Author Archives: Rachel Dempsey

By Rachel Dempsey StaFF REPORTER Muhammad Ali’s daughter Miya, dressed in an orange vest with the word GOAT written across the back in white, stood just inside the entrance to the Yale Bookstore, greeting Yale students and other customers as they entered the building. Some people walked past her quickly, avoiding eye contact, while others »

When Mariana Sorensen ’77 was a sophomore at Yale, she and her friends ate breakfast with a group of senior boys every morning in the Davenport dining hall. Most people would leave after they finished their meal, Sorensen said, but she often found herself remaining at the table for hours, in conversation with a certain »

When students start picking classes for next semester, they can use online evaluations and shopping period to identify boring or inaccessible professors before they register. But as most Yalies know, there is almost no way to screen their teaching fellows, who can make or break a course as much as the professor. The University does »

In most ways, Ava Suntoke is like any other student in her Elementary Italian class. She does her homework every night and struggles with her limited vocabulary during class discussions. She studies for tests and quizzes and is disappointed when she does badly. But unlike her 18-year old classmates, Suntoke graduated from college three decades »

After winter break, Marisa Reisman ’08 will return to campus in January along with the rest of the Yale student body. But unlike most of her peers, she will not be shopping for classes. Instead, she said, she plans to spend several weeks tying up loose ends for her many extracurricular activities before she leaves »

The university that produced the past three U.S. presidents may not be so political after all — at least when it comes to the state of Connecticut. In a poll of approximately 350 Yale undergraduates conducted this week by the News, 86 percent of the student body said they were “somewhat” or “very” interested in »

When Jeffrey Zuckerman ’10 gets a call on his cell phone, it is almost always a wrong number. On the rare occasion that the caller is a friend, he tells them to send a text message instead and hangs up. Zuckerman, one of three deaf undergraduates at Yale, cannot understand speech over a cell phone »

For the last month, Emaan Ammar ’09 has woken up at around 5 a.m. to the sound of her alarm clock. In the half-hour before dawn, she eats a breakfast of oatmeal or cereal and drinks some water — a meal called Suhoor that will be her last until sunset. As the sun comes up, »

For years, the quotation “The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings” was attributed to sportscaster Dan Cook. Then Fred Shapiro, associate librarian for collections and access services at the Yale Law School, came on the scene, and — using extensive online databases and newspaper archives — traced the saying back to Ralph Carpenter, »

As a child Samshad Sheikh aspired to be a nun in a convent, but her Muslim faith eventually led her instead to Yale, where she is serving as one of the two new associate university chaplains who started work this August. Sheikh, the first Muslim chaplain in Yale’s history, will concentrate on Yale’s multifaith community, »

The first of two Yale Law School discussion panels on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy met on Thursday, with guests including a former Judge Advocate General for the Navy who was involved in the drafting of the controversial policy prohibiting openly gay or lesbian people from serving in the military. The panel convened »

Rebecca Fabbro ’09 wanted to take a course in African history after years of studying the history of Western countries, but when she opened the Blue Book this semester, she was surprised to find “essentially nothing” that fit the bill, she said. “There were [approximately] 10 courses on … lesbian and gay history, and so »