Yale is one big nightmare blunt rotation. 

For me, coming to Yale meant moving to The Big City. New Haven, with a population of 135,000, dwarfs any city I have previously claimed as home. Even just the undergraduate Yale College includes 44 more members than my rural hometown. 

However, the illusion of the small-fish-big-pond began to crack when I noticed a peculiar circuit of people coalescing around my daily routines. My fears of finding my community at college were availed when I realized that there were apparently seven people on campus. Cross Campus and the High Street-Elm Street intersection are the worst — a nexus of next-door neighbors, classmates, situationships, your roommate’s situationship, someone you haven’t seen since orientation, and that guy from your discussion section that is somehow everywhere.

And they probably all know each other.

If you decide one morning to just run to a nearby dining hall for a quick brunch, be warned that the less thought you devote to your appearance, the more people you will see. Half of your seminar might have decided to eat in the same college, despite the 13 other options. Oh, and one of them will be eating with the friend of Someone You Don’t Want To See. Nowhere is safe. Once, I ran into Someone three times in one day, twice in the same spot, and never as part of my usual route. The Someone you desperately wish to avoid may be lurking at an obscure desk in Sterling, outside your classroom, or in a B-list dining hall.

My friends say it’s just something with me. “You have the strangest and/or worst luck” followed by, “HELP I JUST SAW HIM TOO.” Lucky Yalies get promoted to Campus Celebrity, not due to their actions or notoriety, but simply because they just keep showing up. A nickname is assigned, varying from subtle to absurd, and the group chat is promptly alerted of their new assignment. Soon your phone buzzes with the first update: “[REDACTED] sighting!!!”

I often wonder if I am recognized too. Am I the star of some unknown group chat? Most of the people I “know” I don’t know. We might share a class (or two) or a club or live in the same college, but we don’t know each other well enough to determine if we share anything worth bonding over. We wave hello in the hallways or yell over the music that we really should get lunch sometime (for the third time, probably not the last). Maybe my apparent observational skills are a reflection of my care for those around me. Maybe it’s simply a last-ditch effort to cling to some semblance of community. Or, maybe I just want to be noticed too.

As the end of my first semester at Yale grows closer, the first-year table in the dining hall transforms from a shared banquet to clusters of cliques. We are together but not, the relatively small scale of campus resulting in a false sense of community.

“You know a lot of people,” a friend remarked after I waved to the third person I recognized on our descent from Science Hill. 

“Not really.”