Yale's annual honeymoon bittersweet

Thoughts From Here
    By Sonia Lin

We've been at school long enough for campus culture to reassert itself. For those of us who might have slipped into an alternate, summertime persona while away from New Haven, our student selves have undoubtedly rushed back upon us, recharged and grinning broadly, perhaps trailing last semester's victories and disappointments on tangled shoestrings.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

There's so much energy in this place, and it crackles loudest and most quickly in these first September weeks. After three months away, friends find joyful reunion in startling, breakaway moments across hurtling cars on Elm Street. We return, well-rested and brimming with big, shiny plans for the semester, for college, for life.

However, the blissful honeymoon that is Camp Yale brings with it an unsustainable level of energy. Thousands of eager achievers tumble together across a few square blocks, scamper down sidewalks, seemingly pour out of the Gothic walls—creating an excitement that rubs and reacts to produce a jostling, hyperbolic atmosphere that leaves us pining for the summer holiday. But despite all the irresponsible fun we're having, this is the time of year when Yale students show their least attractive colors.

For all of its supposed joy, our initial honeymoon period at Yale is at heart a time of competition and subtle scrutiny. Judgments abound: who gained weight, who looks great, who did amazing deeds over the summer, who most deserves to get into that seminar, who has already mapped out his or her life's work. The result of this pressure is a misguided desire to do something—something amazing, something that can be listed and repeated, something that will change the world!—or at least be worthy of admiration. Refine and rename it as we will, we can't escape that old freshman need to prove ourselves at Yale.

Yet can we be blamed? Yale's very method of placing its students encourages this continued compulsion. We must compete for the privilege to learn in the most sought-after classes and follow the most selective majors. Even when we're not desperately applying to overcrowded seminars, we're elbowing and edging our ways into the most desirable sections, trying to impress everyone involved. The desire to learn more about a topic is insufficient to warrant a spot in the classroom. We must somehow show that our desire to learn is stronger than the desires of the 30 other people angling for entrance.

Despite Yale's reputation as a high-powered school, its students are not by nature disposed to such maneuvering. Although we can't help but get caught up in the electricity of these days, the sum of all our energies eventually bears down on us and makes us tired. Before long, we start complaining to one another how crazy shopping period is, we stop asking each other about our summer jobs, and we look forward to a more regular October, when the weather turns and we're all used to being together again.

For now, I have no choice but to throw myself into high-strung Yale September. I would do it willingly for the still-whole hopes and dreams that color these days. And there are smaller benefits to this period of newness. We make it to all our classes on time; we only need one snooze on the alarm clock. But even now, for all of us who swear by our age and experience, the roar of the gathering school year has the ability to renew those dazzled freshman-esque quivers. And with them, the doubts and anxieties we thought we had placed safely in the past return. We're a creative bunch used to getting our way, but the only solution to this bittersweet honeymoon, and all the nagging doubts that ride with it, is to bide our time.

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