Henry Liu, Contributing Photographer

On Friday afternoon, students gathered at 53 Wall St. for The Yale Experience, a campuswide forum highlighting a range of perspectives and aspects of student life. The event was co-hosted by Yale College Council events and Yale Student Athletics.

The forum was spearheaded by Joseph Nash ’26, an offensive lineman on the football team, who began developing the idea last fall. In the months leading up to the event, Nash coordinated with deans, professors and students to turn the concept into reality.

Nash told the News that the initial motivation sprung from seeing the way that student-athletes and nonathletes interacted with each other, where both can see each other as separate groups. However, Nash realized that due to the hectic schedules many have at Yale, many students had some commitments, such as Greek life or performance schedules, that keep them away from interacting with different groups outside of their original interests. 

“I wanted to get the perspectives of students who all experience Yale differently in their own roles and bring them together to talk about how they view success at Yale and how they view their role within the community,” Nash said.

The event opened with a student panel speaking about their distinct experiences at Yale and featured Éle Donegan ’26, Albert Yang ’26, Maliya Francis ’27, Natalie Brown ’25, Mason Shipp ’26 and Tommy Gannon ’27, who is also a staff reporter at the News.

Shipp is a member of the football team, while Donegan competes on the swim and dive team. Brown is active in Yale’s theater community, and Francis serves as president of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Gannon is co-president of the Yale Media, Entertainment and Sports Business Association and Yang is the co-founder of BullMont Capital, a student-run investment firm.

A common theme during the discussions was the sheer diversity of interests and activities at Yale, akin to “drinking from a firehose.” Another topic was defining success at Yale, which Donegan and Yang both stressed was not quantitative to them but rather community focused.

Then, men’s basketball coach Brandon Sherrod took to the stage, sharing experiences about his time at Yale and experience coaching. Sherrod was on the men’s basketball team, but also took a year off to sing with the Whiffenpoofs, the nation’s oldest collegiate a cappella singing group. 

“[That year with the Whiffenpoofs] was something that I think really shaped me not only as a, a singer or a basketball player, but as a human being, being able to have that experience of traveling, around the world and music being the means for that, and still having that affiliation with the university and, again, being able to take full advantage of of everything that it offers you,” Sherrod said.

Nash then introduced Head of Silliman College Arielle Baskin-Sommers. The Silliman head  talked about how her research centers on how teenagers make the decisions they do, especially bad ones, and how she has enjoyed interacting with students in a new dimension as Head of College. 

Lastly, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan ’03 took to the stage to provide his view of merit in the admissions process, especially potential disparities between athletes and nonathletes. Quinlan stressed the goal of the admissions office has always been to build a broadly diverse student body with strengths in many different areas. 

In response to questions around advantages and disadvantages in the admissions process, Quinlan said “it is true that we do give a plus factor in our process to a whole host of individuals, [such as] students who are first in their family to come to college, low income students, students who are being supported by the athletic department, students whose parents graduated from Yale, and students who are getting very high ratings from our music faculty for their instrumental performance.”

The event was well received by audience members, many of them athletes. 

“I thought it was a great event, they covered a lot of different areas around the school. You had non-athletes involved in Greek life and entrepreneurship. I found it super interesting and integrating myself into the broader population of the school, beyond just athletics, has been something I often think about.” Josh Pitsenberger ’26, captain of the Yale Football Team, told the News. 

The Yale Athletics Department is located at 20 Tower Parkway.