Judgment is constant at Yale. Your character and intellect are assessed through endless applications for extracurriculars and fellowships and professors who evaluate you every day, every time you speak in a seminar. This ubiquity has always made me uncomfortable, but what I take most issue with is our campus’ approach to judgment. We take students’ abilities as given and in doing so, favor those who had early access to elite schooling and skill-building opportunities. These students naturally integrate more easily into Yale than do those who didn’t enjoy comparable advantages, so comparisons of talent that don’t account for this gap in preparation are wildly unfair. 

To evaluate responsibly, we need to be critical. When we’re determining if someone is qualified for a role in our organizations and teams, we should ask ourselves what barriers they faced while developing their resume. Someone “lacking experience” might simply not have been able to accept unpaid internships. We should also seek opportunities to learn more about structural factors that might be at play. That means being intentional about forming relationships with students from various backgrounds — and not just gravitating towards people like us. It’s easy enough to bond with someone over a common interest, but we need to remember that interests are themselves shaped by privilege. If you surround yourself with peers who share your enthusiasm for, say, golf, you’re limiting your interactions to people who, like you, can afford such an expensive sport. Since golf has had an enduring diversity problem, you’re probably selecting for majority-white friends too.

Unconsciously self-segregating in this way, wealthy Yalies might never grow close to someone who juggles multiple jobs to pay tuition. They’ll then never know how economic demands confine low-income students to rigid schedules. All-white friend groups may never consider the imposter syndrome that some students of color face while public speaking (for more on the idealization of a “white voice,” watch the film “Sorry to Bother You”). Students whose parents attended college could remain unaware of the additional responsibilities that first-generation classmates shoulder, including tackling the complex College Scholarship Service, or CSS, profile.

In the Class of 2028 alone, roughly 20 percent of students receive full financial aid and 19 percent are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. Twelve percent of Yalies are Hispanic, and 7.2 percent are Black, according to university-wide figures. There’s no excuse. Get to know these students, understand the unique obstacles they navigate, and yes, bet on them. They’re among the most remarkable people I met at Yale and I’ll forever be inspired by their grit and profound sense of purpose. These are the students whose parents are manual laborers and street vendors. They’re the ones who grew up rationing food and sleeping on the floor. Their precarious circumstances followed them to Yale and yet they’re graduating like everyone else. Talk about distance traveled. I’m so proud of them. I’m so proud of us.

Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that my writing will change Yale, much less the individualistic society upon which it’s modeled. But if you’re still enrolled, I encourage you to adopt equity as a lens through which you view your relationships and work. Catching up with a faculty mentor recently, I unpacked my own experiences and wondered if there are ceilings to what marginalized students can accomplish. Part of me says yes, given all that my coursework has taught me about structural racism in our economic and legal systems. But I also know that ceilings only exist if we sustain them. So don’t. Break them. Recognize that underprivileged students work ten times as hard to get to the same place as their peers and that for that reason, we can’t evaluate them by just looking at their achievements on paper. Cast the myth of meritocracy aside, measure success using distance traveled, and learn about the nature of those distances.

The paradigm shift for which I argue isn’t new. Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action, Yale launched an Office of Educational Opportunity to address the disadvantages that disabled and first-generation, low-income students encounter. The Yale College Council has unveiled a grant program to defray the costs associated with extracurricular participation. At an individual level, some Yalies genuinely try to expand their circles beyond the New York City elites with whom they arrived. And I’ve been privy to decision-making discussions where someone advocated for a candidate whose background may not have allowed them to earn certain credentials but who nonetheless had potential. There is hope for a changing campus culture.

When we step outside of our own lived experiences and into those of another, we empathize, and when that empathy moves us to action, we practice love in its deepest form. This love is the best of what humanity has to offer. So, if you continue to study at Yale, cultivate this love within you. Let it guide your perception and treatment of your peers. If you’ve left, do the same in the spaces you now occupy. For if there’s anything our cruel and unrelenting society needs more of, it’s love — and the commitment to accounting for the distance traveled that undergirds it.

SOFIA GODOY graduated from Yale College in 2024. She can be reached at sofiagodoy531@gmail.com.