Author Archives: Gillian Gillers

Handsome, 6’3 and clad in jeans, cowboy boots and a purple dress shirt, Scott Kleeb GRD ’01 ’03 strode onto Yale’s campus last week to talk about his congressional campaign. In his six years as a graduate student, Kleeb, 30, inspired admiration from students and professors alike. He won a prize for his overall performance »

Her blank face looked up, confused: No, fourth-grader Amarilis Villa said, she did not know what No Child Left Behind meant. She did not know that her school, Hill Central Music Academy, had been labeled “in need of improvement” under that federal law for four consecutive years. Villa knew only that she had to take »

Hannah Burnett’s ’08 house in Ocean Springs, Miss. is gone. Gone are the sets of classic books that Burnett’s father read to her when she was young. Gone are Burnett’s paintings that hung on the walls, the rosebushes in her backyard, and the big windows that looked onto the harbor. Burnett’s home was destroyed Monday, »

High school teacher Lorraine Dotts put butterfly stickers on her classroom door to represent this year’s theme: metamorphosis. Dotts wants students to change. She wants them to get better grades, increase their attendance, and improve their attitude. Dotts teaches science at Cross Annex, a program connected to Wilbur Cross, the largest public high school in »

Jason Ray ’06 has no trouble staying active on Wednesdays, even though he has only one class. A theater studies major from Glennville, Ga, Ray acts in three or four theater productions a year, holds two part-time jobs and sings in the Yale Gospel Choir. This Davenport student just finished playing the lead in a »

Joslyn Woodard ’06, a native of Irvine, Calif., lives off-campus but is affiliated with Trumbull College. A sprinter and jumper on the women’s track team, Woodard won honors as the top female athlete at the Indoor Ivy League Championship this year. Woodard, a biology major, is also the president of Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach, »

Chad Kritzberger ’06, an outdoorsman and a devout Catholic from Hudson, Ohio, has spent the past several weeks cramming for the MCAT this Saturday so he can attend medical school. When he is not studying, this Pierson College molecular, cellular and developmental biology major attends mass, goes to the gym, works in a lab and »

Julie Gonzales ’05 is about to graduate, but this Texan, a member of Silliman College and a double-major in history and in ethnicity, race and migration, has not slowed down yet. A member of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan at Yale, or MEChA, and the Undergraduate Organizing Committee, Gonzales is hoping to eventually go »

With plastic bags tied around his legs and feet to keep them dry, Noah Bate crinkled as he bolted out the door of Wilbur Cross High School, hopped on his bike and sped toward Yale’s campus in the rain. Within minutes of finishing a high school exam, Bate took his seat in a Yale intermediate »

Elementary school teacher Christine Chen knew that she and her husband, a Yale graduate student, would keep shotguns in the house once they moved out of University housing. She wanted to know how they worked. Yanping Li GRD ’08 spent one month training for the military in China. But she fired only five shots there, »

This article has been corrected. You may view this article’s correction here. Zoe Palitz ’05 took a break from chanting and singing to take her History of Music midterm. Two other students left the action to get treated for frostbite at University Health Services. But apart from brief breaks, these stalwarts and about 30 of »

When Dale Herbeck was in college and was “hot for a girl,” he would make her a mixed tape using his collection of tapes and records. Today, Herbeck can download music from the Internet and burn CDs for the target of his affection. “Boom! You can have the songs you want, the quality you want,” »