Last Day Before Going to College

Today is the last day of traveling around and visiting colleges. We went to the Amtrak station early in the morning and took a ride to New Haven to visit Yale University. We met some Yale alumi and the Columbia cohorts. Then we went to a French restaurant and had lunch with the alumni. They told us about the life on campus and how the university is divided into about ten residential colleges. Unlike other universities, Yale assigns freshmen randomly to different colleges and different colleges are not associated with different fields of study. After the fancy lunch, we continued the touring; we went inside one of the residential hall and saw what the students' lives are like. There is a piano in every common room and in the basement there are a pool table, a ping pong table, and a food bar. Every residential college has about four hundred students, so the students form a close community within the college they live in. One of the Yale alumnus even made a comparison of schools in Hogwarts to colleges in Yale.

Typical architecture in Yale

A Gate in Yale

One thing that stroke me the most is the architecture of the university. Every gate in the university has very special and elaborate patterns. The buildings are as elaborated and excessively-decorated as a hundreds-year-old church. The dining hall looks almost exactly the same as that in Harry Potter. Everyone was quite surprised went we went to the dining hall. The most interesting building would be the library. Covered by a special kind of marble that lets visible lights to pass through and blocks UV lights in order to protect the books, the library is very modern and contrasting to the rest of the university. The books are stored in the middle of the building so that the books will remain intact if the building collapses. 

Inside the Library

After the Yale tour, we went back to Providence and had another fancy meal with two Brown faculties. They gave us valuable tips of writing essays and applying to colleges. 

Tomorrow we are going to visit the last college in the trip, Brown University. Having lived in Providence for four days, we have not even had a glimpse of Brown. We are going to experience college life for three weeks in Brown and I'm very excited for the coming three weeks.