Items filtered by date: April 2014

The Yale Young African Scholars Program is a new initiative that is modeled off of the Yale Young Global Scholars Program. These sessions, in Ghana and Ethiopia, are the first sessions to take place outside of Yale's campus in New Haven, Connecticut. These sessions are intended solely for African students attending secondary school on the African continent.

The 2014 inaugural Yale Young African Scholars programs will be hosted by Yale University in two locations:

Ghana from 11 - 15 August 2014
Ethiopia from 18 - 22 August 2014

Application deadline 9 May 2014 – Download the application here

The Yale Young African Scholars Program (YYAS) is a high-intensity five-day program designed for African secondary school students (entering their second to last year) with talent, drive, energy, and ideas to make meaningful impacts as young leaders, even before they begin their university studies. The Yale Young African Scholars Program is an official program of Yale University.

There is no cost to students to participate in the Yale Young African Scholars Program. Participants are, however, responsible for getting themselves to the venue at the outset of the program and their return home at the end of the program. Participants will also be responsible for any incidental expenses they elect to incur.

The programs will help students recognize and understand global issues, strategize responses, and innovate solutions while learning from Yale faculty and African undergraduate and graduate students who currently attend Yale. Students will participate in a lecture series and a number of elective seminars on a variety of topics. The demanding academic content is designed to improve students' analytical thinking, intellectual flexibility, and written and oral communication skills. These skills will be further utilized in small workshops designed to prepare students for the demanding application processes of U.S. colleges and universities.

Accommodation will be provided for all students, along with class instruction, three meals a day, and in the case of the Ethiopia session, transportation from Addis to Debre Zeit. There is no cost for students to participate in the program.

Please click here for more information

Enrollment at American colleges is sliding, but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and anxiety-inducing than ever. In the just-completed admissions season, Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools, with the odds nearly as bad at its elite rivals.

Deluged by more applications than ever, the most selective colleges are, inevitably, rejecting a vast majority, including legions of students they once would have accepted. Admissions directors at these institutions say that most of the students they turn down are such strong candidates that many are indistinguishable from those who get in.

Isaac Madrid applied to 11 colleges, a scattershot approach that he said is fairly typical at his private high school, Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif. Students there are all too aware of the long odds against getting into any particular elite university. “It was a crazy amount of work and stress doing all those essays by the deadline and keeping up my schoolwork, and waiting on the responses, and we had more than $800 in application fees,” he said.

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