Why Should I Have to Take a Hit?
Freshman year I was getting back acceptance letters from colleges and looking at the packages, and Yale was the one that gave me the most money. And so it really came down to--yes, Yale is a great place and I’m excited to be here--but Yale is the place that made the most financial sense to me. I don’t know what the range is, the distribution of how many people are on a minimal amount of aid versus all aid, but I’m getting about half my tuition paid by Yale. Next year when my sister comes here as a freshman, that’ll be an interesting thing for my family to try to bear the burden of two girls being in college at the same time. Freshman year I got a National Merit Scholarship, so that went toward my student contribution, so I didn’t have to have a student job here, which made my life a lot easier. I could just focus on DS and getting to know people. One of my close friends did start working that year, and it was an interesting thing to see where the two of us were then and the next year. The next year, sophomore year, I obviously didn’t have the National Merit Scholarship then, so I started working at a library. Halfway through the year got a second job as a lifeguard, because I knew that the first job wasn’t really enough for me to be able to pay for schoolbooks and keep me on the same level as all of my suitemates and friends, like going out to restaurants and getting decorations for the suite. I guess that in general, my experience with financial aid has been that I’ve known since freshman year that I needed to work at least eleven hours a week in order to be at Yale. I’ve enjoyed that, and it hasn’t necessarily been a burden on me personally, because I’ve found ways to insert that into my life. But I know that there are people, and some of my friends, who have worked twenty hours every week--and sometimes more, finagling more than twenty hours into a week, even though Yale says you’re only allowed twenty hours in a week. That has put enormous stress on them. It has come to the point for some of my friends where their jobs have to take precedence over classwork and sleep, and I think that’s just wrong. I know that there’s some situations, not at Yale, but where people take night classes and work a job, or work part time and take classes on top of that, but the whole point of the aid system at Yale is so that we don't have to do that--we don’t have to be flipping burgers at Burger King in order to fund our education. There’s definitely a disconnect. And yes, working jobs to have pocket money is a different situation from working so that you’re literally able to exist on this campus.
It’s also limited my choices for the summer. I’m not able to take an unpaid internship for the summer, at all, which has very much limited my options. I was paid pretty well every summer to do that, but I was living at home and wasn’t doing anything “useful” for my resume. And so this summer I was faced with the terror of “Okay, now I need to actually do something, but what can I do while still getting paid?” I had this really terrible, tearful phone call with my mother where I was like, “Hey, I’m applying to all these cool fellowships where I can do research abroad for my senior thesis, and I can get this much money!” And she would say, “But what about...earning money?” Because I can’t keep the fellowship money for myself, so I have to spend it while I’m there, and I just had a moment where reality hit me. I had forgotten about that, because I was working at a summer camp every other summer and I was earning money, and that was just what I was doing. But once I was out of that preset job where I earned money, it was like, what about all of the other things I want to do? Why should I have to take a hit from my financial situation in order to do research for my senior thesis, which I need to graduate?
Now that I’m 21 and all my friends are 21, it’s a lot more normal to suggest getting drinks together, which can get very, very expensive. I’ve noticed that I started spending so much more money than I’m used to. I’m taking five hours of classes right now, so I’ve had to compensate by working fewer hours. So it’s like, I’ll go to the bar and maybe I’ll get a shot instead of an actual drink. Or, I’ll go out tonight, but I’ll bring my own alcohol. Or another situation is where people will be like “let’s get tickets for a show.” One of my friends offered to get tickets for the show, and I said sure, expecting it to be like $15. It was $30. And I didn’t want it to be a thing. She offered to pay the difference, but I just couldn’t bear that. Thankfully, I’m not in a place where paying those dollars will literally put me out of food or drinks for two weeks. I’ll just have to skimp on getting food off campus for a while. I’m very lucky not to be in a place where it’s going to make a huge difference for my academics or social career. I’ve also never really talked to my suite about this, because it’s not as if I'm very much struggling...it’s hard to talk about this stuff, because everyone’s in a different place, and everyone feels their economic burden differently.
One of my closest friends works at one of my jobs with me. He’s African-American and from just outside of DC, and he doesn’t ever talk about the fact that he’s always working there. I guess at first I thought, oh, he just really loves the job, that’s why he’s taking all these shifts. And then I realized that there might be, and I don’t want to assume, but there might be another reason why he’s working there. Talking with him, we’ve gotten to be closer friends this year, he wants to live abroad for a while, and so he’s saving up money so he can do that. Talking with him, especially this year, I remember it was the afternoon after there was a confrontation between African-American students and Dean Holloway at the Women’s Table, and I came in for my shift, and we had this intense conversation, really wonderful, where we were both really emotional, and he was telling me stories about times he’s faced discrimination here, and felt fear from walking down the street late at night and there’s a white student walking down the street and they walk across the street or walk faster or something...very visible things. Which I think I’ve always been peripherally aware of, but haven’t ever really thought about consciously.
The extracurricular group I’m involved in hasn’t been very diverse in the past few years in terms of race and class. We’ve talked a lot about how we can improve our diversity, especially during the recruitment time early in the year. How do we make it so that we are attractive to all types of people? It’s obviously been a very uncomfortable conversation for a lot of people in the group. We had an alum of the group comment on how white we were in a recent photo of us. And we had to explain to the alumni, because obviously, we’re trying, but how do you go about…. We’re so homogenous now, that it projects an image that we’ll have for the next years, and it snowballs. I feel like this is something we talk about in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classes a lot, the classic problem of white women asking why brown women aren’t showing up to “feminist” events. It’s been easy for me to read about those situations and think down on those white women, but when it’s an actual group that I’ve invested time in, it’s an actual nitty-gritty problem. So, how are we going to fix this?
It’s also limited my choices for the summer. I’m not able to take an unpaid internship for the summer, at all, which has very much limited my options. I was paid pretty well every summer to do that, but I was living at home and wasn’t doing anything “useful” for my resume. And so this summer I was faced with the terror of “Okay, now I need to actually do something, but what can I do while still getting paid?” I had this really terrible, tearful phone call with my mother where I was like, “Hey, I’m applying to all these cool fellowships where I can do research abroad for my senior thesis, and I can get this much money!” And she would say, “But what about...earning money?” Because I can’t keep the fellowship money for myself, so I have to spend it while I’m there, and I just had a moment where reality hit me. I had forgotten about that, because I was working at a summer camp every other summer and I was earning money, and that was just what I was doing. But once I was out of that preset job where I earned money, it was like, what about all of the other things I want to do? Why should I have to take a hit from my financial situation in order to do research for my senior thesis, which I need to graduate?
Now that I’m 21 and all my friends are 21, it’s a lot more normal to suggest getting drinks together, which can get very, very expensive. I’ve noticed that I started spending so much more money than I’m used to. I’m taking five hours of classes right now, so I’ve had to compensate by working fewer hours. So it’s like, I’ll go to the bar and maybe I’ll get a shot instead of an actual drink. Or, I’ll go out tonight, but I’ll bring my own alcohol. Or another situation is where people will be like “let’s get tickets for a show.” One of my friends offered to get tickets for the show, and I said sure, expecting it to be like $15. It was $30. And I didn’t want it to be a thing. She offered to pay the difference, but I just couldn’t bear that. Thankfully, I’m not in a place where paying those dollars will literally put me out of food or drinks for two weeks. I’ll just have to skimp on getting food off campus for a while. I’m very lucky not to be in a place where it’s going to make a huge difference for my academics or social career. I’ve also never really talked to my suite about this, because it’s not as if I'm very much struggling...it’s hard to talk about this stuff, because everyone’s in a different place, and everyone feels their economic burden differently.
One of my closest friends works at one of my jobs with me. He’s African-American and from just outside of DC, and he doesn’t ever talk about the fact that he’s always working there. I guess at first I thought, oh, he just really loves the job, that’s why he’s taking all these shifts. And then I realized that there might be, and I don’t want to assume, but there might be another reason why he’s working there. Talking with him, we’ve gotten to be closer friends this year, he wants to live abroad for a while, and so he’s saving up money so he can do that. Talking with him, especially this year, I remember it was the afternoon after there was a confrontation between African-American students and Dean Holloway at the Women’s Table, and I came in for my shift, and we had this intense conversation, really wonderful, where we were both really emotional, and he was telling me stories about times he’s faced discrimination here, and felt fear from walking down the street late at night and there’s a white student walking down the street and they walk across the street or walk faster or something...very visible things. Which I think I’ve always been peripherally aware of, but haven’t ever really thought about consciously.
The extracurricular group I’m involved in hasn’t been very diverse in the past few years in terms of race and class. We’ve talked a lot about how we can improve our diversity, especially during the recruitment time early in the year. How do we make it so that we are attractive to all types of people? It’s obviously been a very uncomfortable conversation for a lot of people in the group. We had an alum of the group comment on how white we were in a recent photo of us. And we had to explain to the alumni, because obviously, we’re trying, but how do you go about…. We’re so homogenous now, that it projects an image that we’ll have for the next years, and it snowballs. I feel like this is something we talk about in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classes a lot, the classic problem of white women asking why brown women aren’t showing up to “feminist” events. It’s been easy for me to read about those situations and think down on those white women, but when it’s an actual group that I’ve invested time in, it’s an actual nitty-gritty problem. So, how are we going to fix this?
