The opportunity to learn Latin as an extracurricular activity while in middle school in Shanghai set Kathy Sun ’29 on a burgeoning academic journey. In high school, a teacher who had studied classics led her further down this road. By the time she arrived in New Haven as a first-year student, Sun was ready to immerse herself in Directed Studies, Yale’s signature great books program. Now she plans to spend the summer at an archaeological dig site east of Rome.
Sun’s particular interest in a Yale also grew from a middle school experience. “Our teacher played a video about Yale, by Yale students,” Sun says. “It was my first encounter with an American university. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, if I go to college, I want to go somewhere like that.’”
Enrolling about 120 first-year students, Directed Studies offers an interdisciplinary introduction to seminal texts of Western and Near Eastern cultures. “It was very intense, but also very fun,” Sun says. “I learned a lot from the professors.” The classes solidified her interest in classics and in taking a more literary, text-based approach to scholarly exploration. Sun estimates that she and her fellow students read from about seventy different books for the program over the course of her first year.
Her summer archaeological experience, run by Professor Andrew Johnston, takes place at a site called Gabii—important early in Roman history, but later eclipsed by Rome, and now nearly forgotten. “It’s a very valuable site for exploring the early years of Roman history,” Sun says.
Sun is also involved with Helicon, the undergraduate journal of classics on campus. Another highlight of her first year was the weekly lectures she attended by Shawkat Toorawa, the Brand Blanshard Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and professor of comparative literature. His lectures, on “three things worth knowing,” Sun says, teach you “something that you wouldn’t learn in class if you’re focused on a specific major, something that challenges you to broaden your scope of knowledge instead of just going deeply on one subject.”
Sun found her first year at Yale to be full of connection with fellow students. And she especially appreciated the way that the intensity of the Directed Studies program brought her close with her classmates and her professors.
“Going through that together, doing the readings, and each of us contributing our specialties and knowledge to each other means you really depend on each other,” she says. “And the little celebrations after finishing the weekly essay, and after our exams—all of these moments really tie us together.”
