Caroline Sydney
Staff Columnist
Author Archive
SYDNEY: The Yale I love

Five years ago I had to answer, “Why Yale?” In my application, I wrote about the things I thought would matter most to me here — the peer group, the proximity to New York, the loom in the Morse basement (I since learned that only students in Morse have access). In my final column for the News, I’d like to revisit that question.

SYDNEY: Masters of joy

This year I’ve worked with two professors in the late stages of their teaching careers, and, because they have each dedicated their entire careers to teaching, their lives as well.

SYDNEY: Find your friends

In my freshman year suite, I had a bay window with a built in seat that faced the Silliman courtyard. Because it was so nice to open the windows and we attempted to produce drinkable vodka sodas with freshman-year-quality vodka, for at least the duration of Camp Yale, we were able to establish ourselves as “the girls’ party suite” — a designation that we lost almost as soon as classes began and “the boys’ party suite” achieved their hegemony. It was the period when hardly anyone knew anyone and the people who drifted through my suite knew each other through either FOOT, Harvest, high school, across the hall, Toads — or not at all.

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SYDNEY: On collective memory

Some say that GHeav, the concept, is kept alive among the ranks of FroCos, but I have little faith that FroCos will be able to protect this nomenclature forever. One day, the generation raised on Natty G will be FroCos.

SYDNEY: Breaking up with the banks

The air is thick with arguments for shrinking the size of the financial sector.

SYDNEY: Electric feel

"You look like one of the more uncomfortable people at this party,” I was told on New Year’s Eve by a boy I half-knew in high school.

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SYDNEY: On vacation productivity

The to-do lists and schedules I make for vacations are meticulous and glow with a sense of achievability. Each day is carefully divided between exercise, […]

SYDNEY: Incomplete spaces

In my poetry seminar last Thursday, we read two recent books by the African-American poet Claudia Rankine. She writes from a place of grace, strength, pain and experience. That afternoon at that table in LC, her voice on the page was the only black voice in the room. We did not address this as a class.

SYDNEY: Closer to comfort

When I was a freshman, a certain sort of senior girl existed within a completely inscrutable realm.

SYDNEY: Me, myselves and I

A number of anxieties may arise when one considers the multiverse. Personally, I wonder whether or not I am the smartest, most accomplished, happiest version of myself.

SYDNEY: A day apart

It’s so much easier to avoid religious observances than to wrestle them into an existing approach to life structured on secular ideals.