Yale – Anna’s Out of Town News

Will Ukraine’s Economy Collapse?

After the Orange Revolution, it seemed that Ukraine was off to an auspicious beginning. She embraced Europe and the US, denounced Russia, and worked hard on that GDP growth.

With financial gloom dominating Davos, the Israel-Palestine hysteria, and people being laid off by the thousand worldwide, Ukraine and her problems were virtually ignored. While Eastern Europe is whispering about the nearing economic collapse, the most relevant entry about Ukraine’s economic collapse that a Google search in English produces are dated 1993 and 1998, when the economy was truly going down the drain. It looks like 2009 will also join the ranks.

I will not bore you with the details of all the economic troubles Ukraine is facing. If interested in details, read this Jan 19 report, and make all the bad indicators even worse. Then add the constant fighting between President Yushchenko and premier Timoshenko; subtract the non-functioning government. Can anyone say “imminent collapse”?

There was something that drew my attention a few days ago, but I was too busy writing countless applications to blog about it. A story surfaced in the Russian and Ukrainian mass media about a report supposedly written by Ukraine’s finance minister Viktor Pinzenik. In brief, it augurs the nearing collapse of Ukraine’s economy.

Drawing from my own politics-related experience in Ukraine, a fake report to scare the population and intimidate the government would not surprise me. But it was never properly denounced by the Ukraine’s government.

For any interested speakers of Ukrainian, there is a photograph/scan of the report here. After several pages of sad economic stats and a lot of pathos (if someone indeed faked it, they put a whole lot of effort in it), the report concludes with:

An excerpt from what is believed to be Pinzenik's report

“The country is in danger. The citizens are in danger. (Political) power is not an award. It is first and foremost responsibility to people. I would like to emphasize one more time: there is a way out of the current difficult situation. But we are almost out of time…”

There are also rumors that Rada’s (Ukraine’s parliament) employees, including the MP’s, is behind on the salary payments for this month. For all I know, it might be just rumors, but it sounds likely to be true.

As a Ukrainian, I am very upset about Ukraine’s future.

As a political scientist, at least I get to benefit from studying how “dirty” political technologies are used to undermine an opponent in the game of politics.

Although I hope that the report above and all the rumors are not true, it is quite certain that Yale’s poli sci department is probably the safest place to observe Ukraine’s government failures.

Obama, Palin, and Russian Glamor

Yale newspapers and magazines recently turned to international students to find out our perspective on the U.S. presidential campaign. After all, it’s easy to run out of fun material over the course of a 1.5 years long presidential campaign. We are supposed to have a fresh outside perspective.

When I started my freshman year, the presidential campaign was already going on, so I have been exposed to it as much as most Americans. After I found out I had to pay taxes in the US, I have been obsessively following the tax policies of both candidates. Like most foreign Yalies I know, I watched presidential and vice-presidential debates. So much for the fresh perspective.

So I asked the real outsiders — my friends who live outside the US.

The vast majority of my Russian and Ukrainian friends and acquaintances — the younger crowd — would vote for Barack Obama if they could. But in general, the older Russians get, the more they like McCain. An average Russian man hardly lives to be 60, so a 72-year old candidate is an inspiring role model to many. “I wish my husband was so lively” — my friend’s grandmother said of her 72-y.o. husband. “What foreign policies? I don’t care what those capitalists are doing.”

I quizzed my 20-something Obama-favoring friends on their rationale. In a surprising correlation with their college majors, they explained what aspects of the democratic candidate’s tax, education, healthcare, and foreign policies they favored to those of McCain. And then something else came up: Obama is oh-so-glamorous (“a он ничего такой, очень гламурненький”).

Russia is all about glamour. What is known as ostentatious in other countries, is every-day wear in Russia. Mini skirts and high heels are equally worn to class, work and parties. Some restaurants have special side tables for the It Bags. Several haute couture brands have more boutiques in Moscow than in London or NYC. Books that teach girls how to marry an oligarch are bestsellers. And politics has been becoming more glamorous, too.

Our President’s recent video blog post (and yes, he has one!) spurred demand for the stylish Mac laptops: he clearly prefers them to the good ol’ PCs. He was even spotted playing with his iPhone before they became legally available in Russia. Our ex-President-turned-prime-minister has video of him doing judo all over YouTube (and pictures of him with a naked torso that show off his muscles; he is in a great shape). The Ukrainian prime-minister is known for her hairstyle and fancy outfits as much as for her policies.

No wonder Barack Obama with his tall and slim frame, well-fitting outfits and an elegantly-clad wife is a favorite with Russian women.

To be fair, Sarah Palin is also perceived as glamorous. A stereotypical Russian woman wears stiletto boots and furs in the winter, and Palin gives off an image of someone who could totally pull it off. Her recent $150K worth of a shopping spree is definitely approved by the Russian women (she even managed to do it with someone else’s money, a dream of a stereotypical glamour girl). She is in a great shape and wears fashionable clothes. Her four — or is five? Most Russian women lost track (or lost Track. Ha!) — kids raise some well-waxed Russian eyebrows. But of course, a true glamour girl has a glamorous reason to have kids — “Ah, I get it — she had so many fashionable pregnancy clothes that she wanted to become pregnant again and again to be able to wear them!”

If Barack Obama wins, as most my friends hope, they will take great pleasure in praising his and his wife’s looks at the inauguration and beyond. If that happens, Sarah Palin shouldn’t give up. She should simply move to Alaska’s behemoth neighbor. Her glamorousness guarantees a huge success. After all, we all know she is already an expert on Russia.

Latvian Ex-President Encounters a Heated Debate at Pierson: A Very Belated Post

This post is way overdue, but better late than never.

At Pierson College’s Master’s Tea, Latvia’s ex-President Vaira Vike-Freiberga participated in a talk with the crowd constisting mostly of Yale grad students and professors. A couple of Russian undergrad students, including myself, were present.

In Russia, Dr. Vike-Freiberga is usually portrayed as a stern, anti-Russian leader who made miserable the lives of many Russians living in Latvia. I went to that meeting hoping that maybe Russian media actually exaggerated their portrayal.

Dr. Vike-Freiberga is a very charismatic, well-spoken lady who seems to be able to make the audience happy. In the beginning, she talked a lot about Latvian history and of it being annexed and occupied by the USSR. Most Russian media disagree with that, but I believe she absolutely right describing the Soviets as ruthless invaders. The USSR (NOT Russia) did invade Latvia. But a side note: isn’t’ this how most of the world history is made anyway?

Dr. Vike-Freiberga’s hostility towards USSR/Russia is sadly based on her country’s history in general and her family’s history in particular. At the same time, Russians suffered just as much (and, as one of the guest who was siding with the Latvians admitted in a private discussion after a talk, Russians had suffered much more). Her family was escaped to Germany to avoid the Nazis; my grandfathers, both in Russia and Ukraine, were killed in the concentration camps.

During her two terms at the office, Latvia joined the EU and NATO – which is a big achievement for a post-Soviet country. Well that’s all warm and fuzzy and the audience was feeling happy for a small nation re-gaining its national sovereignty and pride.

Things got heated when the issue of the Russians in Latvia was raised. 20% of the Latvian population are Russian. Many never learned a word of Latvian, because they simply never had to. Everybody (including ethnic Latvians) spoke Russian in the USSR, of which Latvia used to be part. Schools and universities were taught in Russian; office and government work was done in Russian. Latvian was one of the official national languages of the USSR — along with Russian. Any Russian speaker has as many rights to speak Russian in Latvia as he did to speak Latvian. Most preferred Russian though, since it was a lingua franca of all fifteen republics of the USSR. In many mixed Russian-Latvian marriages, Russian was a language of choice for spouses and children.

These days when Latvia is a sovereign state, there is a clear attempt on the government’s part to oust Russians and Russian speakers out of the country. This campaign was largely initiated by Dr. Vike-Freiberga, who (coincidentally, of course) possesses an interest in linguistics and Latvian folklore.

Now, in order to obtain a job, the Russians have to pass what Dr. Vike-Freiberga referred to at that meeting as ” a minimal language proficiency exam.” She also claimed that “if someone lives in a country, they should speak a language of that country.” That “minimal” exam requires fluency in a language. And most developed countries have either no state language (e.g., the U.S, where people manage to live without speaking a word of English and where speaking Spanish is often an essential skill for employment in some parts of the country), or state programs that allow immigrants to learn the language (Germany, Israel, you name it).

Interestingly enough, after my questions to Dr. Vike-Freiberga, several Yalies approached me to discuss the issue. Russia was often portrayed as “the evil one” in this case, but many Yalies changed their understanding of the matter after that meeting. Yay for breaking stereotypes!

How My Super-Yale-Like Corporate Internship Turned Into Being a TV Correspondent and a TV Anchor

I have a Hong Kong visa in my traveling passport. I set my debit card so it could be used in Hong Kong. I had a uber-prestigious corporate paid internship in Hong Kong. And then one person at Yale decided I couldn’t go. I will vent extensively later, when I have all the complete information.

And so I needed something to do in Russia over the summer. I showed up at a local TV station and told them they want me to be their intern. The magic of Yale University helped. Now I write news for the local radios, write texts for the evening news, and make completely my own features shown on the evening news at the local (but large) TV station. Oh, and I am an anchor – just occasionally. So much for wanting a corporate internship.

PS: I am also writing for a local newspaper. Apparently, not all of us Yalies go on the cool internship in exotic locales (who would have thought, right?)

Top 20 Things I Learned at Yale After Freshman Year

My dear friend Lubin Li posted this note on her Facebook:

Top 12 lessons that I learned after freshman year at Yale.

12. Some people would sleepwalk into your room at 3am and take away your blanket; others of the opposite sex would appear almost totally naked at your door at 2am. Yet your still fail to learn the lesson — maybe you should lock your bedroom door.

11. Apparently, according to SML librarian, the best place to “do it” in the stacks is the 4th floor. (I was once writing a paper on genocide, and found out that all the depressing books on that subject are on the 4th floor. No wonder.)

10. Suite duty assignments never work, no matter how sophisticated the rotation chart looks.

9. You do badly on an exam and feel horrible, so you compassionately hope everyone else did ten times more horribly so you’ll end up with a good curve.

8. However, you discover that most of the social sciences/humanities courses are NOT curved. To make things worse, an A or a 4.0 is a 93%.

7. A considerable portion of your tuition seems to go towards funding free food at events. But since there are way too many of them, you should NOT take advantage them all. Or else awaiting you is not the Freshman 15, but, maybe, the Freshman 50.

6. Moms are magical — how did they get the stain off your shirts so easily?!

5. You actually can procrastinate on half a semester’s readings and catch up all in a week. However that is, speaking from personal experience, not very advisable.

4. They are called midterms, yet they run from the 5th week of the semester until the week before finals.

3. Harvard sucks; Princeton doesn’t even matter!

2. There ARE people who can write 20-page papers in one night. There are also people who finish an entire semester’s of problem sets 5 weeks early. However, you are not one of those people, so life continues to suck for you.

1. Most importantly, you realized that the George Pierson quote on the poster that Yale sent you last April actually couldn’t be any truer. “Yale is at once a tradition, a company of scholars, and a society of friends.” You’ll find friends who share your craziness roaming the streets of New York, friends who’d look after you after you injure yourself, and friends who infuse you with philosophical theories at 3:30am. These are the people who happily share with you the joy and memories of growth, and they are the biggest reason for which you can’t wait to come back in September.

Thanks for an amazing year, my friends.

With her permission, I am going to plagiarize a bit and make my own list:

20. Whenever you stop by at University Health Services — for any reason, including kidney infection, dizziness, or a cold –first thing they do is test you for pregnancy. Then they test you for mono. So if you want a free pregnancy test and are too shy to ask for one, go to DUH and fake any disease (if you are female, that is).

19. Restrooms at DUH always have basketfuls of condoms for oral sex. Nobody knows why.

18. Be careful while walking around at the SML stacks: people *do* have sex there. Be careful while walking around academic buildings after 9pm: people have sex there, too. Be careful while walking up the stair in your dorm: people have sex there. Beware of the restrooms at night: people have sex there, too. So yeah, beware.

17. Beware of your own common room: random couples sleep on a futon there. None of your suitemates knows the couple.

16. The one time your towel slips off while you are getting out of the shower, your roommate’s boyfriend will walk in.

15. Don’t be surprised to find a semi-naked guy shaving in an all-girls restroom – at 2pm. Nobody will ever know who he was.

14. Freshman Counselors are very very very useful . Your Dean is even more useful. Thank god we have them.

13. Professors are human. They will help you with your paper if you show up for office hours.

12. Professors are human. If you can’t hand in an assignment on time, they’ll understand – just don’t warn them about it an hour in advance.

11. Professors are human. That professor who was oh-so-nice luring you to his high-level literature seminar is not going to be that nice to you afterwards.

10. Anything in Victorian literature can be analyzed using several statements:

a. The French are evil.
b. Everyone is a closeted gay. Dracula is gay. Jane Eyre is not gay, but she is a frigid bitch.
c. Anything that involves an extensive use of “discourse,” “agency,” “anality,” and “orality.” (throwing in “homoerotic,” “the fear of the Other,” and “anxiety” helps, too).
d. Or just quote Foucault.

9. Law school students make best TA’s in law-related classes (duh!), but beware of those attempting to teach your econ section. Run (or switch to another section if you can).

8. Two best sources of free candy: Master’s office and Chaplain’s office.

7. Ronald Dworkin (yes, the Ronald Dworkin, a famed legal scholar) used to be a Master of Trumbull!

6. You can talk your way into a senior-level EP&E seminar (lots of stratagems involved), but it’s going to be a lot of work. You’ve been warned.

5. Don’t be surprised to buy a new “Harper’s,” “Foreign Affairs,” etc and see an article written by your professor. Also don’t be surprised to find out that said articles sound exactly like the lectures you attended last term – and the subchapters are exactly like the titles of those lectures.

4. Doing laundry is painful, expensive, and ineffective. Stains never come off. Prepare to buy lots of socks because they will get lost.

3. If you buy a $150 course packet, it won’t be needed in section. Your professor will explain everything in a lecture anyway. Moreover, you can get an A on the first draft of your final paper for that class without ever reading that course packet and without using a single concept from the lecture. AND you will get a writing credit for that course. (allegedly, some people managed to do it without attending lectures…)

2. GoogleBooks and GoogleScholar make your life easier. And they save you from having to make unnecessary runs to the library at the risk of running into copulating couples.

1. Yale is the best.

Russian Yalies and their Pet Hedgehogs and Squirrels

I was recently confronted by a fellow Russian student at the Bass library and asked if I owned a hedgehog.

“So, is it you who has a hedgehog?”
“Excuse me?”
“There was an article in the Yale Daily News about how we crazy Russian students have hedgehogs and squirrels living in our dorms…”

The YDN website had been down for over a week, courtesy of Aliza Shvart’s case, I suspect. Now that it is up and running again, I found that article. Entitled “Furry, Feathered Creatures Bring Home Back to Yale,” it describes how some students choose to violate the Undergraduate Regulation by having a pet. The two students who have the weirdest pets –- squirrels and a hedgehog –- are Russian. Apparently, we acquire our habit of having weird pets while hanging out with our pet polar bears (sharing a bottle of vodka with them, of course). Just kidding.

I guess I am a proper Russian Yalie, because I like both hedgehogs and squirrels. And I do have a hedgehog in my suite… a plush one that I got for Valentine’s from a friend. My family kept a hedgehog for a couple of months, when I was a child; we found him in the city in the fall. One of his paws was frostbitten and he looked like he wasn’t doing so well on his own, so we decided to host him for the winter. He was cute, friendly, and nocturnal. He loved sleeping in my mom’s shoes and boots, choosing an arbitrary pair every night, so she never knew which one had needles in it in the morning. We loved him, but he would have been much happier in his natural habitat. In the summer, we set him free in the woods and he ran off happily.

I do like squirrels a lot, but I have never had a completely positive squirrel experience at Yale. I encountered a squirrel in my floor’s bathroom once, and I was more frightened than it was. Another incident involved a bouquet of roses in my room and a hungry squirrel that was trying to feed on it (how it snuck into my fourth-floor suite still remains a mystery). It was chased away by my angry boyfriend, who had given me the flowers.

I still don’t know who the hedgehog-loving Russian freshman is; the only other Russian freshman I know claims it is not her. Go figure.

One final word of advice to the YDN: if you are really concerned with protecting privacy of those you are writing about, do not bother with coming up with a fake English name for her if you are going to refer to her as a “sophomore from St. Petersburg, Russia.” There is only one Russian Yale undergrad from St. Petersburg, as one can easily learn from Yale Facebook. Clearly, Yale really needs more Russian undergrads … to make sure all squirrels and campus are well-fed and taken care of!

PS: Recently, I spotted a really cute pig named Isosceles on Old Campus. It belongs to someone living off-campus and it comes to Old Campus to feed on acorns. Now, that’s an exotic pet. Russians, beat that!

Does Yale Need More International Students?

I recently spoke at the conference at The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies about what it is like to be an international/Russian at Yale. I did some research before and thought I would share some of it. Here is some food for thought:

Yale’s undergraduate international enrollment is around 8%; some colleges in the US have as much as 15%.

Yale’s international students come from over 70 countries. My tiny international school in Hong Kong had representatives from 80-something countries in a student body of 220 or so.

One Ukrainian, two Georgian and no Russian students were admitted to the class of 2012 (according to those who have access to the admits website). It is unknown how many of them will choose Yale.

Here is a link to the blog some internationals in the US may find useful.

And here is a link to an post about international admissions at Williams. There is a lot I would like to say about it, but I am trying to make some progress on my paper on the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Once I get am done with writing a prognosis for Ukraine’s failed democracy, I will certainly blog more.

The Yalies Who Lunch (With the Dean)

Ever since I was admitted to Yale, I was intrigued by the last names of President Levin and Dean Salovey: they both sound very Russian. “Salovey,” for one, appeared to be a misspelt Russian word (“solovey” means “nightingale”).This is why I chose Yale over other schools: Yale’s President had a Russian-sounding name while Harvard’s ex-president made derogatory remarks about women in science. And other schools’ presidents didn’t have Russian-sounding last names, so it was Yale for me. Just kidding.

I chose Yale for many other reasons, but I was pleased to learn that President Levin’s ancestors are in fact Russian. Together with nine other students, I had lunch with Dean Salovey (Dean of Yale College) today and he turned out to be Russian, too! Actually, his family comes from Belarus, but his last name is Russian Jewish. And so is that of President Levin.

Trumbull, my residential college, has introduced a Monthly Dean’s Lunch Series that allows Trumbulians to talk to interesting people over a meal. Dean Salovey happened to be our first guest. We all learned a lot of exciting facts by Dean Salovey that Wikipedia and Yale’s website fail to provide: that he plays in a grassroot band, why he became a dean at Yale College, why he cannot comment on Aliza Shvart’s art, and why our dining hall has the right kind of matza (ask me if you’d like to know).

I am now looking forward to more Dean’s Lunches – who knows what I will get to learn next time?

Photo courtesy Trumbull’s amazing Dean Jasmina Besirevic

It’s Bulldog Days!

Unfortunately, I never made it to Bulldog Days: it’s a 20 hour long flight from Hong Kong to NYC (and a 20 hour long flight back!) and my IB finals were drawing dangerously close. A year has passed, and hundreds of those luckier than me are here right now experiencing what is is like to be a Yalie.

Warnings not to serve alcohol to pre-frosh have been sent out (we are an officially ‘dry’ campus during Bulldog Days); a huge bulldog has been inflated and set up on Old Campus; Dean Salovey was in an improv show tonight; bright-eyed and anxious potential 2012-ers are flocking up to campus (my suite is hosting five of them!).

It’s an exciting time for all of us. Welcome to Yale, future Class of 2012!

Dropping the Y-bomb

At ephblog, there is an exciting discussion going on about whether student admitted at both Yale and Williams should choose Williams. One person complained about Yale and Harvard students throwing around their school’s names :

I have a lot of acquaintances, friends and loved ones, who are grads of Harvard and Yale. Is there higher recognizability? Most definitely. And what does this particular ’status’ breed? They all have a tendency to let you know, within a few minutes of meeting them, where they went to school. I find it amusing the regularity with which this happens, regardless of the ‘type’ of individual.

Here is my response with regard to Yalies. I cannot vouch for Harvard students.

“I avoid telling people where I go to college at all costs: people tend to treat me in a weird way after I mention Yale. I also found it to be a very effective way to deter unwanted male attention. I travel a lot and it happens sometimes that a man next to me on a train/bus/airplane is bored and/or flirtatious. After the mandatory “so, wheredya go to school?” I just answer the truth and they tend to sort of stop right away (nobody likes a smart blond, I guess).

In Hong Kong, where I graduated from high school, people tend to deify prestigious academic institutions; upon hearing ‘Yale’, they start asking me tons and tons of questions about ‘the secrets of getting in,’ so I try avoiding ever mentioning it.

In Russia, where I grew up, people either don’t know what Yale is or start making fun of me because of a certain American president who is an alumnus; so I keep quiet, too.

One may claim my experience is unique; I don’t believe it is. In fact, many of my fellow students tend to avoid mentioning Yale when they talk to strangers (unless those strangers are their job interviewers).

An interesting phenomenon to consider is that people pay more attention to the brand-name colleges. Since there is an existing discourse on Yalies bragging around about their alma mater, one automatically registers it every time Yale is mentioned. A student of a random college in the middle of nowhere can talk about their school 24/7 and nobody seems to mind; a Yalie mentions Yale once and everyone considers him/her annoying and arrogant.

Also, if you someone wearing, say, a UMass sweatshirt, most people won’t even notice; if it’s a Yale one, most people will pay attention to it and consider its owner an arrogant brat. Would you disagree with that?

See also incredible anxiety Harvard kids have about dropping the H-bomb…”