It wasn’t until the airplane’s front wheels touched down at Hong Kong Airport that my thoughts finally drifted away from the sunset glow over Davenport Courtyard. YYGS lasted only two weeks—too short, so short that the hydrangeas my mother planted before my departure hadn’t even sprouted buds; yet too long, long enough for me to stand at a perspective I had never imagined, and fully examine the philosophy of life and learning I had followed for the past seventeen years.
Although I had long heard of Yale, this venerable Ivy League institution steeped in tradition, its profound heritage and accumulation of history still struck me with no small measure of awe. The diverse seminars ranged from exposing the chemical scams behind skincare products to exploring AI art and human neural networks. The open and respectful atmosphere allowed the eleven strangers in our “family group,” each from a different country, to grow close within two weeks and ultimately take the stage together in the final talent show. As I wandered through corners of campus, the century-old stone walls and bronze plaques, the Gothic archways and stained glass windows—everywhere bore the marks of time. These moments of intellectual trembling were like golden threads weaving together my dreamlike two weeks. And I am willing to use words as my shuttle to recreate this tapestry.
The Campus
The campus was the first poem Yale gifted to me.
To be honest, the height of summer in New Haven was a little overwhelming, the abundant sunshine rolling up waves of heat that made it hard for me, fresh off the plane, to bear. I had hoped to quickly retreat to the dorms and enjoy the cool air-conditioning, only to be told that Pierson dorms, in order to preserve the historic buildings, had no air-conditioning installed. I ended up begrudgingly carrying two small fans to set up my room. Fortunately, the afternoon’s free-exploration session on campus soon made me forget all about the heat that seeped into every corner.
The moment I stepped into Pierson Courtyard, it felt as though I had lifted the cover of a heavy history book. Beneath my feet stretched stone bricks smoothed by the polish of time, while emerald vines climbed along the Gothic window frames. Sunlight filtered through the branches of century-old trees, scattering shifting patches of light across the lawn. Just as I was immersed in this tranquility, the chimes of Harkness Tower rang out as expected—yet to my surprise, before the echoes of the traditional bells had faded, the theme Stay from Interstellar, played on the organ, drifted into the air.
The solemn timbre of the organ intertwined strangely yet beautifully with the cosmic melody, reverberating through the ancient courtyard. In that instant, time and space seemed to slip out of joint: I was standing in Yale’s oldest college, yet at the same time transported into the cornfield where Cooper found himself lost. The music carried me along the boundary between reality and imagination, where science and art, history and future, suddenly struck a profound harmony. The tower still stood against the blue sky, the ivy on the stone walls still quivered in the breeze, but my heart had already leapt with the music into humanity’s eternal journey of questioning the infinite universe.
Ancient does not mean dull, nor does solemnity imply rigidity. Passing through the archway of Jonathan Edwards Courtyard, one arrives at the Yale Center for British Art. This building, designed by Louis Kahn, is itself a work of art. Natural light pours through vast skylights, sketching a poem of light and shadow within the soaring four-story atrium. Hanging in the center of the gallery, Turner’s seascape unleashes storms of color across the canvas; Bacon’s twisted figures seem to whisper under the dim glow of the lamps. What astonished me most were the 18th-century portraits—the folds of gentlemen’s satin coats concealed an entire era’s elegance, while the rose patterns on ladies’ skirts blossomed with an immortal romance. Though I have never studied art in depth, the bold palettes and avant-garde compositions of each painting had already begun to quietly dismantle the shackles of thought within my mind.
In resonance with it, the Yale University Art Gallery presents an even grander historical narrative. From African tribal masks to Renaissance Madonnas, a quiet dialogue among civilizations unfolds here. Though I regretted not being able to see Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—the masterpiece had just concluded its traveling exhibition before my visit—when I suddenly turned a corner and encountered Monet’s The Garden at Giverny, all that sense of loss dissolved instantly into delight.
Beyond the art galleries and museums, Yale’s two most renowned libraries also left me in awe. One of them is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. From the outside, the entire structure resembles a massive box built of concrete and stone, yet inside rises a six-story glass tower of books, each volume at least a century old. Interestingly, a librarian told me that in the event of a fire, the tower would instantly be drained of oxygen to protect these rare works. Through the glass enclosure, I was even fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the Gutenberg Bible itself.
Adjacent to the Beinecke Library stands the Sterling Memorial Library. Before becoming a library, it had once been a sacred church, and at its very center hangs a statue symbolizing Yale’s centuries-old motto: Lux et Veritas (Light and Truth). The figures of students studying beneath Sterling’s vaulted ceilings seem to embody a quiet reconciliation between the cloisters of the medieval monastery and the world of modern scholarship.
When night falls, the campus reveals another kind of magic. Fireflies rising from the lawns of Old Campus shimmer in harmony with the warm lights glowing from Pierson’s windows. Sadly, neither my phone nor my camera could clearly capture those flickering sparks. Fortunately, before the sky turned completely dark, I managed to seize another gift: clouds ablaze at the horizon like a spilled palette, where orange-red and molten gold burned fiercely behind Davenport’s Gothic spires. The entire campus was wrapped in a dreamlike filter.
My friends and I often sat on the lawn, watching moonlight trace a silver edge around Harkness Tower. In those moments, I found myself thinking: perhaps Yale’s greatest achievement lies in preserving such a perfect coexistence of nature and humanity within a world racing toward modernization.
Classroom
The first challenge I faced at Yale did not come from the difficulty of the material, but from a “treasure hunt” that began in its labyrinthine hallways—many seminar classrooms were like hidden vaults, tucked away in the most unassuming corners of old buildings.
As in previous years, this session of YYGS was divided into four tracks: IST (Innovation, Science, and Technology), LPC (Literature, Philosophy, and Culture), PLE (Politics, Law, and Economics), and SGC (Social and Global Challenges). I chose IST, the track most aligned with my personal background.
Before the program began, I had expected to gain deeper knowledge of science and engineering through IST seminars. Yet, unexpectedly, the class that left the deepest impression on me was one about skincare products—Chemistry for Skincare Product.
As a boy who had hardly ever used skincare, I had rarely paid attention to this field, let alone thought about the chemistry behind it. But in that class, the professor not only explained the common ingredients and their mechanisms of action, but also brought in a variety of commercial products for us to analyze. We compared ingredient lists with the chemical jargon used in advertisements. Through this exercise, I realized that many ingredients did not, in fact, deliver the benefits they claimed—companies were simply exploiting consumers’ inability to parse chemical formulas to give their products a “scientifically credible” veneer. In that moment, I suddenly understood: while the advancement of science is essential, without grounding in real human needs and lived contexts, even the most cutting-edge technology can lose its true meaning.
During the weekend break, YYGS also organized a special interdisciplinary symposium. Within just a few hours, a group of newly acquainted classmates and I collaborated to design and build a simple environmental monitoring device. Afterwards, we carried our homemade equipment across the Yale campus and nearby streets, collecting and recording real-time environmental data.
Running parallel to all the seminars was an interdisciplinary project called Capstone. Over the course of two weeks, I worked with four teammates from different countries to study the system design and control optimization of submarine ballast tanks. Throughout this process, we not only delved deeply into the engineering principles of buoyancy regulation, but also shared our ongoing personal projects—from sustainable energy solutions to biosensor design. These exchanges transformed our collaboration into something beyond the scope of the project itself, becoming a truly mutually inspiring journey.
Life
Although the academic content was rich, YYGS did not occupy all of my time. During the daily family meeting time after classes, I got to know eleven wonderful friends from different countries. We debated the real-world challenges of climate justice, shared how “success” is defined differently across our cultures, and even chatted about awkward first loves while eating ice cream late at night in the dining hall. The world is vast, yet in those moments, we all shared the same Yale moonlight.
What amazed me even more was that, in just two short weeks, the eleven of us—complete strangers at the start—choreographed an entire dance from scratch and ultimately performed it on the talent show stage. Though I had no prior dance experience, the moment the spotlight hit and the applause poured in, the trusting looks from my teammates allowed me to completely let go of my shyness and nerves—I had, for the first time, truly and wholeheartedly embraced the stage.
During lunch breaks, I often gathered with friends to play cards and chat, and sometimes we even slipped off campus to explore nearby food spots. This time not only let me savor many unforgettable flavors—like the tacos in Yale dining halls and the ribeye at Jonathan Steakhouse off-campus—but also unexpectedly taught me new games, such as Guandan from China. Amid laughter and the shuffle of cards, cultural boundaries quietly dissolved, while friendship quietly took root, one meal and one game at a time.
Epilogue
Looking back on the fourteen days at Yale, it felt as though I had opened a thick yet luminous scroll of youth. Every corridor in the buildings, every probing question in class, every late-night laugh became an irreplaceable brushstroke within it. I had gone in pursuit of knowledge, yet returned with something even more precious—a deeper curiosity about the world, a more tolerant understanding of differences, and a clearer recognition of myself.
Yale has never been merely an elite university; it is more like a bridge, connecting time, culture, and possibility. Here, science can converse with art, history can shake hands with the future, and a boy on the verge of eighteen can finally learn to find his place within a larger coordinate system.
Now, the journey has ended, the chimes have faded, yet the courtyard under the starry sky and the warm, sincere faces remain glowing in my memory. Perhaps this is the essence of education: it does not fill a bucket, but ignites a fire. And Yale is that very first spark.
Time stretches on, and footsteps do not cease. May I always carry those two lights in my heart—just as Yale’s century-old motto reminds us:
Lux et Veritas—
Light and Truth.
- Article / Steven Li
