I didn’t mean to find the Egyptology room. Like most Yale discoveries, I stumbled upon it wandering into some place I wasn’t really planning on going. The room features a single table, a single lamp that emits soft light and walls lined with books. It’s a space with an immense feeling of history. In all honesty, most Yale study spots look similar to this one, but somehow the Egyptology Reading Room has a different feel from those other Yale spaces. For me, it’s the place where I’m in the habit of reflecting on time at Yale. 

That’s sort of the point. The room is a space that forces you to be alone with yourself, sometimes for longer than you’d like. It’s a singular table for a singular experience, a reflection of what Yale sometimes feels like: full of other people’s history, but deeply personal all the same. 

I think about this whenever I manage to sneak in and sit there — about how much time I’ve spent trying to find my “seat at the table,” figuratively and literally. We inhabit a school where it can feel like everyone seems to have their place already: in student organizations, friend groups and heated seminar discussions. At times, I’ve felt like I was still standing in the doorway, holding my laptop and wondering if I was supposed to knock first. 

The Egyptology Room doesn’t answer that question, but it does make me think about it. It’s a place where you can feel the weight of all the history around you — not just Yale’s, but your own. The friendships that once felt like forever but quietly faded. The moments you thought would define your college experience but didn’t. The small, unglamorous ways you’ve actually grown. 

There’s an irony in the fact that a room so meticulously preserved and curated isn’t very practical. You can’t really study there without bumping elbows with the lamp or feeling like you’re breathing too loudly. But that’s Yale, too — charming from a distance, a little messy up close. 

When I sit in that room, I don’t feel like I’m making history. I feel like I’m observing it. I’m one student in a long line of people who have passed through, each convinced that their own worries, their own deadlines, their own heartbreaks were monumental. And maybe they were, for a moment. Having spent hours in the Egyptology Room and contemplated the magnitude of my own troubles, I’m inclined to believe they were. 

Maybe that’s the quiet charm of this place: It reminds you that being here, even briefly, is its own form of permanence. That the table will remain long after you’ve graduated, waiting for another student to find it and think those thoughts, or maybe entirely different ones. 

For now, the Egyptology Room is my secret. And maybe it should stay that way. Part of its appeal lies in how it finds you when you’re ready to be alone with yourself.