The Collegiate Yale Figure Skating Club has freestyle sessions on Sundays. But given Yale's endowment, I'm sure they could hire someone to work at the rink in the morning. The greater problem would be to take time away from their ::cough:: mediocre ::cough:: hockey team.
Nathan Chen and University: A Yalie?
- Thread starter ancientpeas
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The Collegiate Yale Figure Skating Club has freestyle sessions on Sundays. But given Yale's endowment, I'm sure they could hire someone to work at the rink in the morning. The greater problem would be to take time away from their ::cough:: mediocre ::cough:: hockey team.
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- Feb 17, 2010
College can wait, but I also don't think the residential college experience would be as fun for him if he were several years older than his classmates, which would be the case if he matriculated in 2022. I suspect that Nathan, like Hanyu and others, trains in moderate (or worse) pain everyday, and the prospect of putting your body through that for another four years nonstop is probably not very appealing.
Her results declined as she started college, though. I hope the best for Nathan in college but his skating is almost guaranteed to suffer.
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I suspect that too. For me the money quote of that Hersh article was Nathan responding "I don't think so" to the question of whether he would ever consider giving up skating for school. If skating were truly his passion, I think he would have responded with a definite "No" to Phil's question. It also seems unusual that someone who placed a high priority on the skating part of their life would not have at least worked out a preliminary training plan with their coach before choosing a college on the other side of the country. That says to me that school is probably Nathan's top priority, not skating.
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But she ended up retiring during her Harvard time....she was on her way up if she had continued skating and de-prioritized her education.... really don't know how he is going to do it. I have no idea what his major is going to be? All of the skaters I'm thinking about ended up retiring and/or and fading away when they went to college....Dornbush, Gao, Flatt, Hughes.
Maybe Nathan can emulate Paul Wylie...he graduated with his Bachelor's degree from Harvard before his last Olympics and afterwards pursued his MBA post retirement in his late twenties.....
Time will tell but I give Nathan the benefit of the doubt that he has a plan. It won't be easy and his skating will probably pay a bit of a price but we will seen - the new rules might actually help him in some ways. Generally goign to school has not helped the skating but it can be done. It is an Ivy League school but I have heard that the Canadian major universities are equivalent to the Ivy League schools - the quality in Canada is amazing. I am not sure an"ivy" league requires that much "extra" time as there are Canadian athletes who go to school - just much fewer of them. Still I don't know if he will do all those promos for companies if he is going to school and competing. That could be tough. Still that might be his bread and butter.
At the same time reading that interview, it seems to me that he is not as obsessive as I thought. He seems only happy to have been accepted and happy to relax a bit before starting to plan this new stage. As he wanting to say ¨I will try to do both things. If I can do it, great, and if I can not, well, it's not the end of the world¨
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- Apr 5, 2016
There are some differences though. Most of the Canadian skaters in university take much lighter course loads - they are truly part time. Nathan won't have that option. The one I know who didn't is Paul Poirier. But Paul trains very close to the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus. He still had to make time to go downtown for some courses. Few of the top athletes in Canada have finished their degrees - their priority has been skating. Actually most skaters retire as soon as high school is done so they can actually do post secondary education.
It's up to Nathan to figure out if he can manage it all or focus on what is most important to him. I'm sure he'll have a better idea of what he wants after a year in school.
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having graduated from a top 3 school in Canada, i would strongly, strongly disagree with you. No way they are half close to ivies. maybe a tier under - so NYU, Duke, USC, Notre Dame, etc ... of course with significantly cheaper tuition. i'm personally surprised he didn't pick any of the excellent west coast schools - Berkeley, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Caltech... i'm sure he would have had his choice with his 800 SAT and extracurriculars ROFL
Overall, I think his choice makes clear that if he cannot do both skating and uni, he will chose uni. Basically because he surely could have gotten something closer to training grounds, lower tier maybe so less demanding and so on.
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- Apr 9, 2018
i don't agree with you, but we're then just talking about what's inside nathan's brain without actually being inside nathan's brain. i would not say berkeley, stanford, ucla, or caltech is in a lower tier than yale. not an ivy, but stellar schools. and he's not a yale legacy either, so i'm not quite sure why
anyways, he's incredibly talented and intelligent, and will do well wherever he goes. i'm totes jealous
All four of the schools you name are excellent, and I wouldn't rank any of them in a lower tier than Yale either. But each is quite different from Yale, and from each other. Caltech is tiny, with less than 1000 undergrads, and consequently oriented more toward its graduate students. It's also much more heavily male (about 2:1 at present, though working on gender balance). Stanford is in the middle: around 7000 undergrads, pretty evenly balanced between male and female students. UC Berkeley and UCLA are big state schools, with around 30,000 undergrads each, again pretty evenly balanced in terms of gender. By comparison, Yale has about 5500 undergrads, again with a pretty even gender balance.
At big state schools, most students move to off-campus housing after their first year. Many introductory classes will be huge lectures; there will be many smaller classes where you have a chance to get to know your professors, but it may take you a little while to find them. Many students will take some classes online or in the summer. I'm less familiar with Caltech's and Stanford's academic systems, but I would expect them to be similar to Yale, with a few large lectures (especially introductory science courses) but mostly smaller lectures and seminars. Yale requires all students to live on campus for their first two years and offers very few courses in the summer or online. And Yale is the only one of these institutions with the residential college system, meaning that most students live not just on campus but with the same smaller group of students in a physical and social community for all four years. (Stanford probably comes closest to the Yale experience, with the vast majority of students living on campus for all four years.) In other words, Yale attempts to engineer a cohesive academic and social experience for its undergraduates, while the UCs offer more flexibility.
Caltech is heavily oriented toward the sciences and engineering; to a slightly lesser extent, so is Stanford, though both do have excellent humanities; they're just not what most students are there to study. The UCs offer just about everything you can think of, but it helps to be self-directed and willing to experiment to discover the full range of intellectual possibilities there. Yale's historic strengths have been in the humanities and life sciences; of course they are very strong in the hard sciences too, but a larger percentage of the student body is oriented toward the humanities and to extracurriculars emerging from the humanities, such as theatre, music, dance, and writing.
I'm not saying that any of these models is better than any other; each is right for some students and not-so-right for others. These huge differences between universities are a big part of why choosing a college is such a long and stressful process for so many students. (And we're just talking about one small slice of the full higher-education picture in the US, without even considering liberal-arts colleges that only award bachelor's degrees, or the regional campuses of state universities that do so much of the heavy lifting in postsecondary education, or two-year colleges that offer associate's degrees and serve as essential stepping-stones to four-year institutions for students who haven't had a smooth path to college for whatever reason.)
In the end, as colton12314 says, none of us is inside Nathan's brain. Maybe one or another of these factors particularly appealed to him. Maybe he wanted to try living in a different part of the country, seeing the leaves turn and experiencing four seasons. Maybe he just liked the pizza.
Nathan said he hasn’t actually visited Yale yet - so I’m guessing the pizza is not one of his reasons lol
Nathan and his acceptance were featured on Your Yale Week:
https://youtu.be/jgMoFtrHqeo?t=1m26s
Nathan and his acceptance were featured on Your Yale Week:
https://youtu.be/jgMoFtrHqeo?t=1m26s
Again, Nathan has made it clear that skating takes priority. He’s said that he plans to go to several World Chanpionships. He says that he plans to go to Beijing. He’s also said he’s going to try this for a year and make a adjustments if necessary. Meaning if Yale interferes with skating too much, he’ll transfer to another university.
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- Feb 17, 2010
Privately, he may be more conflicted than he lets on. I could see him saying this to secure additional sponsorships, and I think he'd have more difficulty with that aspect if he stated school was his top priority. That he is attending a university on the other side of the country from the coach who trained him to a world title says a lot, IMO. Like many young people, Nathan is just trying to happiness and a balanced life, and he can't go wrong choosing either skating or college.
I doubt he's conflicted. He's said repeatedly in interviews how much skating means him. College will be a new experience that he plans to enjoy. But he always been adult like when it comes to his goals. He wants to be a student at Harvard Medical. That's his ultimate educational goal. He's been a bit dismissive about where he goes undergrad. Skating on the other hand, he's been very specific and clear. He wants to go to Beijing. If school does become problematic, he'll transfer to another one. That simple.
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