I visited Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut yesterday, and I wasn't planning to fall in love with it. After all, it's Yale. They don't need me to fall in love with it. Everyone's already in love with it! And based on their admissions podcast, they certainly love themselves, truth be told. And I had fallen in love with Yale decades ago, applied, and was denied after an absolutely disastrous alumni interview. But that's a story for another day.

Flash forward to yesterday: I loved everything about Yale.The city of New Haven has never been a reason to go to this ivy league college, but the area around the campus has certainly cleaned up in recent years and It's not nearly as sketchy and gritty as I remember. I did a general tour, an engineering tour and a science tour, and over the course of my day I talked at length with 5 different students. They were all extraordinarily accomplished, intellectually curious, friendly, secure in themselves, and enthusiastic, with excellent social skills. There's a happiness to the Yale student that makes sense as they tell me about the sense of collaboration in their classes.The engineering student told me that her professor in Differential Equations freshman year required them to put the names of the other students with whom they collaborated on each problem set that they handed in. This helped to create a culture that values cooperation as opposed to competition. The student experience at Yale revolves around the 14 residential colleges. When admitted, students are randomly assigned to a college for their 4 years, and there's an enormous amount of loyalty, a la Harry Potter. Each college is a set of gothic buildings around a courtyard and one is more beautiful than the next. The resources at Yale are staggering. There are the numerous graduate schools where undergraduates are actually allowed to take classes, summer fellowships for research on campus including housing and all meals - I'm told everyone gets approved for if they give half an effort to their application. There's an art museum with works by Georgia O'Keefe, John Singleton Copley and others, a stunningly beautiful library with the largest secular collection of stained glass in the US depicting the history of Yale and New Haven, where every first year student is assigned their own personal librarian, and a rare book and manuscript library where students can view an original Gutenberg Bible, and original manuscripts from the likes of Audubon, James Joyce and Edith Wharton. But now I'm gushing. We already know that Yale delivers an excellent education. I knew that coming in. Research is a big deal amongst undergraduates and we see opportunities at many institutions. But one of my tour guides said to me, "At Yale, I can do research for pay, for credit or for fun. And I've done all 3." That's the Yale student.