CHICAGO — My days usually begin at 4 a.m. This leaves just enough time to shower, finish prepping for the day’s lessons, eat breakfast and scurry off to catch a bus so I can get to school early enough to make enough copies for my four classes. My lunch periods are spent with students I’ve »
We think a lot about legacy here. Surrounded by statues and buildings with hyphenated names, we think about how we might change this place forever, do what no one before us has done. We start cultural groups and non-profit organizations and run for elected office, striving to find validation in word processed letters thumbtacked to »
Here’s a confession: In my four years in the economics major, I hardly went to office hours. After freshman year seminars transitioned to a life of lectures and curves, I sunk into the routine of attending lecture and section, handing in problem sets, taking exams and kicking the dust off my shoes as quickly as »
The first time someone close to me passed away was a foreign experience. I was 7 and it was my mother’s father. I didn’t know whether to wear navy blue or black, so I wore both. I clung to the leg of my father’s pants as we stepped in and out of dark limos. My »
In my first foray into a life divided into semesters, I learned something that I’d like to believe many experience at the beginning of their Yale careers: I was not as good at math as I thought. I had taken BC calculus in high school, so I figured Math 115 shouldn’t have been too far »
This semester, I vowed to do all of the things I planned to do before Yale happened — before classes, rehearsals and papers clouded my vision and looming deadlines screamed: You should use that time to read instead! “Jane Eyre” is a mighty long book, and you haven’t even gotten to the part with the »
I expect many things during the first weeks of the semester: the sensory deluge of Camp Yale, the chaos of shopping period, the feeling of inadequacy at the mention of my classmates’ summer adventures. I expect to be rejected from some seminars, accepted into others, to awkwardly scurry in and out of classes I never »
At the beginning of the semester, I was a woman on a mission. I resolved that by May, I would have everything figured out: My major(s) would be decided, my study-abroad plans settled and my GPA reminiscent of high-school glory days. Instead of sticking to the standard name-year-college-major introduction during the first seminars and sections »
I have shared a bedroom with another person on two occasions in my life. The first was when I shared a room with my older brother, an arrangement that ended before my fifth birthday. The decision to part ways was my brother’s. He did not especially appreciate that, as a wee bairn, instead of counting »
At 2:30 p.m. on Friday, March 7, 2008, the final day before spring break, I walked out of Connecticut Hall and things were looking up. As I took a nostalgic look around Old Campus, there was a spring in my step; I waved to some familiar Stiles frosh heading towards Phelps Gate with suitcases in »
Let’s rewind back to second semester freshman year. One-eighth of my undergraduate career was behind me, and I lived to tell the tale. A new semester was beginning, however; and the seasons changed in suit — a wave of unanticipated frigidness encroached upon me. I don’t mean this metaphorically — it got mad cold. Before »
First semester freshman year, I lived the dream: no classes before 11:30, no classes on Friday and two classes a day Monday through Thursday with ample time between them to rollick in a luxurious, full-length meal before gaily traipsing to my second and final academic gathering of the day. The following semester, karma and distributional »
