Yale Graduates to Head to the Baseball Stadiums and National Parks, Peace Corps and Floating Clam Bars

The Yale Class of 1999 is a diverse group, and their plans for what to do after Monday’s graduation are wildly various.

“I’ve thought about this since I was a little kid,” says Bryan Koplin of his intended post-graduation journey to every baseball stadium in America.

Like many of his classmates, Koplin will lose no time in trying to realize a long-postponed ambition. Indeed, graced with a Yale education and a job market that has never been as favorable, the typical graduating senior is free to travel down roads not usually taken – for a while, anyway.

Traditional fields continue to attract many Yale graduates, according to Sandra Goodson, who counsels students at the Office of Career services. The Class of 1999 has its share of aspiring doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, scholars, consultants and captains-to-be of industry, she says.

“A significant portion of the class has chosen jobs in the non-profit, service sector,” notes Goodson, with many joining such national organizations as Teach for America, Americorps and Inner City Teaching Corps, or working for local programs like LEAP. The Peace Corps continues to attract those who seek to share their good will and knowledge on an international scale, Goodson adds.

But some members of the last class of this century will be taking a detour from their chosen career path or blazing new trails altogether. Among the 1999 graduates are individuals pursuing an interest in professional tennis, studying the Spanish theater, becoming a forest ranger, developing technical tools for “gaze tracking” and running an offshore clam bar, among other less-traditional activities.

Some, like Bryan Koplin, are only taking a short respite to follow their dream through the summer, before settling in to more remunerative work – in Koplin’s case, as a business consultant in New York. That job, he cheerfully notes, will leave him time to have a life as well as a career. He says he might even devote some of his leisure hours to finishing a book on his summer at the stadiums.

Lincoln Else will spend this summer and part of the fall in Yosemite National Park as a wilderness ranger, a job he has held for several summers. Else will patrol back-country trails on foot and assist in search-and-rescue missions. He says in “some weird” way his study of philosophy, with a focus on ethics and morality, has been useful in his work as a forest ranger. Despite a love of the outdoors – during his college years he was a leader in the freshman outdoor orientation program and an active member of the mountaineering club – Else easily imagines moving to Manhattan after his stint at Yosemite. He hopes to make documentaries and pursue another interest, photography. Naturally, the natural world will figure in his future endeavors, he notes.

Alexander Selkirk will be riding out his dream in a solar-powered car. Having served as director of Team Lux during his senior year, Selkirk will join his team members this June racing a solar car of their own design from Washington D.C. to Orlando, Florida. In October the group will reunite in Australia for a 2,000-mile race from Darwin to Adelaide. A political science major, Selkirk confesses that he is “less interested in solar cars than in building a team.” Also this summer, he will work with another team from Yale building an internet company “with a top secret product.” Meanwhile, he will prepare for graduate school, where he will pursue the study of public policy.

Political science major Jonathan Beardsley is setting a conditional time limit on his quest to realize his dream. Before the ink has dried on his diploma, Beardsley will head for Montreal, his first stop on the professional tennis circuit.

“After a year and a half, I’ll sit down and decide whether it’s worth it,” Beardsley says, explaining his formula for calculating the likelihood of making it as a “pro.” If after traveling all over the globe – from satellites through challenger games to the highest-ranked tournaments – he fails to attain the winning numbers, then it’s off to law school, he says. Either way, Beardsley acknowledges, courts seem to be in his future.

While some seniors are scattering to far corners of the world, others are staying closer to their home-away-from home. Tauheedah Rashid was all set to return home to California to take up teaching for a few years before joining the Peace Corps. Instead, she will stay in New Haven as assistant director of recruiting for Yale Admissions Office. She still has a number of other ambitions to fulfill in the near future, including attending cooking school and making her pilgrimage to Mecca.

Not surprisingly for a university that has spawned many of the major players in the movie industry, Yale is once again sending a flock of fledgling actors, producers, directors, screenwriters and auteurs to Hollywood.

Trevor Hawkins, who as a classics major might not fit the usual profile of a contemporary actor, sees a Yale education as a major asset in the very competitive profession he has chosen. “Knowledge of classics connects to everything,” he says. In practical terms of “marketability,” too, the Yale name has cachet, Hawkins says. “Film people know that the Yale name indicates a complexity and intelligence that most people don’t have.”

For all his faith in the mysterious meritocracy of Hollywood, Hawkins is prepared for a less benevolent reality. “I’m going into it blind,” he confesses. “I’m willing to wait tables, substitute teach, coach water polo, anything so I can act.”

Beau Bauman has been a serious promoter of the art of film during his four years as an American studies major at Yale. In his junior year he produced “Across the Hall,” a Woody Allenesque romantic comedy, and this year he wrote, directed and helped to produce “Ivy Weeds,” inspired by the true-life story of an Ivy-climbing impostor. Both films, which were feature length and shot with state-of-the-art video cameras, enjoyed unprecedented popularity when they were screened on campus. “The real magic of movies,” Bauman comments, “is making a connection to the audience.”

Bauman is headed to the University of Southern California to study in the producer program of the film school there. He hopes to connect to the vast network of Yale graduates who have already colonized the movie industry.

Among those graduates who are putting their commitment to social justice into action – although in very different ways – are Loren Stewart and Brian Ingram.

Stewart is going to work for a nonprofit group in Dallas, Texas, called Proyecto Adelante (Project Onwards), which provides legal counseling and other services, such as physical therapy, to survivors of political torture. She will work with Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees who were denied political asylum to the United States in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. While guiding refugees through the obstacle course of U.S. immigration regulations, she will pursue certification as an “accredited representative,” someone with sufficient knowledge of immigration law to become a legal representative in court even without a law degree. Eventually she does hope to go to law school.

“Islamic economics is all about social justice,” says Brian Ingram, who is attempting to develop an investment strategy consistent with Islamic teaching. While the Koranic code of conduct governing all financial transactions – which favors the good of the community over individual interests – might seem at odds with the spirit of a market economy, the idea of reconciling the two is not altogether new, says Ingram, a Near Eastern studies major. When he began researching the subject on the Internet, he found that a Yale alumnus, Nicholas Kaiser, had already established such a fund in the United States.

Kaiser’s Amana Funds are managed according to Islamic principles in that investors share in profit and loss and receive no interest, and funds are not invested in businesses such as liquor, pornography, gambling and interest-based financial institutions. Ingram will be working at Amana Funds following graduation. He foresees attending business school in the not-so-distant future. Much farther down the road, he says, “I would like to open an Islamic bank.”

Though he balks at the term “calling,” Michael Friedman has long been inspired by the prospect of becoming a rabbi. “I always knew that I wanted to do it,” he says. “This year I definitely decided I wanted to do it now.” Friedman, who did his senior history project on maps in the Civil War, will fly to Jerusalem after graduation and spend one year at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He will then return to New York for the four remaining years of study leading to his ordination.

Jennifer Lagerquist and Yue Yin are roommates who will both pursue an interest in dance after they graduate. Lagerquist was an art history major who did her senior project on a Barbara Morgan photograph of Martha Graham at the Yale University Art Gallery. “I never thought I was going to get into dance at all,” says Lagerquist, who came to Yale knowing there was no dance major. Nonetheless, Lagerquist, who began dancing as a toddler and has been dancing ever since, was able to continue performing on campus with the Yale Dancers. In the fall she will enroll in the dance program at New York University’s Tisch School. After five years or so of professional dancing, she hopes to find or create a professional outlet combining her interests in biology and art history.

In the immediate future, Yue Yin plans to continue assisting with a documentary dance video about Australian aboriginals, a project she worked on during her senior year. Later, given her interest in musical composition and choreography, she plans to use audio-visual technology to explore the innate connection between rhythm and movement. She took a class at Yale on rhythm in indigenous cultures and is fascinated by the ways humans respond to the rhythms they perceive, perhaps only subliminally, as opposed to the rhythms they hear on a conscious level. Putting microphones on dancers to monitor their breathing is one technique she might use to make this connection more palpable, she says. After she has written and choreographed her composition, she will ask members of the Yale Dancers to perform it. Meanwhile she will be scouting graduate schools for a multidisciplinary arts program that can cater to her unique interest.

If there were a “Different Drummer” award for the Yale Class of 1999, two strong nominees would be Warren Jones and John Bockstoce.

Jones has found a unique application for the disciplines that were his double-major at Yale. In his work on a device that reads eye movement – a gaze-tracking tool – Jones draws on his experience as a student of mechanical engineering and of art. Jones become interested in this technology because of his work with autistic adults. Ironically this “virtual seeing” machine, which can communicate the perceptions of those isolated by autism, was originally developed for use in air warfare, he notes. Jones has received a grant to continue working to improve gaze-tracking methods at the Child Study Center at Yale.

“My art really is my research,” he says. “We are creating drawing out of the way people look at things.”

Every summer for the past four years, Bockstoce has maneuvered his floating raw bar among the yachts and pleasure cruisers anchored at Newport harbor. The 17-foot motor boat that serves as his retail outlet for fresh shrimp, clams and oysters has become a familiar sight and a welcome snack venue – especially during cocktail hours – in the harbor. Bockstoce, who got the idea for his enterprise from a former teacher who floated a similar raw bar in Cuttyhunk, has found a very lucrative market in Newport. He employs 12-13 part-time assistants and one full time, and insists on a strict dress code: bow ties, dress shirts, white aprons.

This summer, Bockstoce will again be following the routine, pulling up his blue sea ox beside the boats of potential customers and offering his wares. Eventually he might tire of it, he notes, and sell the enterprise to another budding entrepreneur. Meanwhile, “it’s a really a fun thing and a great learning experience,” he says, recalling the time one satisfied customer looked at him and said. “Hey, this is a great idea. You must go to Yale.”