Here, Yale News spotlights a few of the exceptional members of the Yale College Class of 2025, a group whose accomplishments and contributions have strengthened the Yale campus and the world beyond.
Selected from nominations submitted by residential college heads and deans, these outstanding students include musicians and molecular biologists, entrepreneurs and engineers, authors and athletes. One arrived at Yale expecting to focus strictly on computer science but ended up finding new ways to incorporate her insights from that field into medicine and translational research. One launched an AI startup that he’ll soon take to Silicon Valley. Another had visions of pursuing a life on stage, but found a new focus in telling stories as a documentary filmmaker. And another built himself into arguably the best men’s basketball player in the Ivy League.
When they weren’t in the classroom, they were mentoring younger students, conducting orchestras, or reviving dormant literary journals.
We hope this small but impressive sample offers a sense of the creativity, compassion, and resilience of the undergraduate Class of 2025.
Kala’i Anderson
Kala’i Anderson is devoted to Hawai’i, his home.
“Hawai’i forms the basis of my identity,” said Anderson, who was born and raised on Maui. “It gives me a solid foundation and influences how I carry myself and what I choose to do, whether academically or professionally.”
Once on Yale’s campus, Anderson found supportive communities both in Berkeley College, where he served as president of the student council, and the Native American Cultural Center, where as a peer liaison he mentors Indigenous first-year students.
In the latter role, he asked to be assigned to support Pacific Islanders whenever possible.
Anderson’s eyes brighten when he speaks of his first-year peers. He refers to them as “my kids.”
“My kids have provided me with a sense of home when we all are so far away from it,” he said. “They give me something that nobody else can because they have backgrounds like my own. I’m so honored to have served as a peer liaison to help guide them as they charted their own paths at Yale.”
Read more about Kala’i Anderson
Keeley Brooks
Keeley Brooks worried that she’d made a terrible mistake during her first few weeks at Yale.
A violinist since the age of five, she’d begun the requisite auditions for various musical groups and programs shortly after arriving on campus. She especially wanted to play with an orchestra, something she hadn’t had the opportunity to do in the small town of Winthrop, Washington, where she grew up.
“I didn’t get into anything,” Brooks said. “And I thought, ‘What did I just do?’”
After the shock wore off, however, Brooks doubled down on her desire to play in an orchestra and began working harder toward that goal. In her sophomore year, Brooks took a seat in the Yale Symphony Orchestra (YSO).
Since then, she’s served as YSO’s assistant librarian, social chair, head librarian, and just this past year, its president. A member of Morse College, Brooks has also participated in a variety of chamber ensembles and theater productions, all while maintaining a 3.92 GPA. But her time at Yale also took her down some unexpected paths.
“I’ve discovered so many things I didn’t even know existed before I came here,” she said.
Maxwell Brown
Maxwell Brown’s love for theater and music began at an early age: “My parents put me into different summer camps and training programs for musical theater,” Brown said. “I confess that I was, and still am, a musical theater kid.”
“It started as this outlet for me to express myself, and it’s turned into a love for the craft,” Brown said. “Art can be an opportunity for people to shape who we are as humans in this world. It’s really a profound aspect of the human condition.”
Brown, who is a member of Trumbull College, has worn many hats over the past four years: actor, singer, director, composer, producer, and even DJ.
And both in and out of the classroom, Brown, a theater, dance, and performance studies major, learned to think critically about the work he makes and consumes. For him, it’s as important to think about “why” we make art as “how” we make it.
Jimmy Carter
Yale’s Jimmy Carter shares a certain quality with his late presidential namesake: a heart full of empathy and ambition.
It’s what drew Carter, a graduating senior from Branford College majoring in mechanical engineering, to consider Yale in the first place.
Carter was 10 years old, looking at YouTube videos on his mother’s iPhone, when he came across a student’s “Why I Chose Yale” video. That video highlighted Yale was a place to engage with both art and science, community and the corporate world, work and play.
“I was fascinated by it, and as I got older, I realized I didn’t want to ever give up exploring all my hobbies and passions in a way that felt genuine,” he said. “I didn’t want to give up a part of myself when I went to college.”
Zoë Colfax
Zoë Colfax has enjoyed telling stories for as long as she can remember — whether performing on stage or sharing a silly story with her family. And as far back as third grade, when she made her theater debut, she was acutely aware of how people responded to her language choices. And she’d tinker with different approaches that might strengthen the connection with her audience.
Colfax has continued to explore different modes of storytelling in the years since, including at Yale. She’d decided to attend Yale because she knew she’d have a chance to continue developing her storytelling skills while also pursuing her interest in African American studies. Combining those interests, she said, she found that she increasingly felt drawn to stories about social issues — and with the potential to change the world. It was her own family influences — particularly her father’s work as a civil rights attorney — that inspired her passion for social justice.
And she decided to focus on an entirely new medium: documentary filmmaking.
“Film is unique in that you can share your stories so much farther,” she said. “So I started to make documentaries, and the stories that stood out to me were stories about race and what it means to be Black in America. And I started to learn how your voice can really affect change.”
Rolando Kattan Rubi
Growing up in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, Rolando Kattan Rubi was the sort of kid who peppered his friends, family, and teachers with probing questions and comments — about government, politics, art, and society.
When Kattan Rubi visited the Yale campus as a high school student for a model United Nations conference, he was bowled over by the spirit of academic curiosity and civic engagement that pervaded the place.
In four years, he’s followed his heart into human rights activism, international peace advocacy, theatrical training, and the writings of Thomas Hobbes. He’s leaned into his curiosity, studied furiously, and remained open to possibilities in people and institutions.
“It fit me perfectly,” said Kattan Rubi, a graduating senior at Saybrook majoring in political science and comparative literature. “Then and now, Yale has allowed me to explore, and to pursue a broad, humanistic inquiry.”
Read more about Rolando Kattan Rubi
Nicole Lam
A native of San Gabriel, California, Nicole Lam has had music in her heart since she was three years old, when she first sat down at her family’s piano. She went on to become a virtuoso pianist and talented vocalist, and she planned to continue focusing on the piano after high school. Then a music conservatory professor advised her to study something else, “because the more you understand the world, the more meaning your art can hold.”
So Lam came to Yale, graduating with a double major in applied mathematics and computer science and a joint B.S./M.S. in the latter. But while she looks like an ideal candidate for a career in finance, the Ezra Stiles senior instead is Broadway-bound, having discovered at Yale the form of music-making that is “closest to my heart.”
At Yale, in addition to studying the piano and singing with the Yale Glee Club and Yale Cantorum, Lam was music director and head conductor of the Berkeley College Orchestra and an assistant conductor of Yale Symphony Orchestra (YSO) during her senior year.
“These experiences have shaped me into the kind of leader I hope to be: someone who creates spaces where people feel encouraged and inspired to bring the fullest version of themselves,” she said.
Ethan Levinbook
Quarantined in his family’s Connecticut home during a COVID-19 gap year between high school and Yale, in 2020 and 2021, Ethan Levinbook pursued the challenge of learning French with gusto.
On top of a full-time job, he drilled himself daily on vocabulary and grammar, listened to French radio, and corresponded or spoke by phone and Zoom with native French speakers he met through language learning exchanges online.
“Learning a language is, in a way, a form of travel,” said Levinbook — a thrill perhaps felt all the more intensely when house-bound.
His pandemic pastime paid off handsomely: Upon arriving at Yale, he placed out of French language instruction and directly into French-only literature classes.
This weekend, Levinbook graduates not only as a French major but as Yale’s first ever dual B.A.-M.A. degree recipient in French, a four-year program he proposed and persuaded the faculty to establish. It gave him entrée to additional French courses — he’s taken 23 — expanded his orbit to include graduate students and nearly every French professor at Yale, and allowed him to, as he put it, “live the language.”
Read more about Ethan Levinbook
Jessica Liu
Jessica Liu loved her high school AP computer science class so much that she was leaning toward studying computer science in college. But then a life-changing internship the summer of her sophomore year at Yale College opened her eyes to the possibility of career in medicine.
As a Kadoorie Cardiovascular Summer Intern at Houston Methodist Hospital, Liu worked in the hospital’s Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery Department, doing rotations with surgeons, one of which gave her a chance to participate in a trip to harvest a donated lung for transplant.
“I took on the role of a medical assistant, washing out the body to give the surgeon a clean visual,” said Liu, a Phi Beta Kappa pre-med student, graduating with a degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. “I got to hold the lung. Before that experience, I thought surgery was not for me.”
For Liu, such internships during her time at Yale have revealed a niche in medicine that taps into her interests and strengths. She also received a research fellowship with the Oktay lab during her sophomore year, which showed her how she could incorporate her interest in computer science into medicine and translational research.
“Computational biology and bioinformatics is what I ended up doing,” she said. “I love system-level knowledge, the way pathways are connected.”
Coco Ma
By the time she started her undergraduate studies, Coco Ma had already finished her master’s in piano performance at Yale School of Music (YSM), graduated from The Juilliard School, and won numerous top national and international prizes. She had written what would become her first published novel, a young adult fantasy called “Shadow Frost,” at 15, and followed that up with a second, “God Storm.”
When she made the decision to pursue her undergraduate degree at Yale College, with a focus on cognitive science, she was pleasantly surprised to find that the experience felt just as rewarding as anything she’d ever done.
“Being a conservatory student means spending a lot of time alone practicing, having lessons, and interacting with a fairly intimate group of people who are in your studio,” said Ma. “Shifting to Yale College felt like a new beginning.”
Angelin Mathew
When Angelin Mathew was a high school senior, pancreatic cancer claimed the life of her classmate and good friend. The pain of this loss reshaped Mathew’s perspective, inspiring an innovative academic career and a professional aspiration she had never envisioned.
“My whole college journey has really been about trying to live out this legacy and honor the friendship that we had,” says Mathew. “This really hasn’t felt like work. It’s been more like a mission to me.”
That mission will culminate in Mathew graduating from Yale College this week with a double degree in molecular biology and in humanities, where her focus has been on Buddhist-Christian comparative theology. She is also receiving a certificate in global health.
Exploring these diverse academic disciplines, Mathew has forged her own path.
Read more about Angelin Mathew
Bez Mbeng
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a single Zoom call sent Bez Mbeng on a path to Yale and Ivy League glory.
Mbeng, who was a standout guard for Our Lady of Good Counsel high school in Olney, Maryland, at the time, met over Zoom with James Jones, the head coach of Yale’s men’s basketball team. It was their first conversation and when it ended, Mbeng knew he was destined to be a Bulldog.
“I came away from the call thinking ‘I want to play for that man,’” Mbeng said, who had received scholarship offers from several other schools. “It’s hard to describe, but he has an aura about him. My parents and I trusted him right away.”
Four years later, the 6’4” guard will graduate as one of the most accomplished Yale basketball players of all time. Over his career, the men’s basketball team achieved unprecedented success, winning three Ivy League tournament championships, two conference regular season titles, and securing three NCAA tournament appearances.
He is a three-time Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year and was named the league’s 2024-2025 Player of the Year. Last season, he also recorded three triple doubles — when a player amasses double digits in points, assists, and rebounds in a game — which led the nation.
Luke Neal
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.
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.”
Joanna Ruiz
Growing up in Hollywood, Florida, Joanna Ruiz had ambitions for college — her sister, through the nonprofit college matching program QuestBridge, had gone to Stanford. But when it came time to think about possible destinations, she felt unsure about going out of state, and where she might find the right place. Then, as a high school junior, she went to QuestBridge’s college fair and heard a Yale admissions officer speak.
“Yale just felt like the most welcoming place,” said Ruiz. “The way they were engaging with us at the fair told me that they cared, and that Yale would be a good place for me to flourish.”
And in her four years here, she has — in her double major of music and American Studies; in her residential college, Jonathan Edwards (JE); and in her work across a broad range of organizations and activities on campus and beyond.
The common thread? Building, and uplifting, community.
