Yale Alumni Magazine

That’s Why I Chose Harvard: Yale Fan explains.
Posted by Mark Alden Branch '86

Following up on last Wednesday’s post about the high school senior in Oregon whose name is Yale Fan—and who will be a freshman at Harvard in the fall—I took the audacious step of doing some actual reporting. In response to an e-mail, Fan explains that he was not named for the university—Yale is just “phonetically similar to my Chinese name,” he says. Fan is as diplomatic as he is brilliant: he writes that he is a “genuine Yale fan” and that he thinks “Yale is exceptional in the general quality of life and happiness of its students.” He picked Harvard as a “compromise” that “combines the strong math and physics programs of Princeton with the curricular flexibility of Yale.” He adds that “you probably won’t see me at the Harvard-Yale football game because I wouldn’t know where to sit.” Based on his campus visits, Fan doesn’t expect much teasing about his name when he gets to Harvard. “In fact, I got more reactions from Yale students.” That figures—those Cantabs don’t like to acknowledge our existence any more than necessary.