一起来看都是Ivy League，但是各个学校都有自己的tradition，大家也知道我们之前的前总统克林顿还有现在的国务卿希拉里都是从Yale毕业的，所以Jason也提到在校园里有很多的政治性的组织，学生都很热心参加政治活动和政治讨论。但versus在哈佛这样的学校，最popular的专业其实是经济学，所以是更加professional的这样一个culture，更加务实的这样一个学风。那么在Princeton它很强在科学方面，比如它的物理，我也知道Princeton有最好的物理系，它们有几个国家的研究所，它们的历史学科也很strong。Cornell是Ivy League当中工程学最好的一个学校，还有其他像Dartmouth有向华尔街输送人才的传统，所以毕业生的收入在十年以后是最高的，因为学校非常小，可是进华尔街的比例非常高，金融科很强。大家都知道U Penn是以商学院为著称，在第一节中他也提到他没有选择Stanford，选择去Yale的原因，Stanford因为是在西海岸，它在硅谷这样一个地理位置当中，有很强的entrepreneur, 就是start up这种文化，所以很多的学生其实more forward-looking，versus在东海岸的学校是更加traditional的，沉浸在它们的历史和哲学的研究当中，那种深沉的文化当中。在这边更加有朝气蓬勃，但是也更加务实的这种研究态度，好！谢谢大家收看这一节的智胜看教育，广告过后我们继续回到智胜看教育。

M: 各位观众大家好，欢迎回到智胜看教育，我是节目主持人Marian You，今天来到我们节目当中的嘉宾是新加入我们智胜顾问团队的Jason Wu，Hi, Jason!

J: Hi! How are you doing?

M: Good! Jason是耶鲁大学的毕业生，所以我们这一期节目特别邀请他来跟我们闲话Ivy League常春藤名校，因为我想很多的家长可能也不曾有这样一个机会和一位常春藤的毕业生，特别是他，其实是recent graduate，所以和我们现在在读的高中生也没有太大的年龄差距。很多他自己在申请过程当中的一些感受、经验和他对于常春藤院校的一些了解以及与其他院校的一些比较。So I know there are still a little more information about Ivy League school you want to talk about, and you can continue your talk.

J: Yeah, so one of the big differences between these different schools is how big they are, which affects things like what their social life is like, how much of chances of you can getting in or stuff like that, and also locations. So first of the sizes goes, there are a couple of schools in Ivy League are actually pretty big, like Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell. They are all really big, they have may be 20,000 kids total. Once you count undergraduate, graduate, professional schools like medical students and law students, everything put together. Whereas other schools like Dartmouth, Brown, to a lesser extent Yale and Princeton, they are going to be a lot smaller, maybe only five or six thousand students total, like Yale has eleven thousands but only five thousand undergraduates.

And the Ivy League schools that are the easiest to getting into are usually the ones with the biggest undergraduate bodies. So for example, Cornell has 80,000 undergraduates total, whereas Penn has, may be 9,000, every other schools is 6,000, 7,000, 5,000, Dartmouthhas 4,000. So that makes a big difference in terms with how you see this to get in. Because about the same number of kids apply to most of these schools, but Cornell is a lot bigger. So they seek more kids, so it is a lot easier to get into Cornell than it is to be getting into Harvard or Yale, probably just because of that. But also location is a really big difference. So for example you have Columbiawhich is in New York City, it’s on the up west side, it is pretty close to Harlem. It’s like around 125th street or something like that, 116th streetI think. So it’s obviously a huge city, right? And then University of Pennsylvania in west of Philadelphia, not the safest neighborhood but a lot happening around there, whereas you have places like Dartmouth which is in New Hampshire which is really far away from everything and snows all the time, much more isolated. Schools like Brown and Yale are in a small city like New Havenor Providence, Rhode Islandin the case of Brown.

Princetonis in a rich suburban area, so you have insulation from a city life, whereas you might get that at the place like Yale. So location is really a big difference between these different schools, so if you want to be in the city and I recommend ones of those schools like Harvard in Cambridge, which is really close to Boston. If you want to be off close to the nature and a beautiful environment, Cornell, Upstate New York, has beautiful cliffs, ravines and rivers and all of that. So that’s another thing to really take into consideration. They are all in North East, they all get a fair amount of snow, it’s pretty cool in the winter and fall like that. But the physical location is a big difference. And one more thing I want to talk about was financial aid. So the Ivy League Schools…

M: 我先简单地翻译一下好吗？

J: Oh sorry, go ahead!

M: That’s OK! 我也听得入神了，但是我还是想简单的提一下，因为刚刚Jason有比较一下各个学校的locations，我知道我们的学生和家长在选择学校的时候不常常把这个考虑进去，他提到了两个问题：一个是学校的size，就是大小；第二个是location。按大小来说，八个Ivy League当中相对来讲比较大的是哈佛大学、U Penn, Cornell和Columbia，他们大约都在两万人左右，the student body。其他的几所大概从四千、五千到Yale是一万一，但是Yale的undergraduate你提到也只有5000左右，所以就从size相差到两三倍以上甚至更多。那么这会直接影响到它们的录取率，另外一方面也会影响到它们的校园文化。还有刚刚Jason也提到说在Geographic地理上的差异，比如说像Columbia正在Manhattan的上面，up citytet  g I want to talk about is，它是紧邻华尔街，是最热闹的地方了。像U Penn也是比较热闹的区，相反的像Harvard is also a very busy town, it’s like Boston. 其他的像Yale or Brown, they are kind of similar in the way, it’s more like a college town in a sense. 另外有更接近nature的，像Cornell and Dartmouth, they are always like in the middle of nowhere, I met an example before, one of my friends went to Dartmouth, she regretted it because she grew up in San Francisco and she ended up going somewhere she doesn't have human contact. Anyway, 所以我们常常建议学生在考虑学校的时候把各方面的因素考虑到，因为这毕竟影响到你之后四年生活的环境和学术的环境。OK, I will let you continue to talk about financial aid. 接下来Jason很想跟大家介绍关于一个奖学金的问题，这个也是很多家长很关心的，其实Ivy学校并不像你们以为的那样就是读不起的。

J: Yeah Yeah! Sounds like they are为doesn't ing somewhsuper expensive, right? It’s room and board maybe 10,000 dollar a year, and by now the tuition is, I don’t know, you know better than I do, right? But maybe 35,000, 40,000 dollars a year, really expensive schools. But the Ivy League colleges are also blessed by a lot of history and a lot of alumni had made a lot of money over the years, and they tend to have really good financial investment strategies. So they have a lot of money to give to students and financial aid is really a big priority for them. So at school like Yale for example, if your family makes less than 60,000 dollars a year, then the student doesn’t have to pay anything to go to the college, even though the stick price maybe 45,000 dollars a year.

M: You mean room and board included?

J: Hmm-hmm, room and board included. And If your parents make up to 200,000 dollars a year, they only have to pay ten percent of your total income to go to school. And it will be less than that if you have more kids or more kids in college or something like that, some other circumstances. So generally, the richer the college is the better financial aid package you will get. And often times you will get a better financial aid package from, like a really expensive Ivy school, than you will even get from a public school. It can be cheaper to go to Yale than it is to go to UC Berkeley, for example. So for example, if your parents make like 100,000 dollars a year, and it might only cost 5,000 dollars to sign your kids to Yale. So there are accessible to everybody, they are need blind which means that you don’t have a lot of chances getting in, if you have a lot of family income. They really try hard to make sure everyone can afford to go to school. And because they have such wealthy endowment, they can really afford to make that happen. And this is also true for schools like Stanford and MIT. But for other private schools, they might not be that truth, they don’t have this much money, they may make student to take loans or they can not afford to give many grants. But financial aid is definitely something you’ve got to think about, when you are going to school. And it’s one reason you might not want to apply early decisions because you would not be able to compare these financial aid offers from different schools.

M: 刚刚Jason也解答了一个在财政上对常春藤私立名校的“迷思”，不是说你家要很有钱你才可以念这样一些名校，如果你读得好的话并进去了，可能你念这些名校的费用比你念公立学校的费用还要低。我想美国这个国家教育体系的优越性和它的财力就体现在这个地方，它们也是竭尽全力来支持它们优秀的学生。非常感谢大家来到我们这期节目的智胜看教育当中，也非常感谢Jason来到我们这期节目当中分享他的个人经验和很多的knowledge，两周之后请大家继续关注我们的智胜看教育。