Yale extends a PROP-er welcome to minority students

By Fuerza Linda Fraga

The Pre-Registration Orientation Program (PROP) offers a great advantage. You have the opportunity to meet about 100 other minority students and to make new friends.

PROP includes a dance, a talent show, mini-parties, and all kinds of social activities. Your ethnic counselor will lead a few group activities and offer advice about Yale. Yale's cultural houses also throw several intoductory parties.

Unlike the other orientation programs, PROP takes place at Yale, which means that the program contains several workshops designed to introduce you to your new environment. You can take advantage of the extra time on an empty Yale campus to explore the University's facilities and to meet its faculty. When school starts, it is often a PROP graduate others turn to when in need of information.

At the first PROP dinner, Yale College Dean Brodhead, BR '98, GRD '72, will speak about the merits of Yale; afterwards, you will meet the dean and other PROP-sters of your residential college. Later you will meet cultural deans, ethnic counselors, and residential fellows of minority background in your college, in addition to minority fellows. There are several panel discussions led by students and faculty on the topics of ethnicity, sexuality, security, and academics at Yale. For example, Dean Goff-Crews, director of the African American Cultural Center, talked last year about her own experience as a Yale English major. The preparation and introduction to Yale that is offered by PROP is specifically designed with minority students in mind. Yale is a different world from high school, and PROP will smooth that transition.

Despite the recent controversies on campus about minority-related issues such as recruiting and affirmative action, I believe that PROP was an invaluable experience for me. In my opinion, the minority communities at Yale should become more close-knit. When I had visited as a pre-frosh, I had a hard time finding Chicanos on campus; PROP enabled me to meet and socialize with the Chicanos and other minorities in my class. I will also never forget what we did at PROP--acting out skits at the talent show, watching my fellow minority classmates as they displayed amazing musical and theatrical skill, and being blown away by the singing of Shades, the first singing group at Yale I ever saw.

But, after a year at Yale, I can now admit that the PROP writing workshops did little to help me get used to Yale courses, and I felt that several of the workshops were useless and sometimes redundant. Still, it would be a shame to miss out on one of the most useful orientations Yale offers.

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