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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. |
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As this issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine reaches its alumni subscribers, 13,167 high school seniors will be checking the mail for responses to their applications to one day join those graduate ranks. As reported elsewhere in this magazine, the number of applicants to Yale was up 10 percent over last year, setting an all-time record. This should not surprise many Yale loyalists, but some may wonder how the students who are already at Yale feel about their experience and the institution in which it is taking place. In search of clues, we asked four freshmen what they think of their “personal” Yales. No selection from among the 1,297 students who make up the Class of 2002 could be comprehensive. Indeed, since our sources on the candidates were the residential college deans, there was little chance we would find many malcontents. But we also asked to be spared conspicuous boosterism. By virtue of their backgrounds and interests these four representatives provide at least a suggestion of what is uppermost in Yale freshman minds in 1999. Not surprisingly, for people who were admitted to the College in part for their ability to reason critically, not all the responses are unreservedly upbeat. But whatever the complaints—over racial graffiti, teaching assistants, alcohol at parties, or the anxieties of city life—the underlying sentiment is remarkably consistent. In brief, it seems to be continued engagement by highly intelligent and motivated young people in the world around them.
Brandon Smith I was born with music in my blood,” says Brandon A. Smith. A freshman in Ezra Stiles who first sat down at a piano when he was 4, Smith has subsequently carved out quite a career in both jazz and rhythm and blues on the West Coast, and the talented musician continues those pursuits in New Haven. Smith, who grew up in Los Angeles, was not worried about finding suitable instruments at Yale—his favorites are in Hendrie Hall—but after he discovered racial slurs scrawled on the wall of a men’s room in the Sterling Memorial Library, the pianist, whose father is black and mother is white, began to worry about something else: acceptance. “In high school I felt pressured to fit in, but I came here to be friends with whomever,” says Smith, adding that his initial anxieties quickly proved groundless. “You find this stuff everywhere, but no one I’ve met is like that. Despite the graffiti, Yale seems to genuinely accept diversity.” The freshman has already experienced the benefits of the University’s commitment to being more inclusive. “One of my roommates is from Pakistan, and he’s teaching me to speak Urdu,” says Smith, who is leaning towards a dual major in urban studies and music, and has his sights set on writing and recording songs—or maybe urban planning. “Yale’s diversity is helping me get out into the rest of the world.” Smith has certainly gotten out into the musical world. At the Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences, a private high school in Santa Monica, Smith played piano in the school’s elite jazz band, a group that routinely did well in the International Jazz Festival competitions in Reno, Nevada. Then there was his gig for the past three summers as a keyboardist with the group that backed his father, Brenton Wood, a rhythm and blues singer and writer who had a hit in the 1960s with the song, “Gimme Little Sign,” and remains a popular performer on the West Coast. The younger musician is not in a band at Yale, but can often be found jamming with friends in a suite of rooms known as “the Lair” or engaging in such time-honored pursuits as talking about the future and complaining about the food. There’s also a demanding academic load. Smith, who in high school took Latin and Greek, as well as a two-year course in the Great Books, is in Directed Studies, the College’s program for highly motivated freshmen seeking an integrated intellectual experience in the humanities. The program, which features small, seminar-type classes taught by some of Yale’s best faculty members, also operates in a familiar style. “At Crossroads, I had plenty of opportunity to just talk with my teachers,” says Smith, noting that in DS—as well as in courses in Latin, history, political science, and music and technology—he’s been able to get close to his instructors. “While it’s great to have real professors, it was also a little intimidating at first.” Smith has managed to overcome this and the other challenges that freshman year has presented, and he has settled nicely into his new home. At the piano as he improvises on tunes by musicians as different as jazzman John Coltrane and rhythm and blues diva Gladys Knight, Smith picks out a recurrent theme. “I’m trying to synthesize, to formulate my own style,” he says.
Caitlin
Bair When Caitlan Bair, a freshman from rural Clarksville, Maryland, arrived in New Haven, she didn’t have to worry about feeling alone in her new surroundings. “From the moment I stepped onto campus, I was connected to my teammates,” says Bair, a 5'9” guard who, until a knee injury ended her season, was one of the brightest spots of what became a disappointing, 10-16 women’s basketball campaign. “I had the ten older players on the team to guide me, we had a common theme and goal in our lives. And, since we were together five hours a day, we all formed pretty strong bonds with one another.” At some universities, this natural tendency often leads to a kind of voluntary (or, in the case of athletic dorms, involuntary) segregation, as well as to a “jockocracy” in which star athletes are afforded special status. Bair hasn’t seen either among her peers at Yale. “None of my roommates in Timothy Dwight are athletes, and I have many friends who are not basketball players,” she says. To be sure, there is a recognition factor that comes with the territory. Because of regular coverage on the sports pages of the Daily News,”everyone in TD knows my name,” says Bair. But her athletic prowess, however well chronicled, doesn’t give her any advantages in the classroom. “I don’t feel I’ve been treated any differently than anyone else,” she explains. “Besides, at Yale, everyone is very good at something—basketball just happens to be it for me.” Actually, in high school, where she was president of her class, soccer was her main sport. Bair’s team won the state championship, and she was an all-state center-forward; by contrast, her basketball squad “was horrible,” she admits. But because the seasons of the two sports overlapped, Bair had to make a choice, just as she was forced to do when the necessity of pursuing advanced placement courses made it impossible to play the French horn. “I enjoy getting my hands on everything, but to be an impact player and be truly excellent, you have to focus your energy,” she says. At Yale, Bair has managed to reserve plenty of energy for her classes—including multivariable calculus, computer programming, and economics—and for her work in student government on the freshman college council. “I’m a problem-solver by nature,” she explains, as she describes the challenging regimen of physical therapy she’ll have to master after surgeons repair her damaged knee ligaments. She’s determined to be back with the team next fall. “You run down the court. bam, bam, bam. you shoot. swish. it’s so good! Why can’t that happen every time?” Bair wonders, replaying a special scene. “You’re always looking for the magic. That and my teammates make it easy to find the motivation to get into the game.”
Chris
Herbert Chris Herbert and Yale chose each other by Early Decision, and Herbert thought he knew what he was in for when he arrived last fall. “I expected it to be a place where I couldn’t quite manage my time,” he recalls, “a place where I would not know even one-twentieth of the people, where I’d have to work hard and like it a whole lot—in other words, a lot better than high school.” Herbert, who was raised in Weston, Connecticut, and attended public high school there, says the College has met his expectations, but that it has left him up in the air about his future plans. “When I got here, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professional musician,” he says. “I’m not so sure I do anymore.” Not that he has abandoned his interest in music: Herbert plays viola in the Yale Symphony and in a string quartet, and he rushed singing groups last fall and was tapped by the Alley Cats. He is also doing operatic scenes with the Yale Opera. “I didn’t really know I was an opera singer,” he says. “But I guess I am.” But it’s academics that have occupied the largest share of Herbert’s time and attention. He found his first semester daunting because “you have to think here. In high school it was a lot of busy work, and I pretty much relied on my reputation. Here I’ve had to think critically and come to original conclusions.” While Herbert says he has found his professors accessible and responsive, he has found the role of teaching assistants to be greater than he had been led to believe. “The professor gives the lectures, but the TA is the one that’s grading you,” he says. In a fall lecture course, Herbert received a lower grade than he felt he deserved because, he says, “the TA just didn’t like me.” The experience taught Herbert to try out different discussion sections for a given course. “I shopped sections this time, and it worked,” he says. “But I also think professors should pay more attention to TA evaluations, and that students should be more frank in writing them.” Outside class, Herbert has enjoyed bonding with his fellow Branford freshmen, but much of his social life revolves around rehearsing, performing, and touring with his singing group. “The Alley Cats are my best friends at Yale, and the people I spend the most time with,” he says. But he says he is not altogether comfortable with the drinking that is often part of singing-group culture. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t do drugs,” he says. “I just don’t like not being in control of my senses.” He says his friends respect his choice, but that “when they start losing it, it gets a little annoying. But there are always some other people who stay sober you can talk to.” Both Herbert’s Branford friends and the Alley Cats tend to be ethnically and geographically diverse. “I’ll be sitting at lunch, and I’ll look around and realize one person at the table is from Texas, another is from Hong Kong, another is from New York, and everyone’s a different race,” he says. “Coming from where I come from, that’s just amazing.” Herbert is convinced that his early decision was the right one. “You look at the buildings and the people here, and it’s really staggering at times,” he says. “I really would not be anywhere else.”
Anna
Swanson It’s never easy to leave home, especially when home is a tropical paradise. Freshman Anna Swanson recalls the day she left her home in suburban Honolulu for Yale: “At the airport in Hawaii, I started to cry. I got over it about an hour into the flight. I was fine on the limo, but then I got to my room in Silliman and cried again. My roommates were already there and settled in, and it was kind of overwhelming.” Swanson was also unsure if she liked her new home. “I had always dreamed of going somewhere with an enclosed residential campus,” she explains. “I knew Yale was an urban campus, and I was afraid that it wouldn’t have a sense of community, but when it came down to it, I wanted to go to Yale, and whatever Yale was, that was okay.” Swanson quickly saw that the sense of community didn’t suffer as a result of being in a city, but that wasn’t her only cause for anxiety. “I had to get past my fears of New Haven from what I had heard,” she says. “For the first three or four days I was too scared to walk anywhere after dark, but all the organization meetings I wanted to go to were at night. Finally, a sophomore told me I was being completely silly, and I started going out. I just learned to tag along with other groups and stick to lighted areas.” But did the murder of Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin last December (“Light & Verity,” Feb.) give her renewed cause to question her safety? “No, not really,” says Swanson. “Now I’m out until one in the morning sometimes and I feel safe. There are a lot of other people out.” Having come to Yale with the dream of becoming an actress, Swanson has plunged into the College’s theater scene, appearing in an original one-act play and a Children’s Theater adaptation of a Judy Blume novel. She is also an active member of the Yale Film Society, spending her weekend nights working at the Society’s screenings and another two or three hours a week working on press releases and other business. Despite her active participation in extracurricular activities, Swanson says that she has found her closest friends in Silliman. “The people I hang out with on a daily basis are in the College,” she says. Her group goes out to dinner together, to movies at York Square, or to dances at the Afro-American Cultural Center. So far, none of her group is “in a solid relationship"; while she says some people “hook up” occasionally, dating is a “dead sector” for her right now. While some of her friends drink, she doesn’t. Academically, Swanson has adjusted well to Yale from her large public high school. “I was surprised that it’s not as hard as I thought it would be,” she says. She has taken a fairly typical selection of freshman courses, with the exception of the year-long introduction to theater studies and an introductory Korean course. (Her mother is a native of Korea.) But she'd like to see some other options available. “I’m all for learning the classics,” she says, “but I do wish there were more practical things, like journalism classes.” One adjustment Swanson has not made easily is to New England weather. She enjoyed her first real autumn, but has little good to say about the winter, which sent her out to buy coats, sweaters, and snow gear for the first time. “The snow is nice when it’s coming down,” she says, “but it’s too cold here. I’m just waiting for spring to come.” |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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