The first part of these series took way longer than I thought. I owe it to my ability to pick up unimportant details really effectively; perhaps I should work more on the retention of actual valuable information. The saga continues after I had a very enlightening winter break, by which I mean I got to go home and ascertain just how much I missed being on campus within one short stint of returning to where I had exclusively lived.
ECON 121: Intermediate Microeconomics
Another oft-considered milestone of the Global Affairs major is the completion of Intermediate Microeconomics. At this point of Yale, I have pretty much settled on my preference of Global Affairs over Ethics, Politics, & Economics. Knowing that I will complete a STEM-heavy major (somewhat due to OPT extension policy), I looked to this other major as more of a practically oriented foray into social design questions I have long loved. Even with EP&E, I would still have to complete ECON 121. Picking this class seemed like a sensible choice.
Except it could have been an impermissible choice. At Yale, AP, SAT Subject Test, or IB results do not let you waive any requirements; they sometimes allow you to take a higher-level class. For ECON, everyone is required to follow the exact sequence of Introductory Microeconomics > Intermediate Microeconomics or Introductory Macroeconomics > Intermediate Macroeconomics. These four classes, along with other intro-level ECON classes at Yale, follow a very rigid curve of 1/6 A, 1/3 A-, 1/3 B+, and 1/6 B, especially because they assign people who drop the course to the B-/C tail of the curve to protect those that stuck with the course. This was especially challenging in the Introductory sequence, when tales of people getting 99 and an A- were rumored because the material was not challenging enough and too many people earned extra credits.
I was egged on to try Intermediate Microeconomics by Joon, who at this point was also hooked on the idea that prerequisites at Yale are almost never strictly enforced. I coyly showed up to a 200-person lecture hall, situated in the thematic Whitney Humanities Center that later characterized both Joon’s and my second semester, and sat down amid a sea of people whose major could be anywhere between Math to Sociology (or both). I remember coming up to Professor Chalioti and asking if I am even allowed to take the class. She asked me, ‘Are you confident in math?’ I just said yes. She said I could take it.
It was also fortunate for me that I was not in attendance for the second lecture. Every semester, Yale classes would commence on Wednesdays, but then the Monday classes in the subsequent week would be cancelled. They would then require students and professors to conduct Monday class schedules on that one Friday in the middle, and cancelled Friday classes. However, this Friday in the spring semester is canonically the second day of YMUN conference, for which all Secretariat members would be asked to not attend unless they would be penalized for lack of participation (i.e., unless these classes were seminars). Intermediate Microeconomics was not. It also traditionally hosted a weed-out class on its second lecture, where the professor would just dump all the math that there is to learn in the course in one slideshow, to the dismay of at least half the class and prompting at least one-eighth to drop on the spot. I do not know if I would have stayed had I attended this lecture. Many of the faces that I were familiar with in the first lecture did in fact drop.
Intermediate Microeconomics marked one of the first classes that I learned a concept before the course that is supposed to introduce it to me taught me. This time it is the technique of constraint optimization, which Multivariable Calculus only brought up after the first midterm. The course could be summarized in terms of applying computation to economics concepts that people would have learned in the introductory equivalent, encoding them in formulas like the Slutsky equation. I was not too peeved with the mathematical evolution of the class, but I did not anticipate that the vocal majority of the course would be. In my opinion, Professor Chalioti placed a heavier emphasis on the graphical interpretations of economic solutions. The math was rather mundane. This hypothesis was vindicated when I later tutored for a different Professor, who was way more mathematically rigorous in her problem sets.
My work buddy in this class was Brian Cho, who lived on the fifth floor of the C entryway in Vandy in a mixed-gender suite; through Brian I also met Philena, who at this point was an honorary Branford resident. The marginal reduction in course anxiety brought on by having friends taking the same class is no difference here than elsewhere, but the stroke of luck I hit was when we discovered we were the three of the eight people with a perfect score on the first midterm. Not only did this cure me of all the imposterdom I had, but it also created a funny tale between me and Joon when he took the class in the subsequent semester and was unjustly taken one point away from the same midterm.
The biggest takeaways from ECON 121 were about the optimization problem that could rationalize many individual behavior, the economic arguments related to insurance, and how tiered pricing worked. It was one of the classes that I prided myself on mastering its material the most, and I proceeded to peer tutor for it the most times, until my penultimate semester.
SOCY 170: Contesting Injustice
Knowing that I was interested in learning Italian in the summer as part of my language requirements, I was on a sprint to find a suitable Writing credit. I had previously shopped an ENGL 114 seminar, and felt really uncomfortable with the idea of being critiqued for my writing style instead of my content. This is not to say that there is no merit to the former, but I sought feedback that did not so obviously disengage my points from their mechanical delivery. My principle became to take Writing classes from the departments whose fields are also of my practical interest (Political Science, Sociology, even Environmental Science): if a political scientist do not buy my argument, then I am fully convinced to change.
The issue was that this greatly limited the options available to me as a first-year. I was at the bottom of any priority lists for class enrollment, while I was already picky about the course topics. My plans for a GLBL Writing seminar hosted by a practicing journalist fell through when I showed up in a room of 45 students vying for 18 slots. One of my friends recommended me look into a class he took that had an optional writing credit; it turned out the class, “Moral Foundations of Politics”, or MoFoPo, was the one I already self-studied on Coursera and even wrote it into my Why Yale essay. But the other option in the PLSC department was Contesting Injustice, and it felt like an acceptable compromise.
The class seated neatly within a Watson Hall lecture room, with more Teaching Assistants than I felt necessary. The professor was a stern but calming figure, who was very passionate about the topic of instruction (that is, a theoretical underpinning of her corpus on El Salvadorian protests). It harkened back to the Marxist overtones of my Vietnamese education, highlighting the class struggles and revolutionary tactics that safeguarded the indigenous communities of Central America. But it also confronted me with two components of class realities that previous dialectical readings failed to satiate me with. First was the role of religion. Liberation theology was an essential catalytical factor in the progression of El Salvadorian grassroots movement, creating ideological unity and invoking emotional responses to repression across a large base of the population. Conversely, it was arguably the French Christian missionaries that sought to evangelize Cochinchina that initiated the rift between the Vietnamese North and South, with the victorious Tonkin rooted in historical Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist teachings. There necessitates my admission that if the goal is to organize and mobilize, then a materialist understanding of the community is cannot adequately capture its characteristics. Church was also instrumental in many liberation movements in the US mid-20th century, and could be used as a tenable cross-class space that holds all mortality in the smae lighting. The method of movement cannot be rigidly applied from its theory–which brings me to my next lesson, that change can start small and creatively. My fondest memory of the class is when I succeeded in writing about how sound is used within the protestors’ toolkit in South Korea, evidencing a video of Ewha Womans University students chanting Into the New World in light of the presidential scandal. Power can and should be understood with the contextual nuance and flexibility, especially if you are more concerned with longtermist goals than a military commander-in-chief.
The final assignment of this course culminated in an eyebrow-raising tale I am surprised has not recurred in my life. I discovered that I have a tendency to dry heave whenever stressed. It could be before a badminton match; it most frequently is in anticipation of an exam. The point is that I became so perniciously concerned with how prepared I am for a test that my body involuntarily makes unprompted gagging noises. I first noticed this in grade 9, and had already become inured to instances of retching by college. I never actually vomitted, but I would sound pretty convincing. Except for maybe two of my high school friends and my parents, no fellow test-takers had eyed at me scrupulously or complained to me, so I felt pretty confident about keeping this habit to myself as I worked through solving its root causes.
Imagine the scene. It was the last week of classes, by whose end all classes must have finished all instructional activities to leave room for reading week and finals. On Monday, I came down with a debilitating fever, incessant coughing, and no ability to stay alert for more than two hours. Yale Health could not figure out what exactly I had, so they sent me away to rest with a doctor’s note to my Dean allowing me to ask for extensions at professors’ discretion. I had two pseudo-finals within the week: one for this class on Wednesday, and one for Orgo Lab on Friday. As member of the Writing section, I was only required to sit the 35-minute multiple-choice component of the exam. The professor seemed reluctant to administer a make-up exam past that Friday lest such event should interfere with college policies, so she asked if I could take the test an hour before my Friday lab practical. I said yes. I felt better-ish by Thursday, and to ensure my odds I took Tylenol an hour before my test.
What I had forgotten were the dry-heaving demons, my inner saboteurs, that conjured as I sat down waiting for my proctor’s forewords. He informed me that he had printed out a wrong copy, so he excused himself for five minutes. A brewing sensation of angst-ridden dread overtook my stomach: I had forgotten to eat before drinking Tylenol, and I started dry-heaving a bit too realistically. I dashed out of the testing room, there seated another student also in need of a make-up exam, and did not return until I had actually coughed up whatever left in my stomach. My brief descriptions of what just happened, however, sounded alarming to the proctoring graduate student, who probably worried that the teaching staff was pushing me to sit this exam a bit too far just for their convenience, enough that he told me to take as much time as I needed, find another room for myself, and inform the professor who wasted no time to ask if I was physically well enough to continue. The truth is that that exam was on the easier side, and I had already felt confident about the other 92.5% of the grade. I had to leave on time for my next exam anyway, more embittered about the fact that I could no longer claim that I never wet-heaved than the context of the exam itself.
CHEM 223L: Organic Chemistry Lab II
After trodding through the first semester of lab heavily scathed, I made sure to alter my game plan when it came time for course registration. I signed up for the Friday afternoon session, both to maximize my chances of being randomly put in a lab group that did not have my previous TA and to no longer have back-to-back classes through my lunch on Wednesdays like I used to do. The surprise was that Professor DiMeglio intentionally grouped all the first-years together, and unknowingly put my previous TA in my section as well. I was one of three students who had her for both semesters, and we took some solidarity in our successful endurance (again, no shade to her).
To be honest, this semester’s was not bad. I knew the structure of wet lab procedures way more, prepared myself mentally for post-lab assignments in advance, and at some point even discovered that I was sticking to the rules a bit too well. I had the highest yield for one of the only experiments suitable to host such a intra-section competition, while there was Jack, three hoods downstream from my station, who would intentionally truncate his experimental time to leave lab early (his yield that day was 4%). I no longer had just one pair of sneakers, there were no scoring decisions I took offence to, and I made a lot more friendships with my labmates feeling more comfortable with being in a STEM circle. Everything went smoothly.
CHEM 175: First-year Organic Chemistry II
During winter break my class (the populations for CHEM 174 and 175 overlap substantially) seemed to have had a collective awakening. At least among the study groups I was familiar with, everyone recognized both the privilege of being curved up from a minimum 78% to an A and the absurdity of the educational rollercoaster we just experienced. It felt like winning the lottery tickets to the first-ever experience of a hyperloop train, surviving the fast-track journey aghast, and only gradually unraveling the details of what happened once you had exited the terminal. Come the next first day of classes I could tell a lot of people had dropped; there was one newcomer, but many learned of the regular Organic Chemistry sequence’s absolute normality and made peace with that. I toyed with that idea for a while, and decided it was not worth waking up at 9AM for.
The second semester was taught first by Professor Ellman, and Professor Miller resumed before the second midterm. The two professors’ teaching styles had an indistinguishably similar level of charisma, but Professor Ellman’s exam was decidedly easier. It was close to what we learned from the textbook and mimicked the difficulty of his practice exam, a feat so foreign to students of the class that it was hard to convince the only newcomer that last semester was really brutal. It also reminded me that I liked harder exams, as mistakes committed through carelessness are more likely to be forgiven or extenuated. Once Professor Miller took over, it was business as usual. I remember the TA gave us a few questions to solve in section in preparation of the exam, which once again turned out to comprise solely of previous exam questions in the graduate-level organic chemistry course. Our final question on the final challenged us to draw a mechanism towards the synthesis of cubane, undoubtedly never previously mentioned in any capacity in the course.
Over the span of this course, I discovered that I did not want to become a chemist. I liked chemistry, but I just rejected the notion of writing grants and doing small-molecule lab work on a regular basis. I still became obsessed with NMR, which I was told was invented in the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory we studied in many renovations prior, and could have attempted to take the senior-level synthetic organic chemistry class had I already decided against the Chemistry major. I chanced upon a plethora of similarly ambitious classmates that I only befriended after continually seeing them at the Lunar Ball, some study room in Bass, and office hours (the common denominator was one of my favorites James Han). Funnily enough, I became reassured about my capabilities in the sciences after making a group chat with two of my friends who had won Gold at VChO (one won Gold at IChO) and being told that my practice problems were similar to the materials being used to train international olympiad team members. Somehow in a year of sprinting I was on par with students who studied chemistry exclusively their entire high school.
MATH 120: Multivariable Calculus
Multivariable Calculus is also known as Calculus 3, and it is the portion of introductory calculus that is not covered by AP curriculum. At Yale, this class has accumulated insurmountable notoriety. Everyone and their mother bemoaned the class, culminating in a YDN feature that few other courses in the history of Yale had earned the honor. My original intent coming into the first semester was to take MATH 230 (which is the proof-based class you can take if you feel confident in skipping all the introductory math classes). I ended up not feeling up to it, under the guise that I would have to move between Old Campus and Science Hill within 15 minutes (a very fair excuse). By the second semester the highest math class available to me was MATH 120, and why not at this point.
MATH 120 was structured really distinctly. Normally large courses have a professor teaching with many graduate students as TAs managing weekly discussion sections. This course (and all courses below its level) splits students up into sections, each with a different graduate student acting as the instructor and sole point of communication, while one supervising ‘professor’ helps rectify inconsistencies across sections. I learned later in the course that the instructor never grades, but senior students are hired to conduct blind grading irrespective of the teacher; therefore, the instructor might estimate the performance of students by proxy of their engagement in class, but never really knows their weaknesses beyond the scores they are assigned from exams. I think this understandably caused ruckus within the student body who was advertised a very personalized classroom experience. I guess I was lucky with the instructor for my class being the second most highly rated among those teaching that semester. She also introduced me to yerba mate.
Most multivariable calculus curricula are standardized across tertiary institutions; ours follow the Early Transcendentals textbook. The first half of the course teaches vector representations in three-dimensional space and some vector calculus, which happened to already have been covered by the geometry portion of Vietnamese high school math. I breezed through the first month and a half, slightly confused as to why people found the class frustrating, only to underperform in the second midterm when they started covering double/triple integrations and pertinent theorems. In truth, I was not complacent; the exams had a tricky True/False section that took up 20-25% of the grade, and all my wrong answers were there. All was good with the finals, but only after I was taught the lessons of precaution the hard way.
International Relations Symposium at Yale
My journey with YIRA continued right after YMUN when I was informed I would be part of IRSY, a local conference hosted only by first-years. There were eight of us: two Secretaries-General as one inexperienced leader would be insufficient, and most other roles condensed to the bare necessities of a working conference. I was co-leading with Claudia, who till this day remained one of the individuals I maintained an unwavering belief in their future success (based on a combination of personal ethics, dedication, and talent). I became close with so many friends that became constants in my Yale experience, like Claire, who would continue to lead YMUN, Ananya, who would spend half a spring break with me at the UN gushing over the unparalleled opportunities we had been blessed with before our first year in college had even ended, and Annie, who would plumb the depths of the human emotional capacity with me through almost every other YIRA event we did together. I remember my first conversation with Annie in Willoughby’s near TD, rushing 15 minutes late from SOM after hearing that Aki would become next year’s YMUN Secretary-General. We found out that we had been in the same Political Science seminar, or that our journeys thus far had had hilarious parallels that deviated from the predominant American education. I later dropped that seminar after being traumatized by a midterm that involved timed essays: I made it my goal to never enroll in a class that would force me to churn out essays of whatever first came to mind until my knuckles could not be cracked anymore. Annie, on the other hand, came out of the class with way more that was needed for an A.
IRSY played a weird institutional position in YIRA. I was expected to still carry a conference to fruition, yet I had no expectations of managing the finances as it would be outsourced to Board. The conference actually was not considered on the same level as other YIRA constituents; it fell under the realm of the Executive Director, who would try their best to pamper as much as superintend us. The logistics of the conference was a taste of how nightmarish any conference organizing would be. We had to maneuver through countless other events on campus that similarly booked all the rooms in a building, set up outreach channels to schools once we found the one good weekend to organize, and coordinate speakers to pack a full day of activities. Annie, Joon, and I had to haul human-sized speakers across four blocks of unevenly tiled pavements and set up all the sound system fit for a panel of four speakers between noon and 3PM in the Whiney Humanities Center auditorium. Claudia was stressed after being caught in the middle of a feud between two workshop hosts who turned out to be friends the entire time. Compared to the median conference execution experience in Vietnam, the upsides were that the finances were never a headache and the quest for location did not involve signing contracts as an underage highschooler. The downsides, or I guess the novelties to me, were that there were a lot more emphasis on liability in handling with high school students as I was the adult in the conversation. Collecting waivers for media release was a legal necessity, just not a fun experience.
Vanderbilt C32
If my first-semester experience within Branford was with my froco group, then my second-semester social circle extended to our door neighbors in entryway C. Our first suite-to-suite interaction occured when we figured out that the fire escape door in Vanderbilt did not actually sound off when opened. Their suite was the only suite on the third floor of the adjacent entryway, housing four men whose range of personalities was much more expansive than our suite’s, all things considered. There was Alan, the only official finance bro of our group; Himnish, one of the most popular, kind-hearted, and industrious people I knew at Yale; Elliott, with two Ts, a Michigan native who announced to everyone after his last final that he would be transferring away from Yale; and Matt, an iconic staple in our group whose unrelatable college horrors had never left us lacking in entertainment. We decided to merge the suites: my suite was the messy side with the booze, and theirs was the neat TV setup. It was on their couch that I spent cocooned in layers of blanket, morbidly ill my last week of classes, surprised that someone played Jam Jam by IU during Spring Fling, and petrified at the cacophony of gun shots used as hooks during Lil Uzi Vert’s sets.
With a properly functional common room our friend group was able to host more activities. We watched Sex Education and American Horror Story Season 1 together, which ended up prompting us to chip in for a gimp suit that Elliot wore marching around Old Campus. We trained ourselves for First-year Olympics, which Elliot was the proud leader for Branford, and watched Matt annihilate every other e-sports athlete at Super Smash Bros. (Branford typically placed last in intramural activities, which was no difference from Khối Anh at Ams). We hooked Matt up with his date for First-year Formal, who turned out to be the one Yale case involved in the Varsity Blue scandal. I started having my personal belongings misplaced more often, now that visitors could come in through one door and leave through another. Kofi, one of our additions to the suite the following year, would keep taking my bathroom slippers and put it on the opposite end of the mega-suite. We were perpetually unkempt, our disorganization tolerance only punctuated with self-promises of cleanliness before events like Bulldog Days would happen. At some point we tried to draft a suite constitution, but that only lasted within the missing hour of Daylight Saving Time. As we entered the lottery for next year’s housing, our suites decided to ‘clip’ together: we could enter the lottery as two separate entries, and we would both be given the better number of the two. In the end, my suite moved to E13 in Branford, and theirs was our vertical neighbor E22.
Yale Movement: Ddu-du Ddu-du
My first semester with dancing and dance-directing rendered me thrilled for more. My friend Chloe, the only other first-year directing a dance last semester, and I decided that it would be a bit less strenuous to co-direct a dance, and our mutual enthusiasm for K-Pop landed us on Ddu-du Ddu-du pretty easily. Chloe even found a dance cover with six dancing members so that we would be able to accommodate more non-directors. To this day I believe that Ddu-du Ddu-du is BLACKPINK’s best title track, and the view count on Youtube shares my sentiment.
Co-directing a fan favorite song helped discipline me a lot. Chloe was very on track with us knowing the nitty gritty of the choreography, and I otherwise would have never found the energy to fulfill my responsibilities as one of the leaders of the group. I also felt like the nuances in the rhythm and production became more apparent as I had genuinely listened to the track repeatedly; conversely, I also assumed a burden to do the song justice. Knowing the choreography instinctively by the end made for a cool stunt when I was part of the Yale MUN Korea Secretariat in Seoul later that year.
Ending Notes
This piece started a month after I finished the first part, and it took more than half a year later for me to commit to writing it in full. I have a lot of inertial resistance, whether it is to changes in my daily lives through adding a favorable habit or to defending my stance in a sufficiently important argument. I have actively tried to mitigate this trait as I grow into adulthood and scour the Earth for new activities to do in my free time, admitting to myself that there is a difference between taking my time and wasting it.
This semester felt exactly like that: a constant balance between probing uncharted territories and protecting myself from emotional hazards. I landed somewhere in the middle, more towards the riskier side, as I emerged victorious from most of my missions. I was comforted by the never-ending expansion of my social networks, the joy of making instant heartfelt peer connections, and the realization that I had found my footing amid this hectic campus. Heck, the Ambassador from Vietnam to the UN invited me to his home for dinner, a French embassy youth representative connected with me to speak at IRSY, and Mitchell’s parents welcomed me with open arms when I visited southern Virginia for a week. The biggest letdown of the semester was when I went to the Commission for Social Development, owing to YIRA’s 501(c)3 status, and found out that the United Nations, with its procedures and speeches, was actually pretty close to how Model UN sessions looked like. Joon agreed that it felt almost anticlimactic to realize that all the flak we had heaped on MUN for its banality, feigned substance, and self-importance, gave a pretty accurate depiction of how we perceived the UN plenary sessions we attended. Other than that, I had to see for myself how seasonal depression was very real, but Yale really whetted my appetite for so much more professionally and personally.