A few years ago, as a highly ranked high school tennis player from Northern California, Luke Neal had several Ivy League options that offered him the chance to play tennis and pursue challenging academics. But after a 48-hour visit to New Haven, he found that it was Yale’s community that stood out to him.
“Everyone was so closely bonded,” he recalled. “It just seemed like everyone loved spending time together.”
Neal threw himself into that mentality during his four years at Yale, especially at Davenport College, which he grew to love not just for its impressive views and football-friendly courtyards but also for the opportunities for passing-through moments to turn into bonding time. As a senior he lived in one of the college’s house-like residences, known as “The Cottage,” and helped plan events like Davenport formal or JD Day (for the college’s namesake, John Davenport), full of food, games, and temporary tattoos.
Even as Neal achieved great successes in tennis, earning Academic All-Ivy honors as a senior, he continued to seek out new communities across campus. As a senior he joined a Yale society, meeting classmates he’d never met before — and forming close relationships with people on their own journeys whose paths he might not have ever crossed otherwise.
As a senior Luke Neal earned Academic All Ivy honors for excellence in the classroom and on the tennis court.
At Yale, he said, “you’re at a place where you see hundreds of names carved in the table into the walls. You realize how old and traditional it is, but how much everyone cares about each other and how close you can get.”
Some of his favorite memories have been with his tennis teammates. For all his success on the court, he said, few moments were more satisfying than sharing big meals of pasta with creamy tomato sauce and brownie pudding with his team after a day of waking up early, training, classwork, and hours of tennis.
Neal switched his major to chemical engineering after spending a summer at Tesla’s Fremont factory. He spent the next summer working with ExxonMobil in Texas on a project to extract lithium from saltwater, a method the company hopes will be more efficient and environmentally sustainable than traditional methods.
Luke Neal, far right, with other members of the Chemical Engineering Senior Capstone Hydrogen Fuel Production Plant group.
As a senior, some of his projects included designing a hydrogen fuel production plant from scratch, building a water collection system that could capture and collect water from fog passing by it (which, Neal said, “could help potential high elevation communities in regions that don’t have the best water storage”), and working on quantum search algorithms in physics. “It’s just really been a lot of fun, this last semester to have a lot of big design classes, collaborating with other engineers,” he said.
In the fall, Neal will begin a pharmaceutical development job at Merck in New Jersey while also beginning a part-time master’s degree in chemical engineering at Stanford. He hopes to pursue big ideas in pharmaceutical technology development. “I want to take on something that’s unknown, some crazy project where the path hasn’t been well defined,” he said. “It’s rewarding to be able to tackle projects in an unknown area and just consistently struggle with figuring out how you’re going to achieve it.”
Neal advises future Yale student athletes to maintain a good sense of time management but otherwise say yes to as much as possible.
“Your team is going to give you a built-in support system and friends from day one,” he said. “But Yale is full of people doing wildly different things: scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, actors. Talk to everyone. Try and get outside your comfort zone. You’d be surprised how much those experiences can shape your future and make you a more well-rounded person.”
