Upperclassmen impart their academic misadventures

MATT WIEGLE/YH

Your first few months at Yale will be memorable, to say the least. You'll meet tons of people and experience a glut of new things, be they keg stands or one night stands, and you'll also probably complete more academic work than you ever have before.

The latter experience will make for some amazing stories. If a seven-page paper is due by 11 a.m. and you only have two pages written by 8 a.m., you'll hammer out five pages in three hours. The word "cram" will take on new meaning. An "all-nighter" will undoubtedly become common parlance in your conversations during finals period. And if you thought living off four hours of sleep a night for days straight was not possible, your young, resilient body will know worse come next May.

Actually, not all your academic adventures will be harrowing. In fact, most of them will be as inspiring as those brochure photos of Yale students in classrooms imply. But whether the experiences are upsetting or uplifting at the time, you'll be sure to reflect upon them with humor. You'll be proud of those five pages you churned out in three hours. All of those hallucinations that you had from getting so little sleep in so many days will seem kind of cool. In homage to these experiences, the following is a collection of firsthand accounts from some upperclassmen recalling a few of their academic adventures from their freshman year.

Rachel Lears, TC '99: "I took this course called `The History of the Christian Doctrine' from the Divinity School. There weren't that many undergraduates. When we were speaking in section about Thomas Aquinas and his theory that God was the verb `to be,' there was a woman who was sitting in her chair and started rocking back and forth, going, `YES! YES! God is a verb! YES!' That was pretty scary."

Yee-min Lin, ES '00: I was taking Society and War, and all of a sudden, I saw two guys run in with pantyhose over their heads yelling, `MORTAL KOMBAT!' And they ran out. The next day, the teacher pushes up the blackboard in the room and there's `Mortal Kombat' written on the board."

J.J. Lind, SM '99: "I was taking this sociology class by Scott Boorman and it was just really, really boring, and he just droned on and on. One day I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was standing on his desk. I guess he was trying to be like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society."

David Brown, SM '01: "I had a friend who took a midterm examination this year. She goes to take her first midterm examination. She goes to turn in her exam at the end of the day. She has these two blue books and she turns in the wrong one and throws away her examination. A month later in section, she doesn't get back her examination. She goes and talks to the teacher and finds out that they never got her examination. So, over the course of the next term, she is required to write three papers on a given topic to make up for the exam."

Sarah Courteau, JE '98: "I started a paper that was due for a class an hour after it was due, praying that something would happen. And, thank God, my disk crashed. I was able to truthfully say that I had this trouble [and get an extension]."

Lauren Anderson, MC '99: "I had mono my freshman year and I slept halfway through one of my biology classes. Then I overslept for the final, which was at 9 a.m. I wake up at 9:30 and am just panic-stricken. In my pajamas and running sneakers, I grab my backpack and run out across Cross Campus. The entire backpack suddenly just breaks and everything I own is strewn out behind me. People are screaming out, `You're dropping stuff,' and I scream, `I'll pick it up on the way back!' I come to the exam and say that I'm really sorry for oversleeping and I'll take it another time. The professor says, `You still have till noon.'

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