• Saying “resco” instead of residential college

The term “residential college” only consists of two words and six syllables. But when freshmen have to say it again and again while meeting new people, they find the term “resco” handy. Then, like clockwork, these freshmen meet upperclassmen who mock them for saying “resco.” First years, save yourself the time and never let “resco” enter your vocabulary – you will retreat to “residential college” by the end of the year anyway.

• Hunting for frat parties in large groups

The first-year experience is defined by the constant struggle to find a frat house that will let freshmen in. The slow march from High Street to Lynwood Place, and then to Lake Place, is a journey that the unwilling first year is forced to take every Friday and Saturday night. This march also usually comprises groups of at least five people, led by someone who swears they know where AEPi is or knows a brother who can get everyone in. Some even pull up to frat houses with their Yale ID on a lanyard. 

• Bragging about getting into other schools 

The college process is a formidable experience that only time can heal. As their college journey begins, many first years cope with the college application process by constantly reminding themselves of their Yale acceptance. The problem with doing that at Yale is that everyone else also got into Yale. To differentiate themselves, these freshmen resort to bragging about their acceptances to other schools. Some even make it constantly known that they turned down Stanford or ignored a likely letter from Columbia. 

• Trying and failing to maintain long-distance relationships

Every first-year suite has at least one person who never misses a FaceTime with their high school sweetheart. As others go through frenzied hookups, these steadfast souls vow to do everything they can to keep their long-distance relationships. By October break, after attempts at open relationships and the occasional infidelity, most of these relationships fall apart, quite predictably. 

• Hard launching friend groups during fall break

First-year fall is a long scramble for belonging. Friend groups dissolve as quickly as they are formed. The friend groups who make it through the chaos of the first few months announce themselves on Instagram around October break, the same time of the year when the entire first-year class makes a pilgrimage to New York City. It is not a real hard launch if the Instagram post does not include tags of at least ten people. Speaking of New York City… 

• Aggressively Instagramming that first trip to New York City

Every first-year who goes to New York City for the first time has the same sequence of Instagram Stories. The day starts with a shot of Grand Central’s starry ceiling and is quickly followed by a shot outside of the Chrysler Building. Many head to Times Square, where they get photos for their obligatory NYC photo dump later that week, while some end up posing contemplatively in front of famous paintings at The Met. These stories always include a geotag too, as if no one knows what New York City looks like. 

• Taking club applications too seriously

The first few weeks of Camp Yale are all fun and games, but everything starts to shift after the Extracurricular Bazaar. Anxious first years start taking over Bass Cafe, typing away on their Macbooks to craft the perfect responses for their investment club or consulting group application. Whispers of nepotism in the selection process of certain clubs begin to be passed around. Friends even start to drift apart as some latch onto the professional or social groups they are accepted into. 

• Crying over an A- 

Having breezed through high school with straight As, many freshmen struggle to cope with their first A- during midterm season. The “Cr/D/Fail” option suddenly seems appealing, while some even entertain the thought of dropping the class entirely. For the overachieving first-years, the failure to maintain a 4.00 GPA is the worst thing that can happen to them, for the time being.

The post Frat crawls, fall break in New York and failed long-distance love: Yale’s first-year cliches appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Do I need to change the way I speak? 

I had spent almost all my life in Malaysia. I spoke English that absorbed sounds from Mandarin at school, Malay in the streets and Cantonese and Hokkien at home. I watched the same Cartoon Network shows and Marvel movies that American kids grew up on, and though conscious of the difference in their speech, I saw no issue with the English I had spoken to friends and family. 

I became conscious of my accent when I moved to Singapore to attend 11th grade at an international school. My classmates, most of them the children of expatriates, spoke with a blended, American-British-Australian tone, otherwise known as the “international school accent.” The local accent, similar to the one I had, was foreign to them. Despite this, many of them still attempted it, toying with the idea of ‘going native.’

There was no need for me to adopt their speech, but as an anxious latecomer to the school, I was scared of sticking out. I told myself to lay out and avoid suspicion by mimicking my peers. I spent too much time thinking about the pronunciation of words and syllables, fearing the smallest slip ups and feeling embarrassed whenever I said something differently. 

When I got to Yale, I brought the accent I had developed in high school. While I didn’t necessarily fear judgment from other Yalies for sounding foreign, I assumed that most Americans would be more receptive to me if I had sounded more like them. 

I collected bits and pieces of American English from friends as time passed. I corrected my “clementeens” to “clementines” and my “herbal” to “errbal.” I absorbed some regional phrases into my vocabulary too — but not without stumbling along the way. I didn’t always get things right the first time; I once went into the winter cold with some friends from New York City and told them I was “bricked up” instead of “bricked.” I didn’t understand why they were so horrified until much later.

When I first came to Yale, I loved asking strangers to guess where I’m from to break the ice at parties. They tended to point to a city in the Northeast or somewhere along the California coast. One of my friends spent the entirety of freshman fall thinking I was from Michigan, because I never told her the real answer. 

Then, I started to realize how sad the whole thing was. My friends from Texas and Minnesota have regional accents that tell stories about the places and people they grew up with. My accent, which I cannot even bear to call my own, contains no multitudes. It places me in the vague nothingness of Nowhere, USA – a country that I might not call home. 

I haven’t completely lost the accent I grew up with. This past break, I went home for the first time since I left for Yale and almost immediately recovered the Malaysian accent that had been in hibernation. In the sole presence of other Malaysians, I felt no obligation to hold myself to strict syntax rules and unfamiliar pronunciations. I would throw a couple Malay words or Hokkien phrases into English sentences while speaking to friends and relatives. I had taught myself to lose my accent, so to embrace it with such ease this time feels like an act of liberation. 

There comes a time when I might come back to my Malaysian accent. But for now, I think I’ve grown into the accent that my friends at Yale know me for. I might not always say things the right way, but perhaps the occasional slip-ups should be excused. They’re an important part of my story.  

The post How to lose an accent appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Determined to make full use of all 21 swipes each week, I would need to wake up at 9:30 a.m. to grab dining hall breakfast. I wasn’t really drawn to the breakfast options on display, and the blueberry pancakes I was promised were only an occasional feature. I paid for Americanos at The Elm out of my own pocket before my first classes started, and sometimes later in the day,

Everything changed when I switched over to the flex meal plan. And I think you should switch to Camp Flex Plan too. 

If you don’t know what the flex meal plan is, it basically offers 14 swipes per week and replaces the deducted swipes with 300 dining points per semester. The dining points can be used at a number of spots on campus, including The Elm, Steep Cafe and Ramen at Becton. 

I don’t regret being on the full meal plan as a freshman last year. I didn’t have a choice but to wake up early for daily Spanish classes. But now, as a slumping sophomore deathly allergic to classes before 10 a.m., I have no need for daily breakfasts. Instead, with the flex plan I am able to get my daily caffeine fix whenever I want to – for “free.” 

Yale Hospitality claims that first-year students can “get the most out of [their] Yale experience” by being on the full meal plan. This is not true. Munching on cold cereals in the Saybrook dining hall had little impact on my first-year experience. You know what did? Waiting in line outside Edon for an hour only to be turned away. Getting body slammed by 6’2 men moshing to ‘Mr Brightside’ at AEPi. Falling off the wooden railings to my top bunk bed in LDub. I do not miss making small talk with groggy acquaintances at breakfast at all. 

I might not be able to convince some of you breakfast evangelists out there to forgo your breakfast swipe. 

But, think of all the unexpected ways that dining points can come in handy. Sudden craving for turkey reuben sandwich? Swipe that card at Steep Café. Don’t have the skills to steal avocado salmon sushi from the fridge? Play it safe and use those points. Many of my friends even have enough dining points to raid The Bow Wow for Yale caps and Handsome Dan plush toys and Yale caps. Some of them carry over their points to the next semester so they can raid more Yale merchandise. 

You don’t always get to spend all 21 meal swipes every week anyways. Most of us don’t have the energy to go to a dining hall with breakfast during the weekends. And as the semester picks up pace, you find yourself waking up later and missing more breakfasts. Some nights, seeing oven-roasted chicken on the Yale Menu app the third time for the week, Junzi and House of Naan beckons. And seriously, who goes to breakfast on the weekends anyways? Replacing these swipes with dining points makes perfect sense. 

I will admit that the 300 dining points per semester does not adequately offset the deduction of 7 meal swipes per week. Let’s dive into the math behind this – consultant style. 

We assume that the meal swipe with the lowest monetary value, the breakfast swipe, comes at a conservative amount of $6. We multiply that amount by 7 days to get the weekly amount and then by 14 weeks to get the total semester amount, which gets us to a value of $588. Even by conservative estimates, it appears that the capitalist Yale Hospitality machine is extracting a surplus of close to $300 from us. 

I’m no missionary for the Flex Meal Church. I see its flaws. But I like to think of myself as a struggling believer. And, if Yale Hospitality sweetens the deal a little bit, I’ll consider going full crusader mode. 

The post The Great Meal Plan Debate appeared first on Yale Daily News.

As the pressure of the season’s final stretch piles on, football players must cope with challenges on the pitch and in the classroom. Just before this Saturday’s final kickoff, the News spoke with members of the Yale football team majoring in STEM about their careers in STEM, managing training and school work and how football training has influenced their academic approach. 

“I tried taking the CS100 intro class and I fell in love with it, and I’ve just been doing it ever since,” Jason Lee ’24 said. 

Lee, a running back majoring in computer science, came into Yale with no prior experience with coding or computer science. Upon hearing about the emergence of computer science as a top industry, Lee decided that he “might as well just check it out.”

Wande Owens ’23, a defensive back majoring in computer science, had his start in computer science in high school. Owens credits his decision to major in STEM to his passion for problem-solving.

Du’Shaunte Holloway ’23, a defensive back majoring in environmental engineering, was called to the practical nature of a STEM education. Holloway describes himself as “the type of kid to be interested in tinkering around with little things” when he was younger. Though he planned to be a chemical engineer throughout high school, Holloway changed his plans when he came to Yale. 

“I started looking through the majors and saw environmental engineering, which deals with sustainability, climate and all the stuff that I was really interested in,” Holloway told the News. “It all came together.”

Holloway researches water desalination in the environmental engineering lab of the Sterling Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering Menachem Elimelech. 

Yale students already regularly face restrictive schedules and burnout. Football players have an even more restrictive schedule due to practice, workouts, team meetings and other commitments that they have to meet. 

“This season, we lift in Payne Whitney [Gymnasium] twice a week,” Owens said. “Because of class, I lift at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have meetings right after that in [Linsly-Chittenden Hall] from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and after that, I’ve got class. Practice usually starts at 3:15 p.m. and goes on to 5:45 p.m.”

Despite having busy schedules, football players have managed to strike a cautious balance between athletics and academics by seeking support from different sources. Lee has sought the help of “friends and teammates who are also computer science majors,” whom he describes as his “main support group.”

Owens shares Lee’s approach, but has also sought help from older football players who have shown him “how they‘ve managed their time” and “which sessions or TAs can help out.”

For these players, the lessons they learn from the field can be applied to the classroom too. Both Owens and Lee see a connection between their experiences in football and computer science.

“Anything can go wrong at any moment on the football field and with your work, in computer science specifically, one bug, one tiny error can take hours to figure out,” Lee said.

However, when faced with bugs in programming, Owens stated that the virtue of pushing through adversity, which football instilled in him, inspires him to “keep going, push through and [not] be afraid to reach out for help.” 

“Whether you’re doing football, trying to learn proofs or taking the partial derivative … as long as you try to prepare yourself to the best of your ability, pay attention, [be] locked in, give it your full focus and your full effort, you cannot be upset with your outcome,” Holloway said. 

After college, Lee is ready to participate in the workforce, hoping to be a “software engineer at a big tech firm.” Owens intends to pursue a career in professional football, but hopes to “leverage the Yale network and the football network” for career opportunities if that does not work out. 

Though he expresses a similar desire to join professional football, Holloway still plans to make the most of his environmental engineering background when his football career concludes. He considers picking up on some of his ongoing work in water desalination, but leans more toward “working on sustainable energy and air pollution control in different countries.” 

“I’m trying to travel to help small communities and even larger communities be more sustainable and efficient,” Holloway said.

According to the Yale Office of Career Strategy’s “Yale Student Athlete First Destination Report,” 12 percent of athletes in the class of 2021 were employed in research of some kind, 8 percent worked in health services and 3 percent were employed in engineering in their first job after graduation.

The Yale Bowl is located at 81 Central Ave.

The post Meet the football players tackling STEM appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I found an increasing need to microdose chaos as the days pass to remain sane. I used to hop on the Metro-North to the City to escape Yale’s apple-pie order, but that hasn’t been so kind to my bank account. So I settled for the next best place that would supply my cravings: Hong Kong Grocery Market. 

The Market, which ironically offers little from Hong Kong, is more than just another Asian grocery store to me. It has a comforting sense of chaos that no Yale-affiliated establishment embraces. The boxes meant for the storage room greet me in between racks, down the aisles and at the checkout counter. The polka-dotted and crystal-studded flip-flops are found in the same section as the meat fridge. There is a stray jar of dried shrimp nestled among fruits and butter in the refrigerated section. The hipster coffee shops around campus can only aspire to reach the forms of anarchy that the store has effortlessly mastered.  

The Market feels homely to me because it does not pretend to be perfect. The canned drinks on the floor could be placed elsewhere. That hollow tile near the storage room could be fixed. But these little imperfections do not impede the Market’s operations, and quite honestly, they add some charm to the place. This is not an institution that needs flashy interiors and state-of-the-art service to divert attention away from entrenched systemic problems. This is a modest grocery store that supplies Asian goods, and I respect the great job that it does. 

But much more than that, the Market is the closest thing to the grocery stores where most of my childhood in Malaysia played out. The dried shredded squid, grass jelly drinks, rice crackers and Tom Yum pastes that the store offers are goods that no grocery store back home will be complete without. The prices are about the same too, if I pretended for a second that exchange rates were not a thing. I can almost imagine myself frantically searching for dark soy sauce and wheat noodles as the exhaust pipe of my mother’s car outside rumbles in frustration. 

Being away from home for so long, I have had to look for pockets of home in places like the Market to remedy my yearning for home. I spend too many nights — more than I’d care to admit — sobbing at stock photos of Malaysian food, and though I do not have the culinary talents to remake these recipes, I find unadulterated joy in shuffling through the aisles pretending to look for ingredients for that laksa broth I cannot boil yet. I bathe myself under the faint fluorescent strip above me while taking in the somehow familiar scent of the store. I read the labels on the packaging carefully. 

The flight to Kuala Lumpur takes at least a day, but the walk to this market takes only ten minutes. There, I still get to say: “I’m home.” And I’m happy with that.

The post When things don’t fall into place appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It is in front of this bathroom where I found myself at one in the morning, locked out from the inside, clutching my roommate’s pot that held the remains of a tragically undercooked ramen. In my dreams, I’ve always imagined myself as a slightly less attractive Alex Munday. But the harsh reality of my needing to use the bathroom had me realizing that no matter how many sewing needles, bobby pins and Yale ID cards I shoved into the various cracks and crevices, the lock would not unclick, and I would never be casted as a Charlie’s Angel. Eventually, I called my roommate and asked her to bring me a pair of scissors so I could cut open the screen covering our bathroom window (yes, I did climb over the gate and into the area right by our basement bathroom). But I found that the grate was made out of metal and that I probably couldn’t afford any damages that I would incur onto Yale property. But what would a Yale experience be without non-functioning room amenities? A better college experience, perhaps. 

-Ashley Choi

I was stuck in line for Hallowoads with hundreds of people in a chicken onesie last Halloween. I had been separated from my flock, dressed in the same onesie, as the current of the relentless crowd pulled me away from the main line. I tried to hop past the barricades to get back with my friends, but this girl started to cuss me out. Then, some guy had his arm on my neck for whatever reason, suffocating me while I was already struggling to breathe in this stupid chicken onesie. I told him to let go of his friend’s hand, but he said he “couldn’t lose his bestie.” I’m trying to seek help from a friend, but she’s getting hit on by a graduate student in a Hercules costume. 

Right that second, the crowd started to wobble again, the force strong enough this time to push one of the outer barricades off. I fell bluntly onto dozens of people, and after being helped up, I spent some time freeing other people stuck in the pile. I wasn’t going back to the line, so I just sneaked through the side door into the building, only to be welcomed by an unenergetic crowd swaying to some truly mediocre remixes. Safe to say, I didn’t bother ordering tickets to Hallowoads this time around. 

-Po Eic Quah

If you want to know how to wake yourself up in the morning, it seems that I have accidentally ascertained the secret. That is, if you don’t mind the condition of being four and a half feet deep, headfirst, stuck behind a twin XL bed frame. 

It’s 8:30 a.m., which means my phone is playing soft chimes to lure me out of my slumber. I recently discovered that to be woken by the sound of only soft chimes is a blessing — but if you do not possess that gift I might recommend you try this technique. However, I feel an unusual sensation of pressure in my skull. Something is off. I am unbalanced. I attempt to arch my spine to normalize my position on the mattress. I continue to slide until I realize my head is stuck behind my bed and the wall. I am about to collapse into a 3 foot by 1 foot crevice, adjacent to the place where a headboard is missing. My roommate, now known as my savior, screams as she hears my cries for help. Grabbing my legs, she pulls me up from the bed and back into elevated Twin XL safety. 

Besides the near head-to-floor calamity, this remains one of the few times where it took less than a few hours to feel awake in the morning. Despite this, I went straight to Amazon and purchased a headboard. Pick your poison, am I right?

-Zoe Halaban

The post The Many Horrors of Yale appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Every October, Spirit Halloween resurrects shuttered strip malls and grocery stores across the country, transforming these spooky spaces into emporiums for the Halloween shoppers. These stores vanish at the end of the month as mysteriously as they appear. Yet, have you ever wondered what happens to Spirit Halloween for the rest of the year? Here are some of my most convincing theories: 

1. Business as usual in other universes 

I wholeheartedly believe in the multiverse theory. I also wholeheartedly believe that there are multiple parallel universes out there where they celebrate Halloween at other times of the year. Somewhere in the vast expanse of spacetime, there is at least one universe where trick-or-treating in the unrelenting blizzards of winter is a time-honored American tradition. There are an infinite amount of universes out there, and that means infinite opportunities for Spirit Halloween to make profit. That’s probably why they leave so quickly — there are universes out there that they have to warp into. 

2. Backing the the gay agenda

Who would buy a skeleton hooded dress outside of Halloween? That’s right, Phoebe Bridgers and her sapphic fans. What happened to the faux leather lace-up boyshorts from last fall? Sold out by the time Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball Tour started this past summer. Spirit Halloween has been working overtime to supply the closets of Lil Nas X’s backup dancers and concert-going Charli XCX fans. They’re probably one of the biggest backers of the gay agenda — I’m surprised they haven’t made their work public yet. It’s like they want to be the gay version of Hobby Lobby or something. 

3. Placed back into The Freezer 

As November inches closer, Michael Buble and Mariah Carey are carefully carried out of The Freezer to defrost in time for Christmas. The Queen of Christmas’s mighty whistle notes and five-octave range, in particular, take up tons of storage space. The defrosting should be underway now, leaving enough space for Spirit Halloween, Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Lattes, UGG boots and other fall fan favorites. 

4. Orchestrating the timely closure of businesses around the country 

Ever noticed how stores that have done well for years conveniently run their course by September? This is no coincidence. I’m pretty sure Spirit Halloween spends the rest of the year executing mind control campaigns to get people to stop shopping at targeted stores from coast to coast. In fact, I’m convinced that the location scouts at Spirit Halloween plotted the retail apocalypse to free up space for their spooky seasonal stores and complete their ambitious takeover of suburban America’s most middle-of-the-road strip malls. 

5. Staffing flights for Spirit Airlines

Where do Spirit Halloween employees get transferred to after Halloween? To their sister company Spirit Airlines, duh! I’m pretty sure the flight attendant on my flight to Key West last spring break picked out the sexy cowboy costume I wore for Halloween the year before. 

There is no mystery greater than the mystery of Spirit Halloween. No one knows what this ghastly enterprise is up to before and after October. There is only one thing one knows for sure: No commercial space between 7,000 to 10,000 square feet is safe from the haunting specter of Spirit Halloween.

The post Spirit Halloween’s post-October pursuits appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I tried making sense of what was going on in this curious establishment, but my friends were now far ahead of me, and so I promised myself to see what lies beyond the harem pants and crystal piggy banks of the storefront some other day. 

Learning that the store will be up for sale soon, I recently decided to check it out after finishing class. The sky was not hazy, and neither was my state of mind, so I thought I would be able to find a birthday gift for a friend that afternoon. 

Entering the store, I felt like I was transported into a hippie outpost from the Haight-Ashbury district in the Sixties. Relics like Grateful Dead merchandise and “Make Love, Not War” postcards sustained the illusion of a countercultural time capsule. This was only punctuated by more contemporary offerings like a glossy print of Aunt Sandy’s Medical Marijuana cookbook and a ‘moveable and poseable’ Jesus of Nazareth action figure. 

This seemed to be the perfect place to get a gift, and a terrible place for a bad trip.

Though it only takes up two lots, Group W Bench has the material expanse of a Baroque cathedral. However, in addition to finding marbled saints and wooden crosses, which the store does offer in many varieties, you will also find paraphernalia from other beliefs — Mexican calaveras, Hindu dancing Shiva statues and Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings. Everything you can imagine, along with the things you can’t, live here. 

I was drawn to the small keepsake boxes near the backroom, where the owner Raffael came in and out of every few minutes. He seemed to be busy stocking up the vintage postcard racks. So I turned to the woman at the counter, Amy, for some questions about the boxes and the store. 

“Yes, they’re all handcrafted,” Amy answered while opening up the wooden boxes, showing me what they look like inside.

I revealed my admiration for the store’s expansive collection, and to that, Amy told me that the store had been around since 1968. The store moved to its current location on Chapel Street soon after its establishment and remains the only one of its kind in New Haven to this day. I had been to many stores like this in New York’s East Village, but none of them could boast a collection as eclectic as this. 

“I can tell you that we have been here longer than many of [the stores in the East Village]. Many of the things you see here are from Raffael’s personal collection. He was really into African masks for a while, and he got into the Buddhas you can see there,” Amy told me, pointing to a row of Buddha figures on a cabinet. . 

The store seems to cater to some common needs in uncommon ways. Got a midterm tomorrow that you need to pass? Get some crystals near the counter to manifest the Fail away. Need stationeries? Get Jumbo pencils and nose-shaped sharpeners here. Broke your last weed pipe? Choose from the many on display at the counter. It is the oldest running head shop on the planet after all.

Everyone who came in seemed to find something that they wanted. Everyone but me. There was simply too much to see, let alone choose from. Every couple of seconds, I would find another Frida Kahlo piece on the wall or Balinese mask tucked in between reclining Buddhas. I went back to Amy in resignation and admitted that I could not decide on what to get. 

“A lot of customers get overwhelmed when they come here for the first time,” Amy assured me. “Take your time, I’ll be here if you have any questions.” 

I have to admit that I was quite intimidated by some of the signs found in the store at first. Around the shop displayed “No Photos” and “No Cellphones” stickers, a “Go f–k your #selfie” sign on an antique mirror, and another at the counter that read “The customer is always right, there is a Santa Claus, & Republicans really care.” But these signs are not meant to scare people off. Or maybe they’re for a specific type of customer: those who come in with their friends only to crowd around every reflective surface for geotagged selfies.

If you do decide to spend some time in the store, put your phone in your pocket and take the liberty to immerse yourself in the store’s cozy and mellow ambience. The smell of burning incense, the sound of calming psychedelic rock songs and the welcoming presence of the store’s friendly staff make for easy respite from campus. Though the fate of the store is uncertain, as long as its doors remain open, why not take a look inside? The Bench fits everyone. 

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