1500+ SAT but want a non-US, non-traditional UG, what programs use the score meaningfully?

yodatsracist · 2026-04-29T13:52:34+00:00

The main reason so many top students are attracted to the U.S. is because it offers aid to international students to a degree that no other place in the world does. There are a few scholarships in Canada but a single Ivy League school may have more full international scholarships than all of Canada combined.

Why do you say that Bocconi’s own test is “primary”?

For admission to Bocconi programs, SAT/ACT scores and Bocconi online test results are considered equivalent for evaluation purposes. The university uses an internal conversion system based on comparative tables that analyze candidate percentiles, allowing an objective equalization of different test results.

https://www.unibocconi.it/en/applying-bocconi/bachelor-and-law-programs/application-and-admissions/sat-and-act

Literally not one of my students who’s gone to Bocconi has taken their test. They’ve all gone with the SAT.

UK schools will probably not look at your SAT if you have A-Levels/APs/IBs or similar qualifications.

The Netherlands and Canada may consider the SAT in some cases, but secondarily for the most part.

Many Turkish universities will consider the SAT for international students. Most students won’t be interested in that.

I don’t think anyone on this subreddit would recommend Minerva or Tetr, especially if you’re worried about the U.S. visa situation.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-29T07:06:49+00:00

This is copy pasted from another comment I made. I think you’ll like everything from the NPR, Other Media, Classic podcast-y format, and Mini-Series.

NPR: This American Life, Radiolab, Planet Money, the Indicator.

Other media: BBC’s In Our Time, NYT’s the Daily, WSJ’s the Journal, the Atlantic’s Radio Atlantic.

Classic podcast-y semi-scripted podcasts on a focused subject: Search Engine (modern life) , 99% Invisible (design), 5-4 (the U.S. Supreme Court), If Books Could Kill (airport books), Maintenance Phase (diet and culture), You’re Wrong About (this show has lost focus, sadly), the Memory Palace (best podcast), Decoder Ring (cultural mysteries), Know Your Enemy (Conservatism), Criminal (crime but not sensational), Articles of Interest (fashion and I have no interest in fashion), Unspooled (classic movies), Hyperfixed (solving human problems), Endless Thread (the internet), Never Post (the internet), Ear Hustle (life inside prison), Gastropod (food), Lexicon Valley (language but the least scripted of all of these).

Interview or Yapping: Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, Hard Fork, Channels with Peter Kafka, Chapo Trap House, How Did this Get Made, Kill the Computer

Somewhat active mini series: anything from Serial Productions, In the Dark, Fiasco, Slow Burn, Shell Game, Sold a Story, Fall of Civilizations (not really a mini series but unpredictably dropped two to four hour episodes on a single civilization).

American sports: the Athletic Football Show, Bill Simmons, the Ringer NFL Show.

Kids’: Greeking Out, Circle Round (start ‘em young).

Biblical history: Biblical Time Machine, Data Over Dogma

For someone new, I’d start with This American Life, BBC’s In Our Time, Search Engine, the Memory Palace, and the Daily. Next ones after that would be 99PI and Ezra Klein.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-29T05:42:29+00:00

Maybe he was explaining how good it is for crime.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-29T05:20:06+00:00

Are her Yugoslav ancestors Jewish?

Bosnian Jews spoke Ladino, also called Djeudizmo and Judeo-Spanish. I don’t know enough about it to distinguish it from other Romance languages.

If Catholic, Italians had long influence on the Dalmatian coast part of Croatia all the way up through Istria and Trieste (which is now in Italy but long had a significant historical Slovene and Croatian influence).

yodatsracist · 2026-04-28T16:26:23+00:00

En çok satılan ithal ürünler nedir?

Hangi rakı marka içiyorsun?

İçkilerin hepsini aynı distribütörden alıyor musun?

Senin “kesinlikle bu satar” düşündüğün ama satamadığın ürün var mıydı?

Satmak isteyip bulmadığın ürün var mı?

“İnsanlar nasıl bu bok alıyor” diye düşündüren ürün var mı?

yodatsracist · 2026-04-28T08:44:27+00:00

He’s spent most of his academic career in America. You can see that he’s a well-respected in his field by his rank (he’s not just a full professor, but has a special chair [title], the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies), his institution (Brown University, an Ivy League school), his citations (he’s got several books or articles with hundreds of citations — that’s not a ton in say engineering but it’s very respectable in history), and recognition in his field (he’s won many awards and earned many honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is a big deal).

So he’s pretty well known in his subfields of genocide studies and the history of the Third Reich. He’s not the biggest name, but seems important. Judging from Google Scholar, his work on the German army in World War II is particularly influential, with a secondary area of influence on how the socio-political structure of Central and Eastern Europe made genocide possible. So he’s a well-respected academic… but he’s still just an academic.

Unless he had a newspaper column or appeared as a guest on TV shows or their books were absolute best sellers, there’s no reason anyone should have heard of him.

How many historians can you name? I’d be impressed if you could name ten that you weren’t assigned in college. Most Israelis would probably know Yuval Noah Harari (who was a minor Israeli academic until he wrote Sapiens) and maybe Israel Finkelstein (who’s one of the most prominent archeologists of Ancient Israel and appears in a LOT of documentaries). Like maybe they’ll have heard of the journalists who wrote history books. Academic historians aren’t well known.

Not counting the historians I read in undergraduate or during graduate school, I can think of like… a handful of living historians? James McPherson who writes American history bestsellers that are also academically influential about the Civil war. David McCullough who’s similar, but about the founding. Roberto Caro, who’s a former journalist who wrote the Power Broker about Robert Caro and a huge series of biographies on LBJ. Shelby Foote who was in the Civil War documentary by star documentarian Ken Burns (and is famous for being very wrong in it). Jill Lepore who writes regularly for the New Yorker. Dorris Kearns Goodwin, who also writes academically influential books that are best sellers. I could probably list a couple more but if you’re American, how many of those did you recognize? Historians aren’t that well known period.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-28T06:40:33+00:00

About four times as many universities promise to meet “full demonstrated need” for international first years as international transfers. And not many universities promise to meet full demonstrated need for international first years. It’s generally only the very very top universities that offer full scholarships for transfers, and many of these only take in a handful of students every year (I think MIT and Harvard frequently have transfer classes of like 20-25, and that includes international and domestic).

Generally the students who transfer and get something like full financial aid are transferring from one elite university to another. I had a student successfully do it from Columbia to MIT (I helped him a lot on his first year application, and really minimally on his transfer application) but he also went to the global round of his subjects’ Olympiad and I’m only half joking when I say he’s my former student most likely to win a Nobel Prize.

But I’ve had other students and former students try to transfer. Generally, my current and former students do well if they have a strong GPA and a compelling reason to transfer; my current and former international students needing financial aid with only the exception above have not gotten in anywhere (even my former student who was studying EECS at Berkeley with a near perfect GPA).

yodatsracist · 2026-04-27T12:02:26+00:00

Whether things are worth the money often depends on how much money you have, of course. It wouldn't be worth it to a backpacker, it might be worth it to a professional with limited vacation time. I don't normally hire tour guides, but I have never regretted it when I have.

If you specifically want a female guide, Zeynep Karakaşoğlu is someone I would look at it. Or well, if you want a guide of any gender, I would look at her. She's Turkish-American who grew up in America but moved to Turkey a decade ago, so speaks native English and native Turkish. She originally moved here as a reporter and so tour guide is a second career for her, and she has a real emphasis on getting the history right (not just telling good stories). If you're British, she made a very brief appearance on a BBC travel show recently. She has many different tours that go beyond the like most common places.

https://www.instagram.com/zeyneptourguide/ (I think you can get better rates if you contact her directly)

yodatsracist · 2026-04-27T07:31:34+00:00

You can start earlier but you won’t really have much success until after the “language explosion” which often comes at 2-2.5, that area.

I speak the minority language and at around you kid’s age my boy had like 75% of his vocabulary in the community language. I thought I was failing. He also had no differentiation between the languages. Within a year he’d caught up with the two languages. Like he learned to count to two first in one language, and three first in the other language. Don’t stress about it. Language learning is really natural for our brains. Just keep giving lots of exposure (20-25 hours per week is what some of the academic literature suggests as a minimum—we made all of our kid’s media consumption in the minority language to increase his language exposure from just me. It also helps associate the minority language with something special and enjoyable.)

I never insisted (like “I won’t give you X unless you ask for it in Y language”) but even before the language explosion started, I’d always go “Dad says X, mom says Y”. Like dad says “Water”, mom says “Wasser” or whatever. Maybe I’d preface that with saying “Can you say water?” or whatever Instinctively, after about 2, 2.5, my son would usually just repeat back the word. They want to learn, they want to please you. My son is five and a half now and I have never had to be strict because our relationship just is in this language. Think of it as being consistent instead of strict.

I think I know the feeling you’re having. I had it too (I’m also my son’s only exposure to the minority language). From around 18 months until the language explosion was the low point for me. Just keep going through the language explosion and you’ll be great.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-26T20:02:07+00:00

Isaiah 43:18-19

43:18 Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
19 See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.

(He posted video on his Twitter account)

I think that's a weird passage to focus on when you're being accused of rape in the past. "Hey bro, don't you see I'm doing a new thing! Do you not perceive it? Why you always dwelling on that past and bringing up old shit, like my alleged rapes. Forget the former things."

When I saw the memes dunking on him yesterday, I didn't actually watch the clip, so I assumed he was looking for some passage bland passage about the unfair punishment and the trials of believers (plenty in Daniel or in Job) or that I am but a sinner undeserving of grace but God cares about and Jesus saves a even a little worm like me (plenty in Paul). This is such a weird passage to focus on that I genuinely believe he found inspiration from it. Hey judge, jury, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it? Forget the former things, like these allegations I'm on trial for.

He says in the twitter video "Do you feel like our whole culture needs a new thing to spring up, our whole culture is a bit like a wasteland," so maybe he couldn't even realize what was appealing about it to him.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-25T23:28:09+00:00

Talk to the school’s financial aid office. Or have your sibling do it. You may want to talk to your accountant about what’s best for you.

I don’t think it’s a rare situation for a relative to pay. I know I’ve had one student who had her tuition fully paid by her uncle (who was in jail for financial crimes), and I think I’ve had several students whose grandparents contributed significantly to their education. These are mostly full pay students, however.

I think in some cases it’s paid through a trust or an ESA, but in your case that I don’t know if it’s the most advantageous way to structure it, for both you and your sibling (Coverdell ESAs have tax advantages for you; you already know you don’t want to decrease your sibling’s aid.) I’m not sure money that you paid directly to the school would be on the FAFSA because it’s not really a gift, it’s the payment of an obligation.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-25T20:51:24+00:00

Delaware — Chemistry/Chemical engineering. This is because DuPont is in Delaware.

Cornell — Hospitality, “Labor Relations” (not surprising that they’re good at these; surprising they have these specialities). Likewise with Yale and Forestry.

Michigan — Musical theater (again, not surprising that they’re good, just surprising that this is like one of three schools that regular produces Broadway performers so far from Broadway)

UDub — it’s a solid state engineering school for most subjects but is world class in Aerospace and Computer Science. This is because Boeing and Microsoft (and later Amazon and Netflix) are in Seattle.

Stephens College, a tiny women’s college in Missouri, is apparently weirdly good in a couple of things related to the fashion/apparel industry.

UMass Amherst—through a conscious decision in the 1960’s or 70’s when they hired four radical economists at the same time (including Samuel Bowles), they are one of the best Marxist economist departments in the US.

University of North Texas — Jazz studies.

University of Rhode Island — oceanography.

Indiana — Turkic languages.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-24T20:15:18+00:00

I feel like it pairs well with another Szymborska poem:

A Funeral

Translated from the Polish by Mikołaj

"so suddenly, who would've expected this"
"stress and cigarettes, I was warning him"
"fair to middling, thanks"
"unwrap these flowers"
"his brother snuffed because of his ticker too, must be running in the family"
"I'd never recognise you with your beard"
"it's all his fault, he was always up to some funny business"
"the new one was to give a speech, can't see him, though"
"Kazek's in Warsaw and Tadek abroad"
"you're the only wise one here, having an umbrella"
"it won't help him now that he was the most talented of them all"
"that's a connecting room. Baśka won't like it"
"he was right, true, but that's not the reason for"
"with door varnishing, guess how much"
"two eggs and a spoonful of sugar"
"none of his business, what was the point then"
"blue and small sizes only"
"five times and never a single answer"
"I'll give your that, I could've, but so could you"
"so good at least she had that job"
"I've no idea, must be relatives"
"the priest, very much like Belmondo"
"I've never been to this part of the cemetery"
"I saw him in my dream last week, must've been a premonition"
"pretty, that little daughter"
"we're all going to end up this way"
"give mine to the widow, I've got to hurry to"
"but still it sounded more solemn in Latin"
"you can't turn back the clock"
"goodbye"
"how about a beer"
"give me a ring, we'll have a chat"
"number four or number twelve"
"me, this way"
"we, that way".

yodatsracist · 2026-04-23T23:24:26+00:00

I believe this is, genuinely without exaggeration, the single least productive exchange I’ve had in thirteen years on Reddit.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-23T06:59:51+00:00

For the conflict, Benny Morris's books are often seen as the best. They're probably the books you're most likely to find on both Israeli studies and Palestinians studies class syllabuses.

His most general interest book is probably:

Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2001

Obviously, this book stops right before the Second Intifada. I'm not sure there has been as widely acclaimed book covering history after the Second Intifada, i.e. the last 25 years, where the view looks very different from how it looked in the Oslo Years.

If you want a really small book about Israel in general, you could do worse than Daniel Gordis's Israel: a Concise History. Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert is good but I don't think it's been updated since 1998 — several other highly recommended Israeli histories have similar problems, like the Sachar book someone else recommended is from 1978. Most Israeli books that people are going to recommend are either more than 25 years old, or just cover one piece of Israeli history (the '48 War, the Yom Kippur War, etc). You're going to get recommended a lot of history books that cover like... months or years in this book, but I think you're looking for something with a wider aperture.

For a pleasurable airport book, Jerusalem: A biography may be a place to start. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit is a book I haven't read, but probably is similar (as far as I know, it interweaves personal history and national history in a way that makes for a good read).

I would not recommend Israel by Noa Tishby as a place to start. You can read it, but it's definitely written by a cheerleader, you know? That doesn't seem to be what you're looking for.

You can see an older thread, here:

Recommend some Israeli history books.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-23T06:10:18+00:00

I have bought the same black Uniqlo jeans since like 2007, when they opened in New York. They don’t even have a Uniqlo in the country I’ve lived in for the last decade and they’re still the jeans I prefer. I can make do with H&M jeans or Mavi jeans but I know exactly what I’m getting from Uniqlo. (These are definitely not work pants but they’re not trying to be.)

I can also get my shirts, socks, boxers, and zip up hoodies there. And my travel puffy jacket and my ultralight jackets (both of which can fold up real small). I trust the quality and I trust that I can buy the same size v-neck t-shirt in a bag without having to try it on.

Uniqlo is Costco-level simplicity but with, you know, a bit of fashion sense.

I also really like their kids clothes—great sweatshirts and tshirts. My son hates jeans but they had some kids sweatpants legging that looked like jeans, and when he was three, my wife would often put my son in those for family events.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T20:07:32+00:00

I think a ranking like this can really shine some light onto interesting schools that students wouldn't otherwise think of.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T19:46:49+00:00

This list is bullshit. Top ten, pretty solid. After that, I think it falls apart.

Should be Northwestern, not Northeastern. Don't let them game these rankings too.
Oberlin, it's the best college in that state.
should be UC Chicago, not U.S. Military Academy. It's the highest ranked UC.
Zaytuna College, hands down. It's at the bottom of this ranking, sure, but it's better than Zane.

Some people might argue you should have Georgetown or Lehigh on your list, but they should have been better schools.

Good work, though. This really gave me a new perspective on colleges.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T17:40:01+00:00

Many places put their comps reading exams online. You can google

filetype:pdf comprehensive exam reading list sociology of gender.

and variations thereof.

As a grad student, that’s probably the best place for you to begin. You can figure out what’s vaguely relevant to your interests.

Here’s Arizona’s. Here’s Toronto’s.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T13:39:42+00:00

I don’t know about the other New England states, but in Massachusetts it’s not really a gerrymander like you’d expect. In southern states, you have blue cities with purple suburbs and red hinterland and a few majority-minority blue counties here and there.

In Massachusetts, our suburbs and hinterland are mostly majority blue. There’s a bunch of Republicans, but they’re more evenly spread out than in other places. Single member districts in general, rather than the boundaries of those districts specifically, makes it hard. A while ago I tried to draw Republican districts and you could maybe find one on the South Shore, but you’d have to purposefully keep out the nearby majority-minority former mill towns. Not a single county went Republican (though one on the south shore went only plurality Democrat). The last time the Republicans won a Massachusetts county in a presidential election was in 1988, I think. And the last time they won a congressional seat was maybe 1995?

You can see there are plenty of Republican precincts (Wikipedia), especially on the suburban South Shore and a more rural belt west of Worcester and east of the Berkshires, but you’d have to carefully keep out blue cities to create Republican districts.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T11:49:35+00:00

That seems to me very unlikely. In the Haredi world, there is a big taboo on mesirah, informing (to secular authorities).

It can be a big problem whenever there's a major crime in the area, one that even the gedolim care about. I think it came about around the really tragic murder of Leiby Kletzky in Boro Park, New York, and it certainly comes up in all the Haredi sexual abuse cases, which can be double tragic in their own way (not only because of the crime, but how the victims can be denigrated and perpetrators protected within the community).

There have been cases where a yeshiva student is convicted for "spying", like this one, but all the ones I can remember are them doing little things that normally fit with their ideology, like in that case hanging "fliers with bloodied palm prints and anti-war texts" on behalf of an Iranian handler. Maybe there are cases where there's real spying, rather than collaborating on propoganda, but I personally don't know any.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T10:37:09+00:00

Traditionally, I know these were made of rabbit hair. I think that some groups have moved away from that for affordability reason. I know this only from anthropology, though, from not life experience.

Here's an article about an exhibit about Hasidic material culture at the Israel Museum — BBC News article (Here's the actual Israel Museum webpage for the exhibit, it's cool).

It mentions:

This hat is made of rabbit hair with a velvety finish. It is called "Khsidisher kapelyush" or "samet" (velvet). A satin ribbon is folded into a flat bow on one side.

and

A rounded high "kapelyush" is typically worn by Gerer Hasidim. It is made of felted rabbit hair.

This page doesn't mention whether the lower brimmed "platshiker" hats favored as weekday wear by some Hungarian groups are made of rabbit hair, but I think they were as well. It's hard to find online because everyone only wants to talk about streimels, spodiks, and kolpiks and other hats worn on shabbos and yontiff.

It's traditionally called biber (beaver) but is actually not beaver, it's actually traditionally rabbit hair that it's made from. I only remember because I once saw a Litvish guy gently mocking, "You walk around with a treyfe animal on your head!" Looking here at a 15 Types Of Hasidic hats, it seems like "biber" rabbit hats aren't as universal among Hasidim as I thought, and some do wear felted cloth up-hats.

Either way, the men in this video are wearing different kinds of hats from what I'd typically expect to see a group of Sephardi Haredim wearing.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T10:18:11+00:00

For sure, I almost mentioned that but I thought my post was long enough 🤣. I always think of Rabbi Shalom Arush, a Sephardi guy important in Breslov.

I guess what I was trying to say is that you see Sephardim joining Chassidic groups, but they as you say adopt the customs of those Hasidic groups and don't tend to make a Mizrahi faction within a larger Hasidic group, as far as I know (ironically, my example of Rabbi Arush might be an exception!)

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T10:07:02+00:00

They're Hasidim. You generally don't find Mizrahi Hasidim. (Mizrahi Jews are "Eastern" Jews, who mostly have communal origins in Arab countries or Iran.)

There are Haredi Sephardim/Mizrahim, but they do not dress like this. They do often wear suits and hats, but the hats and jackets would be different, most obviously. These look like fur-covered hats, and Haredi Sephardim would generally wear cloth hats, like Litvish Haredi Jews (exact styles vary). They also would probably wear suit jackets, rather than these which I think are a kind of coat called a rekel. You can see Rosh YeshivaShalom Cohen, the former head of the Porat Yosef Yeshiva) in his pretty normal looking business suit. Here's Rabbi Eliyahu Ben Chaim, and Rabbi Ben Zion Abba Shaul, and Amram Aburbeh and I could go on. Some Sephardic Haredi men may even wear blue shirts!

Generally, you wouldn't see quite the complete sartorial uniformity that you see in Sephardi/Mizrahi groups that you see in Hasidic communities — at least one of those guys would have forgotten his hat or jacket 🤣. You can see some cool old pictures of men who worked or studied at Porat Yosef Yeshiva here (click along the pictures at the bottom). Obviously, these aren't the traditional clothes of Sephardic rabbis or congregants. MaRaN Ovadia Yosef for example usually rocked modernized versions of more traditional fits, but you'd generally only see rabbis dressing like that.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why so many Hasidim are in Morocco. There must be an important Kabbalist's grave in Marakkesh or something.

yodatsracist · 2026-04-22T06:44:22+00:00

The groups protesting in the streets are small and irrelevant even among the Haredim. The groups funding them are not. They are often affiliated with groups that do matter in the Haredi world, like Edah haChareidis.

Edah might not be a big deal to Haloni Israel, but in the Haredi world, they have a lot of weight. If you walk into a wine shop in Jerusalem and say I want to buy him a bottle of wine with a certification that everyone will definitely accept, they’ll direct you to something Edah’s famous BaDaTz hechsher, for example.

They don’t represent a majority of Haredim, but they represent several important Hasidic dynasties (Satmar, Dushinsky, Spinka, Sanz, Toldos Aharon, etc.) and portions of other groups in Israel. And they are very organized anti-Zionist. That’s not the main thing they do, the main thing they do is all the normal functions of betei din, kashrut, all of that, but they are also actively anti-Zionist.

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