Aileen Santiago

The end of my college education announced itself not with a bang, but with the slow unraveling of routine. My upcoming graduation from Yale carries its own peculiar sting. It’s not the end of college I catch myself mourning. Instead, I’m unsettled by the fading of a once-permanent rhythm and gradual disappearance of deadlines I dreaded but secretly depended on.

For the past four years, I’ve taken writing for granted. Writing began as a high school passion but hardened into a mundane fact of my philosophy degree. Yale prizes ideas, but these ideas rely on writing for substance and staying power. Likewise, in a world that runs on noise, writing is what teaches us how to listen. But here’s the catch: no curriculum, not even Yale’s, can teach you to master writing. Writing, by design, resists mastery. But even if the University falls short of teaching us to write, certain mentors can get us somewhere. While at Yale, I was fortunate to find people who taught me writing can be an ethic –– one of curiosity, shared vulnerability and the courage to become more deeply human.

This realization crept in unceremoniously. It was my last college Monday, and I was halfway through a meeting with my “Daily Themes” tutor.

First taught in 1907, “Daily Themes” is one of Yale College’s most legendary English courses. Each weekday, students submit 300 words of creative prose to an assigned tutor. The simplicity is part of the magic. The assignment is not to produce stellar work, but to commit to the ritual of daily writing. That said, the course is typically overrun with seniors feeling the last-minute pressure to participate in a Yale tradition or, like me, desperate for one last chance at creative self-expression. A final chance, maybe, to learn how to write for ourselves.

Of course, academia would not be academia without accountability. “Daily Themes” emphasizes the internal kind: accountability to ourselves. We’re meant to leave the course as better writers, made accountable to ourselves by virtue of our daily writing ritual. But grade-wise, we’re also accountable to our assigned tutor. The “Daily Themes” tutors range from PhD students to established journalists and local writers. They wear many hats: critic, editor and often therapist to sentimental seniors.

My assigned tutor was Lary Bloom, a local writer and New Haven resident. Though in his early eighties, Lary is a walking reminder that age and edge are not mutually exclusive. He contributes regularly to the New Haven Independent, where he writes with a blend of civic curiosity, cultural bite and just enough mischief to keep his readers on their toes. The bent tip of his index finger has become somewhat of a personal punchline. “I could write the first sonata for eleven fingers,” he likes to say, grinning as he demonstrates how the fingertip can span two piano keys.

I looked forward to my weekly meeting with the brilliant and unfailingly witty Lary. He sat amongst the other tutors in the left-side section of Linsly-Chittenden 101 during professor Kim Shirkhani’s weekly lecture. When I rejoined him an hour after class time for our meeting, he would be seated in the same spot. I’d taken six courses in that Old Campus lecture hall, and not one had prepared me for the strange intimacy of discussing my personal metaphors. Those rows seemed meant for anonymity, not eye contact. It was disorienting for my lecture hall to suddenly become a confessional.

Still, Lary never felt like a tutor in the traditional sense. He was a fellow writer, if not a peer. At the start of the semester, Lary informed me that writing was what kept him young. At first, I suspected this attitude grew from wrestling with the cryptic Gen-Z vernacular of “Daily Themes” students. My theory gained traction after one prompt asked students to discuss a slang word of our choosing. Lary and his fellow tutors were floored by the careful Gen-Z distinction between “I cooked” — meaning “I did this well” — and “I ate” — “I definitely did this well.” Their reactions were part amusement, part anthropological awe. For a moment, it seemed our language had outpaced them, and the generational gap had widened into a canyon. But seconds later, Lary turned to professor Shirkhani and told her she had “eaten” with that day’s lecture. Only then did I realize that he wasn’t just reading our writing; he was learning our language. It was fluency by immersion.

But to Lary, staying young is not merely about keeping up with slang. Instead, it’s about learning from the younger generations. Good writing doesn’t sit there looking clever. It ripples outward. The act of writing itself is reciprocal, regenerative and always in motion. It sharpens the writer and nudges the reader. It disseminates major ideas but also promotes a quiet exchange between writer and reader. This exchange is not always explicitly academic, as in the professor-student dynamic. Sometimes it’s in the margin of a sentence, where a reader pauses to consider their own worldview. 

This leads me to one of the softer truths of the course: no one writes in a vacuum. All writers must first be readers. Reading fuels writing, especially once you’ve burned through your best “Daily Themes” ideas two weeks into the semester.

This is a lesson I’ve learned not only through “Daily Themes,” but also through my time at Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. At the Writing Center, I sit in Lary’s seat. Students come in with all forms of drafts-in-progress, from English papers to film reviews and fellowship applications. As a writing partner, I have little time to read their work and provide feedback. It’s quick, instinctive, almost a kind of literary triage. But it’s also a conversation. I’m meant to trace the logic of their sentences and to ask questions. I mark the moments where a thought stutters or soars. In those sessions, I’m not just offering feedback on writing; I’m learning how they think. And that thinking challenges my own. Reading makes me a better writer. Like Lary, I’ve learned writing is a reciprocal act. To guide someone else’s language, you have to remain porous to it. You have to let it change you.

Lary never hovered above my work with a red pen — he sat with it. Whenever something in my writing fell short, he didn’t reach for a rule or a correction. He reached for a story. A moment when his own sentence structure collapsed under the weight of an idea. A Broadway play that reframed the way he saw the human condition. His feedback never arrived at a verdict; it arrived as a memory, a shared vulnerability.

I’m grateful to Lary and to “Daily Themes” for re-teaching me the art of creative writing. After seven semesters steeped in the rigor of analytic philosophy, my prose was overworked. Every sentence tried to prove something, and every paragraph braced itself for rebuttal. I had forgotten how to write freely. 

Lary caught my academic fatigue immediately. My very first theme, some strange attempt at anthropomorphizing an oak tree, was more symbolic than sincere. He read it, then offered some advice: “Humanize it.” I wasn’t writing for a professor, he told me. I was writing for a person, for people. It was such a simple suggestion, but it rearranged everything for me. Writing, I realized, was not just a display of intellect. It asked for something warmer than clarity. It asked for presence, and for the same vulnerability that Lary offered me.

This epiphany is what makes leaving Yale — leaving academia — all the more devastating for me. Just as I’m beginning to find my voice, just as my writing has started to feel less like a performance and more like a practice, it’s all slipping away. After nearly 16 years of structured learning — drafting, submitting, revising and perfecting — I’m suddenly without a reader waiting on the other end. I’ve turned in my thesis and my final papers. I’ve written my last Daily Theme. There’s no longer any reason to write 300 words a day, and no built-in audience to receive them.

Lary softened that blow. At our final meeting, as I tried to wrap words around the strange ache of ending college, he reminded me that we live in a world decided by argument. Regardless of our future career paths, we never outgrow writing. As Lary assured me, it’ll follow us. Not the five-paragraph essay, not the polished seminar paper, but something closer in spirit to a Daily Theme: the kind of writing that reaches another human being and says this matters.

That, perhaps more than anything, is what Yale has given me. Not just the skill of writing, but the responsibility of it. That the craft of writing is nothing without the writer’s conviction. That language can bridge generations. And that writing is not about perfection, but about presence. It’s about choosing to lean in, to listen across generations or subject areas, and to be changed.

I graduate from my dream school in less than a week. Let this not be the last thing I write.