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This week I interviewed Austin Wang, a first-year student at Yale University. He graduated from Northwood High School last year (class of 2021). I’d gotten to know him through orchestra and MUSE (Musicians United for Service and Entertainment; a school club dedicated to bringing music to community members through performances). I’ve been in the same senior center performances during my freshman and sophomore year. I also recall some of the most interesting presentations he gave during the club meetings last year, one of which was using machine learning libraries to create sound and music, and the process of doing so through python code on Codelabs. A brilliant violinist, programmer and an entrepreneur, he is extremely talented in many areas including in physics and computer science. Throughout high school, I’ve asked him several times about academics & extracurriculars, and I can say that he is undoubtedly one of the most inspiring people. He is now a Yale student, taking on various subjects and studies. After recently seeing his Instagram stories and posts of the campus during the midterm season, I wondered what his life was like as a college student and how he felt about the college experience. I decided to reach out to him to find out!
Bian Lee: What are you currently majoring in?
Austin Wang: I'm a first-year at Yale University in Berkeley College, one of Yale's twelve residential colleges in the system, and I'm thinking about double majoring in Mathematics and Physics & Computer Science and Economics (or maybe Statistics & Data Science). To be honest, I'm not completely sure yet, so I'm definitely taking some time to explore a bunch of different fields and hopefully figure it out sometime before my junior year.
Bian: What are some of your interests at the moment?
Austin: I'm still very interested in astronomy and astrophysics as I was in high school, and I'm taking a first-year-seminar called "Expanding Ideas in Time and Space" with a fantastic professor in a class of 15 students. Yale has these cool small "seminar" classes of varying fields and focuses, and I've really enjoyed my time debating about how we perceive time, dabbling through Einstein's equations, Lorentz Transformations, tensors, and all that fun stuff! Lately, I've been very interested in exoplanet search, and there's a lab that I'm hoping to join soon! Asteroid mining is also intriguing to me because there's an economic argument that can be made -- can we hypothetically crash certain sectors of the market of natural resources if we figured out how to extract resources from asteroids?
Another one of my classes, Game Theory, has really changed how I perceive social and physical phenomena in the world -- did you know lots of theories in political science, biology, extraterrestrial life, war, poker, and more can be explained and analyzed with game theory? Learning stuff like the Prisoners' Dilemma, where I learned that Yale students are evil, Median Voter Theorem, and Partnership Games, I'm just very fascinated about how models can attempt to explain the world and how it works. Starting with simple models and then making them more detailed and complicated to improve their accuracy is really the way to go! But unlike mathematics, you can't always prove things will work out rigorously. I'd say that my proof-based Linear Algebra class has been very challenging but rewarding. The problem sets have been notoriously difficult and long (as it's all proofs!) and the spontaneous Putnam problems have really incited me and many of my classmates to rush office hours, begging TA's for hints and answers. Honestly, it really cultivates a different sense of community when you're all struggling together (this is a good thing)!
But besides academics and research, I've developed a newfound appreciation for the emphasis on the arts. I'm currently a violinist in the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and I'm especially looking forward to some of the cool events like the YSO Halloween Show, where members of the orchestra can act for a pre-recorded film and play alongside the film in-person in front of hundreds of students all dressed up in costumes. We actually have a concert on 10/16, and it'll be live-streamed directly on YSO's Youtube Channel!
Bian: What do you find different about college from high school and what do you like the best about college?
Austin: The main difference is that college makes you more independent. You have a lot more freedom to do whatever you want to do, explore new passions, make new friends, go to hangouts, and choose classes. In college, there is a lot less structured time (you can even skip classes if you want -- but not recommended!), so you can budget time to do other things. However, this freedom also comes with responsibility. You're now in charge of cleaning your room, doing laundry every week, taking out the trash, and a lot more logistical housekeeping things on top of your coursework and social life -- you make your own schedule. It's actually been very fun becoming more independent as I can now spend less time on things that don't interest me and more on those that I'm passionate about.
Academically, college emphasizes a lot more on the concept of "office hours." You're really expected to go to office hours if you need support or help on anything, or if you just want to collaborate with your peers on problem-sets. This makes it very easy for students to approach them for office hours and research lab opportunities. I'd also say that college has a lot less busy work than high school, and everything you do in a class is essentially meaningful in preparing you for the next step. On that note, I'd say that the academic rigor at Yale as of now is definitely on the tougher end of the spectrum, so I'm trying my best to adjust -- for example, I've never been challenged at the level of taking a mentally rigorous four and a half hour midterm in-person at an auditorium full of people. (I promise that it doesn't sound as bad as it seems!) But overall, I'd say that if you're up for the challenge, you'll find these classes to be very rewarding!
My favorite thing about college so far are the social connections that I've made. Yale has an unique residential college system in which it matches students into one of 14 residential colleges, and I think that it really fosters a community of collaboration and inclusiveness. Within these residential colleges, each dorm has a common room that really encourages students to socialize, work together on projects, or study through midterms, and this has created a unique sense of bonding for me. At least, my suitemates are all pretty close with each other, and we regularly chip in to play a bunch of games and other stuff, if we're not too busy. And, it's also super cool that I can sit at a random table in one of our residential dining halls and talk to other students about some random subjects that they're studying -- I find these discussions to be very intellectually stimulating, and you always learn something new talking to someone studying a field totally foreign to you (like Russian Literature or Ethnicity, Race, and Migration). I'd say that one really cool thing about Yale is that most residential colleges have game rooms with pool tables, ping-pong tables, foosball, pin-ball machines, arcade machines, even an indoor, underground basketball court and movie theater. It's really nice to hang out in these common areas and play a few games with friends to relieve the stress of classes. Also, there's a "buttery" thing at Yale that allows you to get food for a cheap price from 11PM to 1AM. I find this very helpful when I decide that I'm going to stay up and need a late night snack (although I don't recommend staying up too late).
I also really enjoy the personalized attention and size of classes at Yale, which has been very helpful as I figure out my schedules, majors, classes, and life. Freshman seminars and smaller discussion sections for classes have really allowed me to learn better and bond better with my peers. I'd say that Yale is very undergraduate learning focused, so the professors are all expected to teach and to help facilitate the learning process even while continuing with their research endeavors -- as a result, they're all very approachable and friendly towards students.
Bian: What are some goals you have for the next few years?
Austin: I'd love to find out what I want to do with my life. I also know that this is a really hard question, and I'll hopefully have a fraction of the answer by graduation. Some goals in mind are to obtain a well-rounded education, get my degree, make some new friends, run a marathon, create something cool (very vague), and keep pursuing my interests to the fullest extent. It'd be fun to really explore the East Coast and also decide where I want to live or work in the future. As for a career, I'll hopefully be trying out a bunch of different options to figure it out. Maybe I'll go to grad school. As for now, I just really want to have fun and live the four years of my life that I'll never get back! Lastly, if anyone has any additional questions for me or if you want to learn more about Yale, feel free to reach out!