11 minute read
EDITORIAL
OPINION
ZHANG: Second chances
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The first of Yale’s life lessons you learn is that getting in was only half the battle.
Maybe not even half. There’s schoolwork to contend with, the flurry of a cappella auditions or extracurricular applications, internship cover letters and the CourseTable browsing sessions with all of registration’s course interest applications. There are enough sets of hoops to pass through to make college applications pale by comparison.
A handful of those efforts might come to fruition. Perhaps a seminar will place you on the waitlist if you’re lucky, or you’ll perform just well enough to make callbacks. But you spend most of the time acquainting yourself with rejection emails.
Often, those unassuming invitation flyers or syllabi advertising space for “all levels of experience” don’t quite live up to reality. Yes — prior experience might not be necessary — but it doesn’t help when you’re matching up against others who are vastly more seasoned and qualified. In a place like Yale, you probably had to have picked up the pen in third grade or created a portfolio dense enough at this point to find a seat at that writing workshop. You had to have fallen in love with the violin somewhere between age 6 and 12 to reasonably land a spot with the symphonic orchestra. At times, I’ve felt as if our lives had to be predetermined from the very start of childhood, with every step building incrementally to the success of some grander plan.
The selectiveness is frustrating yet understandable. Not every class or club can cater to the size of the interest they command. There are simply limits to entrance, some of them based on inevitable differences in experience or skill.
But rejection, no matter how soft-handedly dealt, still stings. We’re our harshest critics, and it’s tempting to craft warped narratives in which we are destined for failure when a single application goes awry. Missed out on the internship? Maybe you’ll have nothing to do this summer. Never got into the orchestra? Blame your middle school chair auditions, your musical mediocrity, or those afternoons back in fifth grade when you abandoned Bach to peck at your self-made, sloppy renditions of Taylor Swift. Give up. Call it quits. Pack away the books and felt-lined instrument cases, because maybe you were never cut out for music.
This destructive reflection— this fault-fi nding when outcomes don’t turn out as we’d wanted to— helps no one. We’re not the products of perfect linear plans or fi ve-step self-improvement regimens. When we shape our lives too closely to a self-imposed plan, we succumb to nagging regrets and self-doubt. We deny the fullness of our past selves when we squint through the fi lters of qualifi cations and cover letters.
And yet I wish we could have more opportunities open to everyone, spaces where we can learn to flail
HANWEN and fail with-
ZHANG out the judgment of our Thoughtful peers or future employers,
Spot where there are no trophies to be won or personal reputations to defend.
I’m halfway through my junior year now and five-eighths of the way to graduation, a pair of fractions that escapes every attempt I make to wrap my mind around them. It’s a time when extracurriculars and classes have settled into their familiar groove. I’ve sent out some cover letters for internships; I’ve picked out the usual creative writing courses and filled out the forms; I’ve applied to some extracurriculars, without much success. Life’s routines boil down to a strange kind of clockwork: the sun finishes carving its path across the sky before 4:50 p.m., and from my desk I usually watch the light fade away into a faint smear of yellow off the Malone Engineering Center’s windows. I usually have dinner at 6:30 p.m. or 7:00 p.m., then work or read until 11:00 p.m.. I repeat it all again at 7:00 p.m..
What I’m saying is that we’ve fallen into a predictable stasis, where wills and mights are becoming would-haves and what-ifs. Sometimes there’s a lurking sense of dread, as if it’s too late to begin — as if some of the doors have started closing behind us and can’t be opened again. I’m afraid that others are too far ahead and that I’ve somehow missed out on the chance to begin something new again. I just finished Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being for an English class, and I’m reminded of the ways in which its characters marry, move, and betray each other, failing to shape their lives into anything close to the grand visions they had in mind.
I want the sense of possibility to be as full and alive as it was that first time we stepped through Phelps gate. To do that, we’ll need to open our clubs and classes to accommodate those whose passions and interests make up for their lack of experience. In a place that’s committed to exploration and self-discovery on paper, we should fulfill that promise of bringing more opportunities for everyone.
But maybe the change also comes from within ourselves. We must remember that we still have time. We will always have time. We’ll retry, reapply and start again. It is never too late.
HANWEN ZHANG is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College. His column, “Thoughtful Spot,” runs every other Tuesday. He can be reached at hanwen.zhang.hhz3@yale.edu.
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GUEST COLUMNIST AMELIA PROSTANO
A union yes vote changed my life
COURTESY OF LOCAL 34
It’s a special thing to get to vote in a union representation election. You’re lucky if it happens once in your life, as it did for me in 1984 when I voted for what would become Local 34, the clerical and technical workers’ union at Yale. That vote changed my life, and that union made me who I am. I want to share some of that experience for the members of Local 33, so they can reflect on what this moment means for them.
I first got a job at Yale in the library in the late 1960s, but I left after I got married and became a mother. When I came back in the early 1980s, my starting annual pay was around $10,000—about $30,000 in today’s dollars. But it wasn’t just that we weren’t paid enough: the university’s thousands of clerical and technical workers, mainly women, weren’t respected. I remember after I came back to work, my boss said to me, “It’s nice to have a little pin money, isn’t it?”—as though my family wasn’t depending on this job, as if I wasn’t doing anything of real value.
Thousands of us had experiences like this, which led us to organize and build Local 34—to demand respect and establish our worth, in both symbolic and economic forms. It wasn’t easy going. The university told us we’d never have a union, that we weren’t like the workers in Local 35 for whom a union made sense. (Of course, they’d fought Local 35 tooth and nail too, just as they would later fight Local 33. There isn’t anyone who’s tried to organize a union at Yale who had an easy time.) They told us we’d be fired for organizing on the job, which scared many. But we spent our days and evenings organizing with all our hearts. It was wonderful to walk through the space now called Bass Café (back then it was “Machine City”) and see every table buzzing with discussion as people talked about how to move forward together, signing cards, making plans. Nothing would stop us. We knew we’d win our election, but it was closer than we thought and this only meant we had to work harder to get a first contract. We spent 10.5 weeks on strike at the end of 1984. Yale said we’d never last, that we’d be back in a few days. They thought Local 35 would refuse to honor our picket lines, hoping to play up perceived racial tensions between the workforces. But our sisters and brothers in that union stayed off the job in solidarity.
When we won that contract, we put ourselves on a new path. While we were on strike, my daughter used to come to the picket line with a sign that said, “My mother is striking for my future wage.” She knew what it meant that her mother was fighting for dignity, respect, and equality for women on the job. No contract solves every problem, but we’ve passed that idea on down the generations, as each contract builds on the one before and gets better every time. In those first negotiations, Yale refused to pay our members who were taking time to negotiate on our behalf, so hundreds of us wanted to donate a day to those members negotiating on our behalf. Yale refused. But as part of our first settlement Yale did agree to pay our negotiators. In the negotiations, we had to deal with middle management, who didn’t really have the authority to agree to anything. Today, the university’s vice presidents sit down with us as a matter of course,
and members of our union have the right to take paid time off to work on behalf of the union as a whole. For two decades we have enjoyed labor peace at Yale and settled excellent contracts without strikes—a testament to the power we have built as a union. What we did together changed my life. After I lost my husband in 1995, I didn’t think I’d be able to stay in my house on one salary. But I could because of what the union had won. When I retired, I was able to retire comfortably with a good pension and excellent healthcare, two major benefits my union won through years of hard work and intense negotiations with Yale. My retirement and my health care were, and remain, secure. No two workers or two unions are identical, but the essence of this experience is there for anyone who wants to stand for herself and her coworkers on the job. Being a founding member of Local 34 is one of the proudest achievements of my life—I know that what it did for me, it did for thousands. I know that we made these into jobs that could support a family, blazed a new path for women in the workplace, and made good on my daughter’s picket sign. More than all this, it made me who I am: a person who knows she is worth something, not because anyone else told me so, not because I am unique, but because of the strength I found with others around me. It carried me through decades of work and defi ned my life. For every member of Local 33, I am so happy that you get the chance to fi nd this same knowledge and same strength.
AMELIA PROSTANO retired in December 2021 after 40 years at Yale where she worked as an Acquisitions Assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and was a Vice-President of Local 34. Contact her at amelia.prostano@me.com .
