Take advantage of college's freedom

You were accepted to Yale because you worked your tail off in high school. However, you also got into Yale because after the admissions department examined your writing samples, extracurriculars, and interviews they decided, for reasons that even they probably don't know, that you would be a much more interesting person than the 10 other kids you beat out for your spot in the class of 2005. Everybody who applied here was a good student. But in the end, it was the interesting people who actually got into Yale.

DANICA NOVGORODOFF/YH

Classes are important, but they're not any more important than getting to know the people with whom you'll spend the next four years. And the only way to meet those people is to get out and try to meet them. Hit the town Thursday through Saturday. Try drama, writing, politics, activism, art, or something else that seems fun. Just make sure you leave your dorm room for more than classes and trips to the dining hall. In the end, what makes Yale great are the people you meet here. Chances are, every other school to which you applied had an academic program that, while having different strengths and weaknesses from Yale's, was just as good overall. Yalies, not Yale classes, separate this university from all the other colleges you looked at last year.

On the other hand, you are at one of the best universities in the world. You have a chance to take courses with professors who know their disciplines as well as any scholar alive. And you'll be working with students who may be able to teach you something about English poetry or Freudian psychology themselves. You don't want to waste that kind of opportunity. In purely monetary terms, somebody is dropping 35 grand a year so that you can be here. If you treat Yale like a giant residential bar, that's one hell of a cover charge. More importantly, neglecting classes wastes the amazing privilege of attending Yale University. For everyone who comes here and wastes his time, there are plenty of others who would have appreciated the chance to attend.

These suggestions may seem contradictory, but they stem from one basic premise. You're here for four years, and you should try to get the most out of them. Experience is your most important commodity. You might never get another chance to write poetry, debate Sartre with a random person standing by a keg, see 20 liters of liquor sitting on your floor, or take history with a professor who was in Poland when Eastern European communism crumbled in 1989.

The next four years are a time of incredible freedom, and not just in the sense that nobody here will stop you from drinking until your liver crumbles. If that's all that freedom means to you, then you picked the wrong college. Yale allows you a rare chance to experiment with ideas, interests, and life in general. Whether you're the only freshman from your country or one of 20 people coming from the same school, there's nothing stopping you from completely reinventing yourself. I have a friend who came out of high school certain that she wanted to be an engineer, only to finish her first semester having decided to major in art history. The possibilities here are almost endless.

Taking advantage of these possibilities means striking a balance between the demands on your time. Yale, like most of life, is about how you choose to approach it. It's easy to talk about balance, but balance is a process of constant choice. You could go to Tuesday Night Club and see some friends, or you could finish the history reading that was due in last week's section. If it's nine o'clock on a Thursday night, you could stay in and edit your Russian Literature term paper yet again, or you could head to TK's for wings and beer to unwind from writing the paper all week. The first lesson that most incoming freshmen need to learn is that perfection is impossible. A 4.0 average isn't worth becoming a hermit, and being the social center of campus doesn't justify failing your classes.

Getting the most out of Yale means grabbing this place by the balls and never letting go. Just because you know that you're physically incapable of doing all the reading for all of your courses, having fun on the weekend, and involving yourself in a few extracurriculars doesn't mean you shouldn't try. At various points during this year, I saw the sun rise—because I had to write a paper, because I was coming home from a party, and because I needed to finish an article for the fine newspaper you're reading. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

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