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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Everyone here is very modest, but when you ask them about their lives, they’ll tell you how they discovered a method for dating crocodile teeth, or published a book of poetry, or something else you can hardly imagine or believe. I want to be a senator. I think it’s atrocious that no one believes in the political system, and that most people are cynical about American democracy in general. I want to be part of changing this, because I really do believe in the ideals this country was founded on. The American Presidency is definitely my favorite class. Spanish is my least favorite, but only because it is an 8:20 a.m. class.
I was in the Peace Corps in Senegal, and I’ve since worked for NGOs dealing with transportation and hunger issues. I want to adapt private sector efficiency models for NGOs, and I knew that Yale’s MBA program was one of the best for development work. I enjoy being with people who think in a different way—I don’t think there’s not enough dialogue between the private and public sectors. After Yale, I want to do something that uses information and communication technologies to increase peoples' possibilities. I love West Africa, and I’ll be really surprised if I never live there again.
My first Yale experience was FOOT, the freshman outdoor orientation trip, which was insane. We backpacked and slept under tarps for six days before showing up on move-in day smelly and dirty. But the experience was amazing! I’m still friends with the freshmen on my trip, and we hold regular reunions. I’m not sure, but I think I might want to pursue a career in medicine. I’ve heard so many good things about so many professors, there’s no way I’ll be able to take all the classes I want to before I graduate.
This year, all 78 of us in the program are eating and breathing nursing. We are all in the same classes together every day, the whole group, together, always. Thankfully, we like each other. The nurse-midwives are an especially tight-knit group. Maybe because our chosen field revolves around the idea of relating to women, empowering women, and caring for women, this same idea has somehow translated into eating and partying with women. I was dancing at GPSCY and a girl came over and asked if I was a nursing student. I said yes, and asked her how she knew. She said she could tell by the way I was dancing. It’s exhilarating being around other art students all the time. That's one of the main reasons I wanted to come back to school. A lot of us got into art as kids and never got out of it. But one thing we’ve realized is that if you want to be a thoughtful artist, you have to come to terms with painting as something more than something fun to do or something you’re good at. So it’s beyond “Oh, I love this!” for the people here. A lot of people are making sacrifices to be here and work amazingly hard.
At home my family calls me Hai, but all my friends call me Angela. Hai means “sea” or “ocean” in Chinese. My grandma named me with hopes that I could grow up to be generous and achieve something meaningful in my life. I will be working in the tissue engineering field, in which we try to regenerate, recover, or repair tissues through stem cells, drug delivery, mechanic stimulation, or other approaches. My ultimate goal, at this point, is to get my PhD degree and be able to wear the glamorous graduation gown!
It’s a beautiful thing, computer science, and there’s some wonderful stuff going on here with social robotics. Yale is creating robots that learn from humans in a social setting. People here are wittier than people I’ve met anywhere else, and more considerate. Dining hall talk is interrupted by “I’m going to get some dessert, can I bring you guys anything?”
I attended high school in Singapore. It’s 12 hours ahead of New Haven in terms of time difference. But the striking similarity is how fast-paced both places are. I don’t really think there is that much culture shock, given the way American culture permeates the world. So far I’ve been enjoying all my classes, especially literature and introduction to psychology, because I've never taken courses in these fields before.
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