Julian Raymond

When I was younger, one of my favorite treats was to put granulated sugar and sliced up lemons in a Ziploc bag and shake until they were coated like candy. I always liked something sour that could be made sweet, something that could be shaken up and put under pressure, but come out on the other side something fantastic and new – revealing something you never would have guessed could be so wonderful. As I reflect on my four years at Yale, that happened to me in so many fantastic ways. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my first-year self these past few weeks leading up to commencement. At the time, I had a grand plan set out for my life and thought that once I had gotten into Yale, I had essentially secured my future. I thought I would be working on Capitol Hill or on my way to law school after spending four years dedicating my time to studying American politics. I also believed after my first year I would have easily made a ton of friends and my life would look a lot like a Yale version of Elle Woods. 

I quickly realized that I was wrong. My first year I felt isolated as I was plagued by a series of mystery illnesses. I spent the year largely in and out of the hospital. I met with my Dean about extensions and my medical situation more than I met with anyone else that year. I struggled academically for the first time ever as my illness mixed with the rigor of an Ivy League school. Feeling discouraged from a less than wonderful first year, I applied to study abroad in Italy to get my language requirements out of the way. This experience — as silly as it sounds — changed my life at Yale.  

During my study abroad, I met a girl who pushed me to join her sorority to make more girlfriends at school. I couldn’t make the first meetings either — I was ill at the time — but her word alone got me a bid. This finally allowed me to make friends, and despite being sick a lot of the time, I didn’t have to worry about who I would go to parties with, grab meals with, or just talk about life with. I had found a place for me. Growing up in Georgia, around big state schools, I had never imagined myself as a sorority girl — it has a very different interpretation in the South — but I loved it. 

My sophomore year, I met my closest companion, a friend of my suitemates’ who I initially thought was my total opposite in so many ways. At the time we met, I was very free spirited, and she was a reserved, academically focused, Polish-Catholic girl from Brooklyn. Despite our differences, we had a lot in common. I found her being my shoulder to cry on and I hers. I learned about networking from her and her dazzling ability to talk to people and make them interested in what she has to say. I never imagined I’d have a friend with whom I could go home for Thanksgiving, spend New Year’s Eve on a FiDi rooftop, and take a drive up to Boston for galas and football games. 

My life had changed academically as well. I found myself drawn to studying Italian populism, social crises in Europe, and austerity policies. I took a lot of classes about the EU, Europe, and Ukraine, but I was still convinced that my career was going to be working in Congress or as a federal lawyer in Washington. When I finally got an internship in Congress, I hated it. 

I had to think for months about what I got out of that experience and what I learned from it. It had changed what I wanted to do completely just as I came into my senior year. I also suffered from a crisis of confidence that my grades or extracurriculars fell short of my “dreams of law school.” On top of that, knowing now I didn’t like a congressional career, I had no idea what I would tell interviewers about what I wanted to do. So, like any other Yale student would, I panicked. I applied to all of these ridiculous consulting and finance positions that I had no experience in because I felt like it was what I had to do as a Yale graduate. 

In these moments of personal crisis, I was also writing my thesis about Italian politics, austerity and euroscepticism. I had been encouraged on more than one occasion by my thesis advisor and some other professors to apply to graduate school, but I sat on it until the end of senior fall because I was unsure about the job market despite my passion for the topic. 

I eventually decided to apply for political science and political economy masters programs with the hope to get a PhD after. For the first time in a long time, I had true passion about something I was doing. I started to think I made the wrong choice about my major, but in writing my thesis and my research proposals, I realized that my passion was the study of politics in academia. I wasn’t sure how anything would pan out as I had never shaken the feeling that I wasn’t good enough to be at Yale in the first place. However, I got into every graduate program I applied to. Now, after graduation, I will move to Montreal to continue studying the European political economy, a topic that hadn’t been on my radar junior year. If anyone had told freshman year me, the future Washington lawyer, I would have laughed and called them crazy. 

Much of my experience at Yale can be summed up by the idea that the year prior, I would have called myself crazy. If you look at things from a pessimistic perspective, my constant sickness and my bad internship experience prevented me from having the life I dreamed about at 17. 

At the end of the road, I am grateful for everything — the good and the bad, the sick and the healthy, the known and the unknown. If I had not had the hard times, I would not have had the good ones. I would not have my best friend Ula, my sisterhood in Kappa Kappa Gamma, my graduate school acceptance to McGill or my passion for the European Political Economy. Out of everything Yale has taught me, the best lesson I learned was that sometimes you have to go out of your way to add a little sugar to the lemons life hands you and wait for the bag to stop shaking to experience the sweetness of it all. These four years at Yale have been, and will be remembered as, among the sweetest that life has to offer.