On Writing Well

My biggest complaint about the Yale education is that my level of writing has actually deteriorated over the past two and a half years. During spring break, I picked up a book from my freshman year writing class, called On Writing Well. After reading it, I realized that a lot of junk has crept back into my writing. Sometimes I believe that I am doing negative learning by writing papers for some of my classes. The writing that is most important to me is short essays, articles, and speeches. But when I write for my classes I fall into an academic writing style that is opposed to much of what I have learned about good writing. I don't think is just me - the papers of others that I read show a similar excessive wordiness. I was hoping that this blog would give me an opportunity to do some writing the way I wanted to. Unfortunately, between trying not to fail classes and working on all my software projects, there simply hasn't been the time. I have about ten saved drafts of posts that I was not able to work on enough to publish. But that's ok. For now, programming is what I want to do. I will return to writing later in life.

Business and the Academy Don't Mix

I wanted to check out some of the top business books recommended by 800CEOREAD, so I decided to search the Yale Library catalog. However, the book did not appear. So then I went to the Yale library's Borrow Direct service where I could search the combined catalogs of every single Ivy League University (except Harvard's cause they very snobbishly didn't join the consortium:-P). Only two of the top ten books at 800CEOREAD were found among the combined 30+ million volumes that these libraries contain. I guess research libraries and libraries for practical use are two different things entirely.

Harvard Sucks: The Video

Mike Kai has now posted a video of the Piersonites pulling off the "We Suck" prank. Check it out at www.harvardsucks.com. The video rocks and you can even buy a poster of the picture shown below.

5,000 Harvard students can't all be wrong

Before the Harvard-Yale football game a band of daring Yale students, led by Mike Kai PC '05, donned red shirts labeled "Harvard Pep Squad" and placed thousands of sheets of red and white construction paper on the Harvard bleachers. Yale may have lost The Game, but every time Harvard scored a touchdown the entire Harvard student body proclaimed to the world their own suckiness: We always knew it, now they admit it. Think this picture will end up in their viewbook? Here's a picture of my suitemate, the fearless and fleet-footed William Niebling, stealing the sacred Harvard flag: (annotations on the picture are not mine) Will, how were you ever brave enough to challenge those terrifying Harvard male cheerleaders?

From the Yale Herald:

When asked at the UOC meeting why the parental contribution was so high, [Deputy Provost Lloyd] Smith responded that Yale's policy is to expect families to share in "the joy of paying for a college education" and to make "lifestyle changes."

This makes me really angry. There are too many families out there who live under constant stress because both parents are working so many hours to pay for their child's education. My own dad is forced commute an hour and a half each way to work, at a time when he should be winding down and thinking about retirement. It is also terrible that we will lose bright young adults to jobs such as investment banking so that they can pay off college debts, instead of having them follow their passions into work that may not pay a lot, but be of great value. The Deputy Provost's comment would be bad enough if Yale needed to charge such a tuition in order to give us an extraordinary education. But this is not the case, as I will hopefully explain in the future.