This is part 2 of my recap of Yale’s Multicultural Open House. You can find part 1 right here.

This is more a fun, quick note than anything else.

We were given meal tickets to go eat in residential colleges’ dining halls during the day, and I got a nice picture of dining at Yale. This was much bolstered by articles about Aramark and dining services in some publications that I got later that day (see below). Anyways, as I walked into the nice dining hall at Pierson I noticed one thing first: grapes. People had grapes, white and red, everywhere. And fruit! Fresh fruit such as I was never used to seeing in a dining hall. I did have a worry that this might be a distinctly American University type situation–i.e., as when I was at AU for an NSLC program for a few weeks, and the food was quite good but there was almost no variety. One of the student papers I collected said that “better quality, less variety” was the new trend, which is better than the reverse. At the very worst, there is always fresh fruit.

Lunching in the residential colleges also gave me the perfect opportunity to search high and low for as many student publications as possible. I asked some of the student recruitment coordinators where I could find a copy of the Yale Daily News, but no one was particularly helpful– “around somewhere” was the general answer, it being the weekend. In Pierson I found The Yale Herald and The Misfit, and was able to come by the Daily News from Friday somewhere on the way back to Old Campus. I found all the publications I picked up quite interesting but I found the Misfit to be very cute; it seemed like the sort of thing an admissions office would not be handing out to parents, but I still enjoyed it.

I even sent a Facebook message to Susannah Bragg, one of the editors.

Dear Susannah,

I was just dropping a line hello to tell you how much I liked The Misfit. I visited Yale on sat. for the ‘multicultural open house’ which was made all the more exciting for exposing me to the fine publication you edit (a more holistic picture of my ‘open house’ experience can be found at samjackson.org if you have that much time to kill). I looked around on the interweb for an e-mail, but all I saw was the Herald calling the misfit “the most disease-ridden rag on campus.”

Disease-ridden or not, I enjoyed reading it; I did my best to scour Pierson for any / all Yale publications and didn’t get too far, but the misfit was one of them, and it was quite fun.

I especially liked the squirrel repartee… I would have also messaged your co-editor, but your name was listed first, which must mean you are the more important of the two. Either that or ‘bragg’ comes first alphabetically before ‘lewis’ … for the purposes of convenience I’ll assume it is a testament to your preeminence.

anyways hooray for cool student publications.

your fan,
Sam Jackson

Something like the Misfit might not be taken to be five-star recruitment literature, but it says to me “Yale is a campus of diverse opinions.” It says that Yale is a school with its own nice share of quirks and quirky people. I appreciate that.