Didn’t Get Tapped for a Society? Here Are Six Other Exclusive, Terrible Organizations to Rush Next Year
Everyone knows that Yale’s secret society system is an elitist, exclusionary anachronism, but that doesn’t make it any easier when you get passed over on tap night. Thankfully, your good buddies at the News are here to help: If you didn’t get tapped for a society last night, we’ve prepared a helpful list of other groups where you can spend your Thursday and Sunday nights being insanely snobby and unwelcoming!
1) Mar-a-Lago: Look at it this way: If you’re going to be spending your senior year paying an exorbitant fee to spend a lot of time in a heavily guarded compound, hobnob with minor celebrities and make your community substantially worse, you might as well do it in sunny Florida instead of cloudy Connecticut, right?
2) Whatever the hell Jeremy’s startup is: You know Jeremy? Jeremy from down the hall, with the hair? Yeah, so he’s got this startup he’s working on, and it’s straight-up baffling. He keeps saying that it’s going to be “Twitter for politics,” but isn’t that, like, what Twitter already is? Plus, he keeps bragging about how he doesn’t even own a computer, and that can’t be good for someone looking to start a website. Point is, sometimes when he’s taking a break from prattling on about Aristotle he’ll mention that he’s looking for “executive-class investors” who’d be willing to pay $18,000 per semester to drink room-temperature beer while you listen to him ramble interminably about the “internet of philosophies.” Now that’s a senior society replacement if I’ve ever seen one.
3) The crew of a commercial whaling vessel: This one might be a bit of a controversial choice, seeing as you might actually end up gaining money from this, but stick with us: a commercial whaling vessel’s crew is a society of scholars, a company of friends and, more often than not, basically just a group of self-centered men who yell incoherently about transcendentalism while they destroy entire ecosystems and try to brutally murder a sensitive, intelligent creature. And don’t worry: What with the intense group bonding that isolation and danger at sea causes, they’re plenty exclusionary and elitist, too!
4) The DiNatale crime family: This one’s a great option for people who are concerned about the Yale bubble: Instead of just scamming your fellow Yalies out of their hard-earned money, you can scam the whole metropolitan area! Plus, if you’re into hurting your community through physical violence, there’s a whole lot more kneecapping deadbeat Irishmen when you’re hanging with the DiNatales than if you’re in, like, Desmos.
5) The Lutheran Church–Wisconsin Synod: If what you really want out of your senior year at Yale is a group of people to have a good time with, and if your definition of having a good time includes being a jerk and spending all your time on pretentious, esoteric discussions with little to no regard for what’s happening outside your infinitesimal bubble, then this breakaway antifeminist sect of Lutheranism might be for you! It’s a long-term commitment, but that just means you’ll have more time to meditate on the precise distinctions between God’s law and God’s word, women’s inherently sinful nature and the hard-line conservatism that your idiosyncratic reading of the Bible demands.
6) Harvard: Admittedly, this club (technically an “elite private university”) is located a couple of hours outside of New Haven, but it’s still the gold standard in organizations for people who don’t think that Yale is prestigious, expensive or elitist enough. Apply today!
Micah Osler | micah.osler@yale.edu
Correction, May 3: In a previous version of this column, the author mistakenly referred to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in #5, when he intended to refer to the Lutheran Church–Wisconsin Synod.