Yale Graduation

We are back from the Northeast and Yale graduation, filled with vaguely equal measures of hope and sadness. Hope, because Natalie has passed through the august institution and kept her balance and poise and general goodness and has found a fine thing to do with her future. On August 15, she heads off to Juneau, Alaska to work as an intern (I think, but who cares?) for an organization that lobbies in the Alaskan state legislature on behalf of public school administrators. It will be a fine adventure in a markedly different place and she will learn and experience a lot of new things. What more could one ask for from a post-collegiate job?

Sadness because... so much of her college experience was taken from her by COVID. But also, I guess, because I had so hoped that she might be able to have a much better experience there than I did. Mine was marred by my parents' marriage falling apart and my own substance abuse challenges. I tried to be cooler than thou and hung out with all these super cool off-campus artsy people and somewhat marginalized myself from the core of the student body. So I was something of an outsider by graduation.

It felt like Natalie ended up having a similar trajectory, for different reasons. It made all the sense in the world to move off campus her junior year. Living in an apartment and cooking and getting food from around New Haven seemed much more sensible than living in a dorm and getting takeout from dining halls and living largely sequestered in a dorm. But then she was cut off from the great mass of her peers in her residential college.

Admittedly they looked like the same somewhat daunting class of tightly wound overachievers that were there when I was there, maybe even more so. If anything there seems to be less room for divergence from the straight and narrow than in my day. But also greater diversity and tolerance in important and meaningful ways.

In the end I think she was able to make better use of her time there in important ways than I did. She got involved very energetically in super positive endeavors organizing Yale kids to provide mini-courses and other services to kids from the community. Her friends were all very nice and looked less dissolute than my did (though mine were also all fundamentally good people too). I was very happy to see her have a genuine and heartfelt interaction with a dining hall worker in Branford on her very last day; she had taken the time to treat them as peers and it was clearly appreciated. I guess mostly the problem was that so much of her college life ended up spent alone behind a computer screen, not a recipe for joy. There will be more to come.