It’s hard to remember everything you need for the big move to Yale, and you’re bound to forget something or other at home. Worry not! As someone who managed to forget every single important possession for my first year, I’m here to remind you of the essentials. Here’s what you should make sure to bring along:

A Fan

This is not a joke. Your life might literally depend on this.

What they don’t tell you about New Haven is that, for the first week of the semester, it’s the same temperature as the Seventh Circle of Hell. 

Buy the most expensive, heavy-duty fan available. It won’t actually help, of course. Nothing can. But as you lay on top of your blanket at night, your whole body dripping with sweat even though the fan is blasting directly into your face, you’ll have the comfort of knowing that you tried to avoid this, at least.

A Mattress Pad

Yale sustainably sources their mattresses from local quarries. Charming as this may be, if you want to avoid chronic back pain, it’s worth investing in some extra cushioning.

A Copy of War and Peace, or Some Equally Pretentious Garbage

You don’t actually have to read this. All you have to do is display it in your common room in a way that looks like it was just left there by accident, and then enjoy the clout. 

There’s around a 50 percent chance that any guest you have over will make some remark about it. They might say they loved reading it. Don’t worry. They’re also lying.

Ignore this if you’re a DS student. You’re trying too hard already.

Shower Shoes

Since Yale was built, its showers have been unofficially co-opted by the biology department to experiment with the growth of strange new life forms. It’s been a smashing success –– the floors are perpetually coated with an odorous, beige substance, otherwise unbeknownst to the world.

It would be quite rude to disrupt this experiment that has been 200 years in the making with your bare feet. Bring along some shower shoes so the growth of these novel molds and fungi can continue to grow undisturbed.

An Unresolved High School Romance

This is just to spice things up.

These things never work out. You’ll probably last two weeks into the semester with your high school sweetheart. But let me tell you, it’s going to make things so much more interesting, both for you and the source of that weirdly intense crush you’ll develop before orientation ends.

A Brita® Water Filter

The tap water at Yale is opaque. It technically qualifies as a diluted soup. If you want access to potable water –– a rarity at Yale –– it’s worth bringing a Brita®. 

Assembling the Brita® will give you and your suitemates a fun group bonding experience early on in the semester. This is more or less canceled out by the months of passive-aggressive requests to fill up the Brita® which will fuel a quiet-but-ever-growing resentment among your suite.

A Desk Lamp and Some Fairy Lights

The overhead lights at Yale are either nonexistent or so blindingly white that they pierce into your soul and give you the appearance of a corpse. There is absolutely no in-between.

Aesthetics come before all, so keep those lights turned off for your entire semester. Get some trendy light fixtures so you can properly set the atmosphere. As a neat side effect, you might also be able to see.

A Personal Essay About Your Transition to College

There’s nothing the WKND desk of the Yale Daily News loves more than a story about how college is different from home (who would have guessed?). All your stories are so completely unique that literally every single first-year just has to submit their own. It’s a rite of passage.

Tissues to Cry Into

These are an essential item for that first month of the Yale Experience as you learn what it’s like to no longer be the best at anything. Break them out when you get rejected from the mock trial team or the debate association or an a capella group or the computer society or a service organization or literally any other extracurricular at Yale. 

Don’t worry –– eventually you’ll learn to lower your expectations.

And that’s everything! Just be sure to bring all of these along, and your first year will be off to a great start.