Two weeks at Yale
On Yale Young Global Scholars, and why it was the best fortnight of my education
Abstract
A note on the Innovations in Science and Technology session at Yale Young Global Scholars, and on the specific thing that made it different from school.
I spent two weeks this August at Yale, on the Innovations in Science and Technology session of Yale Young Global Scholars. It was the best fortnight of my education so far, and since I have been asked about it several times since, it seems worth writing down why.
The obvious answer is the teaching, and the teaching was very good. But that is not actually what made the difference. School teaches you well too. What school cannot easily do is put you in a room with a few hundred people your own age, drawn from dozens of countries, who are all interested in something and none of whom have any reason to pretend otherwise.
That last part matters more than I expected. At school there is a low but constant tax on visible enthusiasm. You learn to hold an interest slightly at arm's length, in case it is the wrong one to have. At YYGS that tax simply was not being collected. People said what they were working on, at length, without hedging, and then asked you what you were working on and actually listened to the answer. Within about two days I had stopped rounding my own interests down.
The second thing was the range. The session was built around innovation in science and technology, and the people there approached it from every direction: some were interested in the engineering, some in the medicine, some in the policy, and a few, like me, were mostly interested in what any of it does to an economy. I had assumed those were separate conversations. They are not, and finding that out in a seminar room with people who each held one piece of it was worth more than reading about it for a term.
What I took back was smaller than a conclusion and more useful than one. I had been treating my interest in economics and my interest in building things as two separate accounts, one for school and one for the rest of the week. Two weeks of being asked what I was working on, by people who wanted the real answer rather than the tidy one, made that separation look like an affectation rather than a fact. I have not kept it up since.
The thing I keep returning to is how unremarkable all of it felt while it was happening, and how much it stood out afterwards. Nobody there was performing being clever. They were just interested, out loud, in front of each other, for two weeks. I would go again tomorrow.