Yale

Meet Class of 2026 graduate Matthew Verich! #Yale2026 🎓 For Matthew Verich, all the threads came together during his sophomore year at Yale. “I found my people that fall,” said Verich, who is graduating this spring with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and a certificate in Spanish. His “people” at Yale have included spirited jazz musicians, an inspirational colleague in a neuroimmunology lab, and classmates exploring their religious faith. As a first-year student, Verich, who comes from Alexandria, Virginia, sampled a variety of different courses as he searched for his academic niche. During that second year, the path narrowed as he found a connection to science and a growing commitment to medicine. “I had never taken biology, but I was definitely curious about the field, so I took a class,” Verich says. “I had taken chemistry, and knew I liked it. I also like psychology, because I enjoy thinking about how people think. So, I said, ‘Let’s try to combine them all,’ and I went into neuroscience.” A summer internship in the Mandel-Brehm Lab, a research lab at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) that explores interactions between the nervous system and immune system, further shaped Verich’s interest. There, he worked alongside and drew inspiration from a Nigerian student whose path to medicine required extraordinary persistence, including overcoming poverty and other barriers. “He was way ahead of me,” Verich recalls. “He was already studying for the MCAT [the Medical College Admission Test] and approaching the whole process with a level of focus I hadn’t really seen before. His dedication was incredible. It showed me what it looked like to pursue this path with purpose.” 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Verich’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

With Commencement just around the corner, meet Class of 2026 graduate Zakira Bakhshi! Zakira Bakhshi’s early life often involved crossing borders. Born to Afghan parents, she moved between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — and each country shaped her understanding of displacement, belonging, and home. “Those experiences came with their own political, social, and economic realities,” said Bakhshi, who studied in India before coming to Yale. “They made me very aware of the most overlooked aspects of the world and how access to stability and opportunity is so uneven.” Bakhshi arrived on campus filled with doubt but determined to open doors for those who lack the opportunities that haven been afforded to her. Despite her initial uncertainty, she quickly found her footing. “I stopped navigating the social systems on campus and began building within them,” said Bakhshi, a resident of Trumbull College. Two years ago, she founded the Yale Afghan Student Association, which brings together Afghans across the campus community to celebrate Afghan culture. “Afghanistan is so often reduced to just headlines about crisis and conflict,” she said. “I wanted to create a platform where a more nuanced and human perspective on the country could flourish, one that highlights the culture, resilience, and diverse experiences of Afghan people.” What began with a handful of students has grown into a vibrant cultural community. 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Bakhshi’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026! #Yale2026 🎓

Get to know Yale College Class of 2026 graduate Miles Zaud! #Yale2026 🎓 If Miles Zaud isn’t reporting and writing a story in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe, odds aren’t half bad he’s writing or playing music in a style dear to you. Jazz, folk, gospel, classical, musical theater — they’re all in his repertoire. Maybe he’s seated at a concert grand, maybe he’s stomping his foot, fiddle and bow in motion. Maybe he’s scoring cues for a film. Whatever the endeavor, Zaud is absorbed, a young man immersed in the timelessness of a creative flow state. The Saybrook senior grew up in Topanga, California, just north of Santa Monica, playing piano, surfing, and undertaking homeschool adventures, including travel to “primitive skills gatherings” around the American West. These are back-to-the-land festivals in which participants, hundreds strong, aim to live in tune with the ways of early humans: Starting fires with sticks, handcrafting atlatls (javelins) and traps for procuring food, sleeping under the stars. Participants may bring tools and tents, Zaud said, “but most people really don’t — the point is to do it yourself.” The gatherings eventually became the subject of his Yale senior project, a 20,000-word work of gonzo non-fiction that he ranks high among his collegiate achievements, along with a series of original musical scores recently performed on campus under the title “Curious Opus.” It was last September that Zaud set out for a skills gathering in Rexburg, Idaho, aiming to cast a reporter’s gimlet eye on a culture he’d known since childhood. As sometimes happens, he met a girl, a wildland firefighter, and fell in love. “The gathering itself took some really unexpected turns,” he said. 🔗 Tap the link our bio to keep reading about Zaud’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

Meet Class of 2026 graduate Zaida Rio Polanco! #Yale2026 🎓 Zaida Rio Polanco, a singer-songwriter who put out a solo album of indie folk-inflected pop-soul songs in high school, stepped away from music-making as a first year at Yale and shifted her artistic talents to an a capella group and a hip-hop dance troupe. But when Yale’s student-run record label, 1701, invited artists to audition during her sophomore year, Polanco picked up her guitar. She auditioned, the label signed her, and “it was like night and day,” Polanco said. “I went from doing no gigging to gigging around campus all the time. They assigned me a student producer, a student manager, a student graphic designer,” she said. “We were all learning together what it means to operate in this microcosm of what a real record label would be.” Over the past three years, Polanco has frequently performed at her residential college, Benjamin Franklin, as well as at other venues around campus and in downtown New Haven, including a performance at Toad’s Place, at which she also danced with three of her hip-hop friends. Her recordings are easily found on YouTube, under the stage name Zaida Rio. She knew she wanted to eventually pursue a career in the arts when she entered Yale, but she chose to major in environmental studies. Her Filipino mother, who comes from a long line of farmers, is an avid gardener at the family home in White Plains, New York. As a result, Polanco said, “I’ve always felt very connected to the earth.” (Her 93-year-old grandfather, who was a farmer, will attend her graduation.) 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Polanco’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

Conversations about leadership, higher education, and life at Yale. President Maurie McInnis recently spent time with some of this year’s Woodbridge Fellows, a group of recent Yale graduates gaining hands-on experience across the university while exploring careers in higher education and nonprofit leadership. Established in 2005, the Woodbridge Fellowship helps fellows build connections across campus and gain a broader understanding of how the university works. 🔗 Tap the link in our bio to learn more.

As Commencement approaches, meet Class of 2026 graduate Shaun Pexton! When he was a kid, Shaun Pexton would pore through popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American to find the latest advances in astrophysics or biology. There was something about the vibrant layouts on glossy pages that evoked mystery. But by the time he was 12 or 13, one particular topic really started to fire his imagination: quantum mechanics. He wasn’t quite sure how it might be relevant to his life at the time, but there was something exciting about the complexities of this field — the idea of quantum “entanglement,” for instance, a phenomenon so critical to the emerging field of quantum computing — that seemed almost too impossible to grasp. “I would always try to find the page that had the word ‘quantum,’” remembers Pexton, a Yale senior from Silliman College. “The magazine would have these articles with almost magical diagrams that showed these cool processes. To me it really was magic because it was so distant from what I saw every day. It really pulled me in, in a very real sense.” For Pexton, who was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Singapore, but spent his high school years in the U.K., these mysteries became ever more engrossing, and to better understand them he expanded his reading to journal articles and textbooks. When it came time for college he turned his attention to Yale, a university steeped in quantum history, where pioneering researchers have imagined and built the infrastructure for the next generation of quantum technology — and a seedbed for tech industry talent. Once he got here, it was like being in a quantum candy store. 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Pexton’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026! #Yale2026 🎓

Meet Class of 2026 graduate Audrey Aslani-Far! #Yale2026 🎓 Before Audrey Aslani-Far ever arrived on the Yale campus as a first-year student, she already knew that she would focus on two distinct, but in her mind not dissimilar, fields of study. Enamored with science since she was a young girl, she was intent on studying molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. But she’d also always enjoyed learning new languages, and so she planned to study Russian as well. Some people thought this was an odd combination. But Aslani-Far didn’t see it that way. “In both genetics and in languages, the world is composed of a set of letters,” she says. “Studying these subjects just gives you a new way to read it.” Indeed, she chose to attend Yale because it was a place where she could dive fully into each of these worlds. And over the past four years, the Grace Hopper senior has done just that — as well as discovering other interests and communities that have widened her intellectual range. Aslani-Far was 10 years old when she discovered the world of genetics after visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “There was an exhibit on genetics, which I had never really heard of before,” she remembers. “And I immediately thought, ‘This is the absolute coolest thing — it explains how the world works.’” She nurtured this interest over the next few years, gravitating toward genetics classes in high school and devouring books and science articles on the subject. She assumed genetics would remain her focus at Yale, but a cell biology course during her sophomore year shifted her scientific trajectory. 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Aslani-Far’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

Get to know Yale College Class of 2026 graduate Nolyn Mjema! #Yale2026 🎓 For Nolyn Mjema, service is at the heart of everything he does. It’s something his parents instilled in him at a young age. “They have influenced me a lot in terms of being very service-oriented,” he says, “and always having a reason of why I’m doing anything that I’m doing.” At Yale, he found his “why” inside and outside the classroom, juggling a rigorous academic workload with community service work through soup kitchens, mobile health clinics, and mentoring middle school students in greater New Haven. Raised by Tanzanian parents, Mjema was born in Houston, Texas, and lived there for about half his life before his family relocated to Edmond, Oklahoma. Once at Yale, he established himself as a rising star in the study of biomedical sciences, majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry while also starting a joint degree program at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) during his senior year. He’ll graduate with his Master of Public Health degree next year. Mjema, who is a member of Morse College, has spent his academic career bridging the biomedical sciences and social inquiry. While he aspires to become a doctor, he has enjoyed incorporating a public health lens into his research where he’s explored questions of health, race, and access. He said that one course, in particular, was foundational for him. During his first year, he took “Sickness and Health in African American History” with Carolyn Roberts, an assistant professor in the Department of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which helped him better understand the history of medicine viewed through the lens of the African-American experience. “It’s part of why I’m so passionate about service, especially service of underserved populations,” he said. 🔗 Tap the link our bio to keep reading about Mjema’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

As Commencement approaches, meet Class of 2026 graduate Isabel Rancu! When Isabel Rancu learned she was a finalist for the prestigious Marshall Scholarship last fall, the Yale community rallied around her. “The fall semester was incredibly chaotic,” recalls Rancu, a senior from South Carolina whose love of science brought her to Yale. “I was a new counselor for first-year students, and I was applying for fellowships at the same time. When I heard I was a finalist, I just felt overwhelmed.” That’s when the Yale community showed up for her — sometimes, in surprising ways. The first-year students Rancu had been mentoring as a First Year Counselor at Pauli Murray College began mentoring her. “They were spit-firing back at me the things I tell them before their exams,” Rancu recalls. “‘You’re going to be great.’ ‘You’re going to do so well.’ And I even heard one of my favorites: ‘Even if you don’t succeed, no one can take away the hard work you put in to get here.’” As she prepared for a final interview, the head of college and dean at Pauli Murray offered to conduct a mock interview with her. Fellow lab members offered to prep her. And a professor emailed a Yale alum who’d won a Marshall Scholarship a decade earlier, asking for guidance. The student emailed back in 10 minutes. “It was a sensation I’d never experienced,” Rancu says. “It was like I had an army behind me, and it really showed me the truth about this community. Yale is a place where everyone’s gut instinct is just to help, and you really do get out what you put in.” 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Rancu’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026! #Yale2026 🎓

Old Campus is just about ready to welcome the Class of 2026. The chairs are in place, the stage is set, and Handsome Dan is patiently waiting for Commencement Weekend to get underway: ▪️ Yale College Baccalaureate — Sunday at 10 a.m. ▪️ Yale College Class Day — Sunday at 2 p.m. ▪️ University Commencement — Monday at 10:30 a.m. 🔗 Tap the link in our bio for the full schedule and everything to know for Yale’s 325th Commencement. #Yale2026 🎓

Meet Class of 2026 graduate Kai Zhang! #Yale2026 🎓 Kai Zhang loves making art. He enjoys the sense of invention that accompanies transforming an idea into something tangible and unique. But what really gives him joy is sharing the product of his imagination with others. “To me, the magic of art is in the acts of sharing and receiving,” said Zhang, a Yale senior and resident of Davenport College. “I love seeing my art in the hands of others. It’s like little pieces of me that I give to other people.” In high school, Zhang began making zines — whimsical and sometimes silly handmade booklets on random topics of his choosing. One might contain a comic about making peanut-butter noodles. Another might argue that cats are preferrable to dogs. The well of subjects, he said, runs as deep as one’s imagination allows. “You can make something out of nothing on any topic you like and then share it with everyone,” he said. “You can make a zine from one piece of paper that you fold or cut into certain configurations. From there, you visit a print shop, make as many copies as you want, and start sharing them.” At Yale, Zhang has used zines to spread joy. With the support of a Creative and Performing Arts grant from Davenport, he founded the Itsy Bitsy Zine Club, a creative community that encourages its members to express themselves through zines, prints, stickers, photos, or other media of their choosing. Through a monthly subscription service, Yale College students can sign up to receive bundles of the club’s creative output, which will be delivered to their residential college suites or off-campus housing free of charge. “It’s a little gift filled with art, left right on your doorstep.” 🔗 Tap the link our bio to read more about Zhang’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

Get to know Yale College Class of 2026 graduate Sidney Richardson! #Yale2026 🎓 For every math and science accomplishment Sidney Richardson has racked up during her four years at Yale, she’s had an equally memorable experience outside of her comfort zone. Co-authoring a scientific study on human interactions with robots? Major achievement. But so was learning to make quilts for Yale New Haven Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. Indeed, Richardson’s college years took her to both a National Society of Black Engineers conference and an audition for a hip-hop dance group. “That was a wakeup call,” she joked about the dance audition. “They firmly rejected me, but I did end up taking salsa lessons in New York, which was amazing.” Richardson, a graduating senior at Pierson College and a native of Kansas City, Missouri, said a STEM focus — particularly computer science and math — was always in the cards for her. She revels in the way that math allows you to see how systems work, and she was a huge fan of her CS50 class, an introductory computing and programming course jointly taught with Harvard. “Computer science never feels like work to me,” she said. “It feels like I’m solving an interesting problem.” She spent one of her summers in New Haven working with the Interactive Machines Group, an interdisciplinary research group led by Yale’s computer science department, on a study about how humans respond to robot during a collaborative game; she spent another summer in New York City as a software design intern for Bloomberg (where she’ll work full time after graduation). Yet it was the arts and humanities that led Richardson to choose Yale in the first place. She played the violin in high school, enjoys dancing and the performing arts, and knew she wanted to go to school in a place infused with, and informed by, art and culture. She knew she’d find that here. 🔗 Tap the link our bio to keep reading about Richardson’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!