Stanford

About it:
One of the best universities of the U.S.A, with highlights in the science area and in the sports area.

General data:

• Motto: Die Luft der Freiheit weht (The wind of freedom blows)
• Type: Private
• President: John L. Hennessy

Location:
Stanford, CA, U.S.

Foundation:
1891

Founders:
Leland Stanford.

Highlights:

• It alumni have founded some companies like Google, HP, Eletronic Arts, Nvidia and Yahoo!
• Stanford enrolls approximately 6,800 undergraduate and 8,300 graduate students from the United States and around the world.
• Stanford's athletic program has won the NACDA Directors' Cup each of the past fifteen years.
• 16 Nobel Prize laureates.
• If Stanford were a country, would take the seventh position in the medal of the Olympics 1996.

Famous alumni:
Tiger Woods; Jennifer Connelly; Vinton Cerf; Sergey Brin; Lawrence Page; and several American athletes.

Curious facts:

• Fraternities and sororities have been active on the Stanford campus since 1891, when the University first opened. In 1944, University President Donald Tresidder banned all Stanford sororities due to extreme competition.
• Stanford is now home to 28 Greek organizations, including 12 sororities and 16 fraternities, representing 13% of undergraduates. In contrast to many universities, nine of the ten housed Greek organizations have houses on University-owned land, the exception being Sigma Chi, which owns its own house on The Row.
• On most Thursdays during the school year, seniors gather at a bar in Palo Alto or San Francisco. The location rotates week to week, and chartered buses are organized to take the seniors safely between the bar and campus.
• During Winter quarter dead week, Stanford faculty serves breakfast to students in several locations on campus (you might see a vice-provost refilling orange juice, etc.).

Classification:
It is usually elected from the second or sixth best university in the world.

Benefits for the Student:
One of the best sports programs in the world, in addition to fraternities.

Princeton

General data:
It is the university that invests most in students. In 2008, 1.8 million dollars per student! This money comes with a draconian code of honor: the evidence does not have a teacher watching. Each student signs a contract where they agree not to paste. Broke the contract is expelled. A student expelled from Princeton is not accepted in any other university in the United States.


Location:
Princeton ,USA


Foundation:
Established as College of New Jersey in 1746

Highlighted courses:
Mathematics, physics and astronomy, economics, history and philosophy.


Highlights:

• Princeton is among the world's richest university with an endowment of just over eleven billion dollars (the fourth largest in the world), supported by continuous donations from its alumni and maintained by investment advisers
• One of the actually teacher's are John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner.
• Princeton is well known for its men's and women's crews, which have won several NCAA and Eastern Sprints titles in recent years.

Famous alumni:
James Madison; Woodrow Wilson; John F. Kennedy; Michelle Obama;

Curious facts:

• A teacher is a mathematician and Nobel laureate John Nash, the film biography A Beautiful Mind.
• An athletic competition between freshmen and sophomores that is held in the fall. The event centers on cane wrestling, where a freshman and a sophomore will grapple for control of a cane. This commemorates a historic freshman uprising against a university tradition that only sophomores and upperclassmen were permitted to carry canes, in which freshman attempted to rob sophomores of their canes in defiance of the rule.
• The midnight before Dean's Date, students from Holder Hall and elsewhere gather in the Holder courtyard and take part in a minute-long, communal primal scream to vent frustration from studying with impromptu, late night noise making.
• Nude Olympics - Annual nude and partially nude frolic in Holder Courtyard that takes place during the first snow of the winter. Started in the early 1970s, the Nude Olympics went co-ed in 1979 and gained much notoriety with the American press. For safety reasons, the administration banned the Olympics in 2000 to the chagrin of students.

Classification:
From 2001 to 2008, Princeton University was ranked first among national universities by U.S. News & World Report (USNWR).After one year at second place in 2009, Princeton returned to the number one spot in 2010, sharing that honor with Harvard University.After one year at second place in 2009, Princeton returned to the number one spot in 2010, sharing that honor with Harvard University.

Benefits for the Student:
A good marriage between fun and study make the Princeton is a good place for anyone wanting a good education, but without having to sacrifice everything else.

Cambridge

About it:
One of the better universities in the world, is the second oldest university in England and the fourth oldest in Europe.In homage to its educational excellence, Cambridge became a city that is home to Harvard University in the United States - were the pioneers of Harvard alumni of Cambridge.


General data:

• Motto: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra (Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts Non-literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge)
• Type: Public
• Chancellor: HRH The Duke of Edinburgh

Location:
Cambridge, England, UK.

Foundation:
1209.

Founders:
Scholars leaving Oxford.

Highlights:

• The Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was competitive and helped produce some of the most famous names in British science, including James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and Lord Rayleigh.
• Many of the most important scientific discoveries and revolutions were made by Cambridge alumni.
• affiliates of the University of Cambridge have won between 84 and 87 Nobel prizes, more than any other institution according to some counts.  
• The webcam was also invented at Cambridge University, somewhat infamously, as a means for scientists to avoid interrupting their research and going all the way down the to the laboratory dining room only to be disappointed by an empty coffee pot.

Famous alumni:
Sir Isaac Newton; Sir Francis Bacon; Charles Darwin; Niels Bohr; J.J. Thompson; Stephen Hawking; Willian Fox Talbot; Alfred Marshall; Emma Thompson; Rachel Weisz; Sacha Baron Cohen;

Curious facts:

• Some of the names of places in Cambridge are very strange to an outsider ( for example a park called Christ's Pieces).
• Is the second oldest university in England.

Classification:
Always is in the list of the 10 best universities in the world.

Benefits for the Student:
Cambridge is the university where many of the gretest mathematical of the history have studed, and is one of the most respect universities in the world.

Harvard

About it:
One of the bests universitys in the world, with the most highlighted courses of the U.S.A.

General data:

• Motto: Veritas (Truth)
• Type: Private
• President: Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust

Location:
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A

Foundation:
1636

Founders:
Colonial Massachusetts legislature.

Highlighted courses:
All of the Harvard courses are very disputed.

Highlights:

• Seven U.S.A Presidents come from Harvard.
• 75 Nobel Prize are from people that is afiliated with the university.
  

Famous alumni:
George W. Bush; Barack Obama; John F. Kennedy; Al Gore; Conan O'Brien; Natalie Portman; 

Curious facts:

• The Harvard University Library System is centered in Windener Library in Harvard Yard and comprises over 80 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes.According to the American Library Association, this makes it the largest academic library in the United States.
• Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university. Since 1974, 19 Nobel Prize winners and 15 winners of the American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have served on the Harvard faculty.
• Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax each fall in their annual football meeting, which dates back to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game.
• Since the filming of Love Story in the 1960s the university, until the summer of 2007 filming of The Great Debaters did not allow any movies to be filmed in campus buildings; most films are shot in look-alike cities, such as Toronto, and colleges such as UCLA, Wheaton and Bridgewater State, although outdoor and aerial shots of Harvard's Cambridge campus are often used.

Classification:
First place, in the most of the ranks.

Benefits for the Student:
One of the best universities in the world, Harvard is without doubt, itself the greatest benefit for the student.

Oxford

About it:Oxford was founded 842 years! For the oldest English-language universities in the world have spent four kings of England, 25 British prime ministers and even a pope. The institution is traditional. So much so that one of its colleges, St. Hilda's College, until now only accepts enrollments of women! The academic year at Oxford is divided into three periods of eight weeks.


General data:

• Type: Public
• Motto: Dominus Illuminatio Mea (The Lord is my Light)
• Chancellor The Rt. Hon. Lord Patten of Barnes

Location:
Oxford, England.

Foundation:
1167.Oxford was founded 842 years.


Founders:
Unknow.

Famous alumni:
Four kings of England; 25 British prime ministers; Bill Clinton; Lewis Carrol; Oscar Wilde; C.S. Lewis; J.R.R Tolkien; Adam Smith; John Locke; 

Curious facts:

• Oxford, is the oldest surviving university in the English-speaking world.
• Doing the math, they are 24 weeks of classroom and 28 weeks of vacation
• The Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, is the oldest museum in the UK, and the oldest university museum in the world.It holds significant collections of art and archaeology, including works by Michelangelo,Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, and Picasso, as well as treasures such as the Scorpion Macehead, the Parian Marble and the Alfred Jewel.

Classification:
Fourth best university in some of the lists, but is also said that Oxford is the best university in the Europe.


Benefits for the Student:
Undergraduate teaching is centered on the tutorial, where 1-4 students spend an hour with an academic discussing their week’s work, usually an essay (humanities, most social sciences, some mathematical, physical, and life sciences) or problem sheet (most mathematical, physical, and life sciences, and some social sciences). Students usually have one or two tutorials a week, and can be taught by academics at any other college - not just their own - as expertise and personnel requires. These tutorials are complemented by lectures, classes and seminars, which are organised on a departmental basis. Graduate students undertaking taught degrees are usually instructed through classes and seminars, though there is more focus upon individual research.