Walking down the eccentric streets of SoHo, I began my day’s journey to cut and color my hair, which I like to call my much-needed “C and C appointment.” I held my usual emotional support cup of iced coffee in one hand and played with my hair in the other, twisting it at the ends. It was one of those moments where I became extra aware of my surroundings, looking at each cobblestone and the beautiful people stepping across them. It might have been the intoxicating, fashionable air or the fact my mind was already on hair, but I couldn’t help but notice that each person I passed wore a different and most likely artificial hairstyle. 

No two people wore their hair the same. Some had straight brown hair with layers upon layers. Others had slightly highlighted hair with dead ends at the bottom, trying to be subtly cool — like the first woman who passed by me, though it was obvious she put in effort. Some people had hair colored in all colors of the rainbow, others had only thin spikes of hair left. And of course there were the few who had no hair at all. 

Hair is something that is naturally a part of us, yet many of us feel the need to manipulate it. I couldn’t help but wonder, why are so many people constantly changing what nature intended to be a certain way? As I subtly judge these poor, unsuspecting pedestrians, I felt like a hypocrite, because I too have changed my hair from its original state.  

Growing up, I had thick brown curls. And I hated them. There were moments when I became so frustrated with my hair that I would stomp into the bathroom on a mission, grab a small pair of nail scissors from the drawer and, quietly hopping onto the vanity to get a closer view at the mirror, would cut the frizzy flyways near my middle part. I still have an uneven hairline from the continuous amateur haircuts in my bathroom salon. 

When I wasn’t frustrated with my curls, it seemed like my mom was frustrated with them. Every morning before school, I would stand in front of her saying a small prayer while she used a black brush with thick bristles that almost fought against my hair, twisting it into different shapes to create a braided ponytail. Every day, I wore this tight pony braid, restricting my curls into one consolidated position. I think I had a headache for my whole elementary school career. 

From morning to noon, I tried to make sure my hair wouldn’t move, using various products and making countless trips to the bathroom to slick water onto it. Whenever I saw or even felt a curl escape my pony braid, it meant another trip to the bathroom. My goal was to keep my hair perfectly in place, but in truth all I wanted was for it to be free. Free from the tight twists. But my mom insisted that a pony braid was the best way to control my hair. Still, the control never lasted. The flyaways eventually made their embarrassing appearance by late afternoon. 

By middle school, my hair didn’t feel like something to control anymore, but something I needed to hide. I might have moved up to the middle school floor, but the headaches still remained, along with my stable pony braid. As I gained the freedom to move around between classes, I began to notice the various hair styles in the hall. It felt like walking the streets of SoHo, but with more skirts and fewer guys. 

Most of the girls at my school had straight hair, including most of my friends. I felt different from them and even from my teachers. I remember walking into English class wondering why I wasn’t lucky enough to have my teacher’s blonde, straight hair. Each time I walked in with my curls, I felt different, and I didn’t like that. Why didn’t I look like everyone else? I hated this thing that was naturally a part of me, and wanted to hide it away. 

I constantly complained to my friends about the frizz, the curls, the constant headaches. That is, until she told me that she straightened her hair every other day. I was shocked. It looked so natural. She offered to teach me over FaceTime. That night, I secretly grabbed my older sister’s hair iron and sat close to the mirror, a position that felt uncomfortably similar to my amateur salon days. 

The next morning, I walked to school with my head held high and a smile painted ear to ear. My friends looked at me shocked. I was hoping they would notice my new hairstyle, but just not in the way I expected. Instead my friend who taught me over FaceTime said, “Sophia, I told you to repeat every section, including the back.” She took me to the bathroom and turned me toward the mirror. There, I saw the truth: the front of my hair looked like everyone else’s, but the back revealed who I really was: a girl with curly hair. 

I was so embarrassed, I returned to my familiar pony braid. It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that my mom proposed I do a keratin treatment. I am 4’11, so wearing a pony braid during the first week of high school made me feel like I was the same girl from middle school. I was convinced people might start to actually think that I was still 11. I was fed up looking this way, so we finally took action. 

My mom took me to the appointment, exchanging words with the hairdresser in Hebrew. He slapped a series of chemicals onto my hair and four hours later, I looked like everybody else. I finally felt like I didn’t need to keep my head down in the sea of straight-haired girls, because now I fit in. I was a part of them. From freshman year until the end of high school I would visit David, my hairdresser, to slightly burn my scalp. My mind felt relieved from the emotional stress, and my head did from the physical strain of the ponytails. 

But the treatments were not enough. I didn’t want to just have straight hair, I wanted blonde highlights. I wanted to be like everyone else. And it seemed like everyone was getting highlights. But my mom would never let me, so I did the most rebellious thing I have ever done in my life. On my 17th birthday, I told my mom I was at school studying for the New York State Regents with my friends, went into a sketchy Chinese hair salon next to my house and told them to make me blonde. I came away feeling fabulous, but my mom was tearing up and grounded me for the next few months. But the real punishment came at school, where girls laughed at the white streaks running through my hair. 

My mom made me keep the “tiger stripes,” as my friends like to call them now, to show me that actions have consequences. Eventually she took me to David, and from then until the end of senior year, I had three highlight appointments a year on top of a keratin treatment once a year. I looked like every other girl, and I gained a sense of satisfaction from my artificial hair. I relied on these appointments to boost my confidence and happiness. 

At the time, it genuinely did feel like confidence, but it was rooted in conformity. This wasn’t me. I tried so hard to fit in, I forgot who I was. Through smoke and mirrors, I had become the girl I thought everyone wanted to see, rather than the girl I truly was, smart and talented in ways that went beyond mere looks. Girls are more than hair, they can be smart, funny and passionate in all kinds of ways. 

It was only in college that I realized that. But I didn’t discover it on my own but rather with the help of my fabulous yet blunt New York City hairstylist. “As I made my way to my regular “C and C” that day in SoHo,” he told me he could no longer treat and bleach my hair. I turned to him like I saw the ghost of my curly hair past. He said that I lost so much hair from the constant bleaching that treating it further would do more harm than good. I told him I was scared. I was scared that I didn’t know who I was with curly hair, but he assured me I would be fine with the right products and correct hair routine. 

He sent me links to the products he used on my hair and gave me a much better tutorial than my friend from middle school did on FaceTime. Over time, I began to see results that I liked. I like that my hair has volume with full waves, rather than being straight and flat. Straight and flat doesn’t represent who I am. I was meant to have waves. This isn’t me trying to fit in. It is a manifested expression on the outside of who I really am as a person. 

Now, as I walk down the streets of SoHo, I let my curly hair free. No more headaches. No more conforming. This is me. I might still get highlights again in the future, but after all, this is New York City, a place filled with endless opportunities to experiment, reinvent, and express oneself. At least now I am finding a balance between authenticity and change, because change can be good when it is not fully overtaking you. So get the highlights. Make the treatment appointments, just don’t let them make you. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sophia Madeb

The post A Hair’s Journey appeared first on The YU Observer.

I used to read. A lot.

The library was an escape for me. I would go and read, and then check out dozens of books. The library I used to visit had a limit of 75 books checked out on a library card at once, and I remember dragging a large suitcase there, desperately trying to find a way to go over the limit and fill the suitcase with as many books as it could fit. And I’d go to this library at least once a month.

As I said, I used to read a lot.

Before my teenage years, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books, eager to be thrown into a world unlike my own. Know a sci-fi/fantasy series for kids? I definitely read it back in the day, more than once. It wasn’t really something I did for fun — not that it wasn’t fun, it’s just that I read because I was a kid with an imagination that needed to be in use.

I used to read during class too. There was a special way to hide the book under the desk so the teacher couldn’t see. Yes, they would suspect that something was up, and maybe they’d even come over, but there were strategies on how and when to hide the book, or even what to say if caught. I read during lunch as well. And recess. Why shoot hoops when you could take a ride on a fire-breathing dragon that could travel through portals that traversed across space and time?

By the time I got to high school, the obsession slowly faded. Free time barely existed anymore, and I began to write my own stuff. It was fun, and it was less risky to do during class. But every once in a while, I would pick up a book or two and feel the same way I did years ago, watching the world around me spin, faster and faster, until it became completely different.

When I came to Yeshiva University, I hoped to continue to use my imagination during my own time and not during school, just as I’m sure the authors intended (and my teachers would hope), but I was just too busy. I wanted to read more, I wanted to dive into those other worlds, but there was simply no time anymore.

Thankfully, I got to read some fantastic novels for some classes here. Pale Fire was the first, a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov that starts with a long poem by a fictional poet, followed by prose analysis of the poem by the fictional poet’s strange neighbor. It’s got layers and layers of meaning, with some absolutely mind-bending parts to it.

This novel drew me back into my old ways, and after I read it I desperately wanted to consume everything I could through classes at YU. Shakespeare — a lot of it. Phillip Roth’s alternate history novel The Plot Against America. Each one made me seek more, and it’s gotten to a point where my obsession has taken over me more than ever before.

Of course, I don’t mean I’ll be reading in class or wasting my time. As an adult, I’ve realized that real life is important and needs to be maintained and tended to, just like imagination. As a kid I didn’t realize this, and I didn’t have to, but now I must. There’s a balance, one that still lets me enjoy plenty of time in a book. I’m happy about it. It’s fun, and it helps me think. I’ve got the whole summer ahead of me and I just got my hands on Blake Crouch’s apparently fantastic Wayward Pines trilogy. 

I’m writing this article because I know that some of you out there were like me. Maybe you think you only enjoyed reading because you had such a big imagination back then — you were a kid, and you did. Now, things are different. Find a way to give yourself the time, space and energy to read. Take a literature class. You can disappear for a few hours and experience something you don’t even realize you’ve been avoiding for a long time. 

Photo Credit: JJ Grayson

The post How YU Rekindled My Obsession with Reading appeared first on The YU Observer.

If you had told me in high school that I would attend an all-girls university, and more importantly that I would end up loving it, I would have laughed in your face. 

I went to coed schools my whole life, and if I am being completely honest, my focus was not on learning or grades — it was my social life. I enjoyed being around boys in particular. I liked talking to them, spending time with them during breaks and even during class, flirting and having something to look forward to beyond whatever was on the teacher’s agenda. I hate to admit it, but people probably would have called me a “pick-me girl.” 

I decided to come to Stern College for Women partly because New York felt exciting and almost glamorous — the idea of living in the city and having easy access to Broadway shows, great restaurants and a plethora of bars appealed to me. Stern also felt like the natural next step after my time in seminary. I definitely did not choose Stern because it was an all-girls school — that was purely coincidental. However, after spending a couple of months here, the allure of New York City — although the original reason I decided to come to Stern — moved to the background of my experience rather than being its defining feature. 

When I came to Stern, I started to take academics more seriously. I began to actually do the assigned readings and pay attention in class instead of just passively sitting and half-listening. School stopped being a social performance and became a place where I actively worked on myself every day. In high school, I didn’t realize the extent to which boys occupied my attention because that’s all I had ever known. It was only after being removed from a coed environment and seeing my priorities shift that I noticed the change within myself.  In a place without the constant awareness of how I might be perceived by boys, the hesitation and fright around talking faded, and over time, I started to think about myself in a way I never had before — I felt smart. 

Instead of thinking about running into a crush at school, I started doing my work, but not in a forced, miserable way. I actually wanted to do it, and it was easier without distractions. My time became dedicated to cultivating knowledge rather than approval from boys in my grade. I read more, I thought more and I found myself having conversations that felt deeper and more meaningful than anything I had ever experienced. 

Before coming here, I never saw myself as someone capable of pursuing something serious or ambitious. It was not that I lacked interests or goals. It was that I lacked the self-confidence required to pursue them. Stern became the milieu in which I could evolve into a stronger, more self-assured  version of myself. I do not think that is just by chance. Without worrying about men’s perception of me, I stopped performing and started focusing on who I actually wanted to become. I stopped seeking validation and began building true confidence and a sense of direction. 

It was this transformation that made me realize I wanted to pursue law. Law had always been something I found interesting, but I never thought I was smart enough to make a career out of it. Growing up, I internalized the belief that I was mediocre, and because of that I avoided doing things that felt difficult. If I never gave something one hundred percent effort, failure felt easier to justify to myself and to my peers.  

But Stern changed that. 

Without the constant pressure of hoping to be viewed favorably by the boys at my school, I became less afraid of making mistakes. I started taking risks academically, and over time, I proved to myself that I was more capable than I had originally assumed. What once felt out of reach now felt realistic, and that realization helped me push myself to study for the LSAT and prepare to apply for law school.  

The greatest value of an all-girls environment, at least in my experience, was safety. Upon reflection, in a coed environment I found myself engaged in an act of performance in order to perfectly craft my public image. In an all-female environment, this pressure doesn’t exist for me. As a result, I have spent the last three years focusing on who I wanted to become as opposed to the person I wanted other people to see. 

As my time here comes to a close, I’ve discovered that Stern is so much more than a place that gave me access to the rush of life in New York City. It is a unique institution that has enabled me to stop playing a disingenuous role and instead focus on becoming the truest version of myself. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Ashley Hefner

The post Who I Became Without Men Watching appeared first on The YU Observer.

In my first year at Stern, I took Archaeology with Dr. Jill Katz (as everyone should during their time at Yeshiva University). The class examined world prehistory, the advent of agriculture and the rise of social complexity. On the midterm, one question asked us to describe how the concepts we learned in class were applicable to our lives. I compared starting college to the experiences of the first Aboriginal Australians, who ventured out beyond everything they had previously known in order to discover something new. 

Here’s what I wrote: “The motivations that brought Aboriginal Australians to seek out new lands is easily applicable to me as a Stern student. I left my hometown seeking an adventure and a change of scenery. I have to learn how to survive in a new environment without the support and familiarity of the place I left.”

I was alluding to what I now understand college to be (thanks, again, to another one of Dr. Katz’s classes, Cultural Anthropology): a rite of passage. 

The phrase was coined by Arnold van Gennep, an anthropologist who examined the significance of rituals associated with transitional stages of life. The point of a rite of passage is in its ability to  raise one’s status. More specifically, rites of initiation denote the entrance into adulthood. In order for an individual to merit a coming-of-age ceremony, they must have mentors, a change in social status and pedagogical ascension. The ritual doesn’t just mark the individual’s newfound status; it itself is what elevates it. Though secular American culture doesn’t feature many rites of passage, graduation ceremonies stand out as a prime example of a status-changing ritual. 

Though I had never heard of van Gennep before this semester, I intuitively understood his ideas around rites of passage, and this informed how I treated my time in college. 

Van Gennep explains that there are three stages to initiation into a higher social status. Upon completing them, the individual should emerge changed and reincorporated into their life as an adult. I view my college years through this lens.

The first stage is separation from the life the individual had previously known. When I came to Stern, it was the first time I was away from home for a significant amount of time. I came to New York City, separated almost entirely from everything and everyone I had ever known, and was given virtually unbridled freedom. In the first week, this independence was exciting. But though I continued to have a great time, independence also came with homesickness and loneliness. This isolation, though, is necessary to arrive at the next stage.

The second and most important phase is the transition stage, also known as the liminal or the “betwixt and between” phase. I had to learn how to fend for myself without the support I was accustomed to. That first semester was one of the most difficult of my life. The novelty of my independence wore off, my workload increased and the weather grew colder. Balancing my new responsibilities without the guidance (and beautiful weather) I had at home was arduous. Though this stage is the most challenging, it’s also where meaningful growth occurs.  

The third stage is reincorporation, when the individual is brought back into their village transformed into an adult. For me, this will be signified by graduation, perhaps the ultimate ritual of initiation, and leaving Stern. In theory, I will be returning to my previous life, but with the skills needed to support myself. Not to mention the degree itself, which alone elevates my status as a college graduate.  

I came to Stern seeking an adventure, and found myself in a liminal state. While my college years have most definitely qualified as an adventure in ways I never expected, the real meaning of my time here was in the personal growth I experienced along the way. 

It’s only in a place like college that one is forced to exist and simply learn, with the time, space and freedom for reinvention. The responsibilities here are extremely low stakes, if you’re not killing yourself for a perfect GPA. 

I had zero expectations when I came to Stern. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to end up. Especially in the beginning, treating college like an experience and not just a means to a degree opened up opportunities for self-discovery and growth. I had the freedom to struggle with new ideas and weigh various career options. It also allowed me to confront my fear of failure without any real risks. I knew that I would figure things out eventually, and that the process would change me along the way. 

Despite the challenges and the uncertainty I faced during the liminal stage, I can confidently say that I am proud of the person that has emerged from this journey. Graduation symbolizes reincorporation — signifying the weight of what we have gleaned from our time in college. As I walk across the commencement stage and leave the YU bubble, I am eager to put the skills, knowledge and maturity I have obtained to good use. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gabriella Gomperts

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Today, it is practically impossible to avoid encountering artificial intelligence (AI) online, from a simple Google search to social media content. The rise of AI has brought on a wave of innovation, with companies, the medical field and private individuals alike all utilizing this tool to improve the lives of others. 

Students at Yeshiva University have not been immune to AI’s hold on the world, but the way I see it being used is often not as positive. If you’re someone who has ever talked to me about AI, you know I don’t feel particularly partial to it. As someone involved in many creative spaces, I also have reservations about how the technology is being used in the greater entertainment and arts community. 

I am not speaking about those who just plug their assignments into AI and call it a day. Though I firmly believe that is wrong and dishonest, I wish to highlight something else. Recently, I was paired with a classmate for a project, and I opened up the document to read over what she had written when I noticed a line at the bottom: “If your teacher wants it described more concisely…” I asked my partner if she used AI to write the assignment. She replied yes, but said she only used it to help outline the assignment. She assured me that the words written were her own, but something still didn’t feel right. 

After some thinking and overhearing different conversations in the halls of YU, I came to a conclusion: people generally realize that plugging an assignment into AI is morally wrong, but many still believe it is completely innocent to use AI as a starting point. But in using such a shortcut, they were not thinking about what the assignment was asking of them, and certainly not coming to any original conclusions. Brainstorming, the initial stage of any project, research paper or essay, has been completely cut out. 

I see the temptation of using ChatGPT to make my homework a little easier. There are certainly other activities I would find more enjoyable than doing schoolwork. But at the end of the day, the results of these shortcuts wouldn’t really be my work. How much would I really learn this way that I could apply to my future studies? 

A recent MIT Media Lab study examined the impact of AI usage on the brain. The results found that those who were reliant on AI had the lowest brain engagement and that they “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Whether we acknowledge it or not, our use of AI is changing the way our brains work and how they process information. 

So is the era of brainstorming coming to an end? Will all aspects of learning be offloaded to a bot that has pulled facts from various corners of the internet? Will schoolwork build our skills or will it just be another area where corners are cut?

If we use AI to get our ideas flowing, are they really our ideas? By using AI in this way, we are spoon-feeding ourselves thoughts and doing our brains a disservice. We are not appropriately engaging our minds in ways that encourage cognitive growth. 

As humans, we have been given the unique gift of creativity. Great works of art stem from the genuine human experience and resonate with audiences because of that. Creativity, and really all the work that we do, is supposed to come from us and our observations of the world, not what a robot is telling us others have already said. 

Even among modern innovations, AI certainly seems like magic. But take Mr. Arthur Weasley’s advice in Harry Potter into consideration the next time you log onto ChatGPT: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain!”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Aliza Gans

The post To Think, or Not To Think? That Is the Question appeared first on The YU Observer.

Dear Freshman Me,

There is a version of college that looks something like this: you arrive with a plan, you execute the plan, and somewhere around junior year, it all starts to make sense. You know what you want, you know how to get it, and the uncertainty that everyone warned you about turns out to be manageable. I believed in that version completely. And for a while, the belief itself felt like enough.

This lie informed the way I approached everything, waiting to feel ready before I applied for anything, waiting to understand a room before I walked into it, waiting for some internal signal before making any change. I thought clarity was something you arrived at before you started moving. Turns out, it’s something you earn by moving, and only by moving, without shortcuts.

College, especially business schools, makes a very convincing impression of a system that rewards people who have it figured out. The students who talk the most confidently in class, the ones with the internship lined up before sophomore year, the ones who seem to already speak the language, can all make you feel like everyone got a manual you didn’t. But spend three years actually watching people, and the picture gets more complicated. The ones who looked certain early are not always the ones who end up doing the most interesting things. Certainty and true competence are not the same, and college is one of the few places where you can confuse them for long enough to actually convince yourself that they are. Often, that early confidence comes from the opposite of ambition, from staying close to what’s already familiar, from choosing the path that requires the least reinvention. The student with the “perfect” internship locked in before sophomore year isn’t necessarily ahead; sometimes they just optimized for comfort early, which looks like competence until the real world asks something of them that their comfort zone never did. 

What I learned, slowly and mostly through doing things before I felt ready, is that the people who develop real judgment are the ones who accumulate experience faster than everyone else, not because they’re smarter, but because they don’t wait for permission to start something. They apply for the role they’re underqualified for. They ask the question in the room where they’re the youngest person. They take the internship that doesn’t make obvious sense on paper and figure out what to do with it once they’re there.

There is a specific kind of moment that I think every serious person in college experiences at least once: you ask someone, a boss, a mentor, someone you respect, for direction, and what you get back is “figure it out.”

The first time it happens, it feels like a door closing. Eventually, you understand it as the opposite. What it actually means is that you are in the right room, being asked to operate at the level the room requires. Nobody hands you the answer in a real professional environment; they give you the problem, and, if you’re lucky enough, resources, and they expect you to work backwards from there. Learning to do that, to think through something with incomplete information and still make a decent call, is the most transferable skill you can walk away from college with. More than any specific ability, and more than a degree itself.

The thing about waiting for clarity is that it feels responsible. It feels like the mature approach is to get organized, understand the landscape, then act. But in practice, this mostly just means you act later than you should, with roughly the same amount of information you would have had if you’d started earlier. The landscape doesn’t become easier to navigate the longer you stare at it. It becomes easier to navigate when you’re in it. 

So if I could go back and change one thing, it wouldn’t be a specific decision. It would be the pace. I would have moved sooner, applied earlier, asked more questions before I felt like I’d earned the right to ask them. Not recklessly, but hungrily. With the understanding that the people who end up knowing what they want are almost always the people who went looking for it before they were sure they’d find it. You are going to figure it out. Not before you start, but because you start. It is never too late to ask questions and to change career paths, but always remember that action is the cure for anxiety. That’s what moving before you’re ready actually gets you not just experience, but the only kind of clarity that was ever real. 

— Your Senior Self

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Yael Tangir

The post The Biggest Lie I Believed in College: An Honest Letter to My Freshman Self appeared first on The YU Observer.

I was born believing I was creative. As a child, my parents and teachers were impressed with my love for art, music and writing, and my ability to use my imagination to transform blankets into fortresses and write and direct musicals for school projects. I wrote my first book at the age of eight and beamed pridefully as I held it up to present to my mom. 

A few years ago, I rediscovered this book buried within a pile of artwork from my childhood that my mom keeps in a big plastic bin beneath her closet. I cringed as I flipped through the pages, realizing that my “original story” about three best friends was lifted almost entirely from a children’s book I had read, just with characters’ names swapped out.   

Imitation, I reasoned, is the opposite of imagination. Suddenly, all the praise I had received for my creativity as a child felt like a fraud.

As an English major at Stern, I have been lucky enough to take classes spanning screenwriting, literature, creative nonfiction and copywriting. Somewhere within the overlap of all those classes, a question kept resurfacing: what is creativity, really? I used to think it was a trait you either had or didn’t, like having brown hair or being good at sports. But the more I engaged with the creative process, the more that definition warped. 

This semester, in Professor O’Malley’s British Romanticism class, we studied Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet of the Romantic movement who drew a distinction between two different creative faculties: imagination and fancy. Fancy, he argued, is a mechanical process, a rearranging of existing images into something that only mimics creativity. Imagination is something deeper. It dissolves what already exists and recreates it into something new, unifying diverse elements to produce new forms of meaning. Imagination, he writes, is the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.”

This distinction clicked when I thought back to my advertising class. One of the first rules we learned was to throw away wordplay. Puns and clever headlines are always the first ideas to surface, but seasoned advertisers warn that they are vacuums—impressive for a split second, yet empty underneath. That is fancy. It dresses up existing ideas without transforming them. Real advertising, the kind that actually moves people, requires something closer to what Coleridge meant by imagination.

But these definitions are still abstract and don’t explain what it takes to truly be creative. That’s where my creative writing classes came in. Each one added a new layer to my working definition of creativity.

In my introductory creative writing class with Professor Matt Miller, I learned that writing characters is about understanding what drives people. What does that character want? What are they afraid of? Those insights are what propel a story forward and explain why characters make the choices they do. It’s not about coming up with the most intense and dramatic plot, but about placing your characters in situations that challenge their wants and needs. 

I remember sitting in my memoir class when a student raised her hand to comment on the piece we had just read. “I didn’t like it,” she announced. “I just didn’t relate to her story at all.” The professor gently pushed back. Maybe we don’t need to relate to a story for it to matter. Maybe we just need to be willing to care about someone else’s experience. The comment stayed with me. Why do we read other people’s stories? Should we care about a story that has nothing to do with us?

The answer came from my screenwriting class where I learned about the importance of the audience’s identification with the protagonist. Unlike novels, which rewards readers willing to excavate complex themes, a good film has simple and clear emotional stakes. A guy wants to get the girl. A monster is terrorizing a city and its citizens must try to stay alive. Even if we have never been in those situations, we root for the hero because we can relate to their feelings of love or fear. 

That is exactly what makes good advertising too. David Oglivy, often called the “father of advertising,” said that truth is the most powerful element of any campaign. Advertising at its best is not manipulation. It’s identification. It’s about finding the human desire that lives beneath the product and holding it up to the light.

This is the answer to the creativity question and the reason why we watch and read stories about other people. At its core, every story is the same story: what it feels like to be human. It takes on infinite forms, but the emotional heart is always shared. We recognize ourselves in a character struggling with loneliness whether she is an eighth grader navigating a new school or a middle-aged man facing the end of the world. Creativity is the ability to take a lived experience and thread it back into the larger human one.

A few months ago, I finally sat down and watched Mad Men, figuring it was required viewing for anyone who wants to work in advertising. The show follows Don Draper, a creative director in the high pressure world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. The show doesn’t simply follow Don Draper sitting in a conference room brainstorming slogans—which, besides making for a very boring plot, would miss the whole point. What Mad Men understands is that Don’s best ideas come from his own life, his wounds, his love, his longing. In a famous scene where he creates a pitch for a kodak photograph carousel, he uses photos of his own family to sell the client on the power of nostalgia. “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he said. “It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” That’s the whole game, in advertising, in storytelling, in any creative act. The deeper you go into your own experience, the more it becomes a mirror for everyone else.

My favorite screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, understands this better than anyone. In his 2011 screenwriting lecture at BAFTA, Kaufman told a story about a man in his neighborhood he would pass while running. Once, when he was running down a hill, the man was running in the opposite direction and greeted him with a clever line: “Well, sure, it’s all downhill that way.” The first time it happened, Kaufman smiled, certain they had shared a genuine human moment. But then it happened again. And again. Until he realized the man said it to everyone. The next time he passed him, Kaufman looked away, flooded with a shame he couldn’t quite name. He had mistaken something ordinary for something special, and the embarrassment of that mistake felt almost unbearable. What makes Kaufman such a remarkable storyteller is his willingness to sit with the feelings most of us instinctively brush past. The shame of feeling ordinary. The embarrassment of wanting connection and missing it. He leans into those feelings, and in doing so, he finds something that belongs to everyone.

John Keats famously said “what the imagination seizes as beauty is truth.” We cry at fictional characters because somewhere in their story, we have recognized ourselves. There is something beautiful about the way a perfectly captured emotional truth can stop you in your chest and make you feel less alone in your own experience.

So how do you tell stories that resonate? Where does that kind of imagination come from?

In Dr. Ann Peters’ creative writing class, we had an assignment called the mimic, where we chose an author we admired and imitated his or her voice as closely as possible. I didn’t understand. How could imitating someone else’s style help you find your own? The goal, Dr. Peters explained, was not to become that writer, but to find yourself in the process of trying. Your own instincts surface in the gaps. The places where you diverge from the original, where your own sensibility quietly asserts itself, that is where your voice lives.

Now I think back to that children’s book I plagiarized at eight years old and I no longer cringe. I understand that all artists and creatives emerge from somewhere. Every writer you have ever admired once sat down and copied someone they admired. Imitation is not the absence of creativity. It is the beginning of it. Eventually, we stop borrowing and start inventing. We move from fancy to imagination, from rearranging what already exists to dissolving it and making something new. 

Creativity, I learned, is not a trait that some people are born with. It’s a way of seeing the world. It’s simply the willingness to look at your own corner of human experience and uncover what it means, not just for you, but for everyone who has ever felt the same thing and never had the words to explain it. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Aliza Feldman

The post What Being an English Major Taught Me About Creativity appeared first on The YU Observer.

My first ever article for the YU Observer was full of lies. 

I don’t mean that in a dramatic way. On the surface level, everything I wrote was technically true. I was indecisive about where I wanted to go to college. I did spend months asking myself the question “what do you really want?” It is true that I can’t speak highly enough of my first-year orientation. And the second I arrived on campus, Dean Shoshana Schechter greeted me with a smile that made me feel, at least for a moment, like I had made the right choice. 

But when I wrote that “the transition from seminary to college has so far been very smooth” — that was the lie. A well-intentioned one, potentially. Looking back, I think that article was less a piece of writing for others and more an act of self-persuasion. I was trying to convince myself, publicly, that I was happy here. But I wasn’t. Not yet, at least. 

For months, the problem wasn’t Stern. The problem was me. I didn’t really want to be here. Stern was my next best option, second to what I actually wanted, which was to stay in Israel. I was mourning something I so badly wanted, but couldn’t have. I was picturing a life that was out of reach, while standing in the middle of the one I was already living. 

It wasn’t until right before Pesach of my first year that something shifted. I had finally found my footing — my rhythm, my people, my place, — and then it was time to leave for two weeks. It was bittersweet in the most clarifying way, because the fact that I didn’t want to leave told me everything I needed to know. 

So, I made the decision to stop imagining a life that didn’t exist and instead start properly living the one in front of me. 

And what I found was nothing like what I had advertised in that first article. 

I came to Stern expecting the Torah-secular balance to be the defining feature of my experience. I wrote about it enthusiastically in that first article, full of hope for shiurim (Torah classes) and chavrusas (learning partners) and a life where both worlds – Torah U’Madda –  coexisted equally. And while that environment exists and I’m grateful for it, it wasn’t what changed me. What did change me were the things I never thought to anticipate. 

It was first and foremost the people, the friends I could not have met anywhere else in the Jewish world. It’s the fact that at Stern we have a student body so diverse that someone who grew up in a Bais Yaakov setting can sit across from someone who doesn’t observe Shabbat, all of us at the same Shabbat table talking and laughing. It is the fact that you can meet some of the most unique and incredible people at this institution. I think about the life I had initially wanted for myself, and realize I would never have met and known these people if that’s where I had ended up. That alone makes coming here worth it. 

It is also the sense of community I found in unexpected corners. In the political science department, at the YU Observer, on my floors as a Resident Advisor (RA), in the ResLife office and among my fellow RAs, with the small group of Chabad girls who attended Chassidus shiurim and with the girls in the Mechina program. It was hosting Friday night dinners in my apartment and the experience of Shabbat in New York City. It was learning to take the subway alone and realizing, somewhere between uptown and downtown, that I had become someone much more capable and independent than I thought I could be. 

It was professors who became mentors. Administrators who knew my name. An education that didn’t just prepare me for stability but genuinely enriched my life in ways I’m still discovering. 

None of this is what I wrote about in that first article. All of it is better than I could have imagined. 

Now, years later in my last piece for the YU Observer, I’m standing at a different — yet somewhat parallel — crossroads. Senior year, and especially graduation, does that to you. It strips away most of what you thought you knew before. It gets rid of the structure you have been accustomed to since preschool, and asks you again that same uncomfortable question: what do you really want? And just like four years ago, I find myself seeking guidance from people I trust, sitting with uncertainty and trying to make a decision from a place of strength, rather than fear. Those were my own words. Written by a version of myself who didn’t fully believe or understand them yet. 

I believe and understand them now. 

Not because the path forward is at all clear, but because I have seen and experienced what happens when you commit to the life in front of you even when it isn’t the one you planned. I’ve seen how expectations can be humbly exceeded by something realer and more surprising than anything you could have scripted. I’ve learned that the moments that truly shape you rarely announce themselves. Instead, they accumulate, like a mosaic, until one day you step back and see what they’ve created. 

So to anyone else standing at an unfamiliar (yet so familiar — such is life) crossroads, unsure whether their choice is the right one: it might not be what you imagined. It might take longer than you expected to feel like home. But it has the potential to be something you could not have dreamed for yourself.

I spent so long asking myself, “What do you really want?” I never considered that the answer might find me before I found it. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chloe Baker

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“Hey! Hey!” the people at a nearby table yelled. “What about us?”

The air erupted with the roar of angry complaints. I smiled sheepishly as one of the full-time workers swallowed a laugh and ran out of the kitchen. Even before the door swung closed behind her, I already understood my mistake.

“If you’re pushing the cart, and you see people coming later sitting in the first tables,” she said, “you can’t stop for them, you understand? Because there are people who have been waiting for a long time.”

She returned to the kitchen and I lifted another two plates from the cart and placed them at a new table. Though some murmuring persisted behind me, I was unfazed by the incident. Small mistakes were commonplace for me at the soup kitchen; I always seemed to find new ways to break the cafeteria’s unwritten code of rules.

As I weaved the cart between the chair legs in the narrow aisle, I kept an eye out for the plastic yellow poker chips strewn across the tables. The chips were a surprisingly sensitive issue. We were supposed to take the chip when we gave a plate. But when I was starting out, sometimes I forgot to take these chips when handing out food, or I’d accidentally give to people who didn’t have one.

One time, a staff member looked down at the cart and counted less chips than there should have been. He reprimanded me loudly, and though I didn’t understand a word of his Spanish, his tone and gestures got the message across loud and clear.

I was startled to be yelled at– it had never happened, since I first found out about the opportunity to volunteer at the food kitchen by word of mouth a few months back. My embarrassment dissipated, though, when I saw how quickly the worker moved past the issue. He didn’t give me a different job; soon after he finished yelling, he left me entirely, trusting me to give out the plates on my own. When I saw him five minutes later, I don’t think he remembered the incident at all. We just went back into the routine.

The chips, I later learned, are given out by the soup kitchen before someone enters as a sign that they are eligible for government food assistance. By regulation, the soup kitchen could only provide for people in the government’s program. If found noncompliant, they could potentially lose funding.

Even after coming for a long time, we volunteers were frequently reminded to account carefully for the chips.

“If someone asks for a milk or a soup and they don’t have a ticket, don’t give them,” we were told in a grave tone by the same full-time worker who had told me not to serve the latecomers first. “Not that you did anything, but some people from the government came by yesterday and saw volunteers giving to people who didn’t have chips, and they told us we had to stop it.”

Ironically, since the rules about the chips were more obviously serious and important, they were easier to grow accustomed to. Most of the soup kitchen’s other rules, though followed meticulously, are arbitrary conventions. Whether we first distribute the food along the left or the right aisle makes no difference. But, after only a few times working at the soup kitchen, I wouldn’t dream of starting on the right.

I spent my first few times at the soup kitchen walking on eggshells, glancing at the other workers and volunteers, mimicking their every move. Besides the literal language barrier, all the conventions and routines of serving the food felt like its own language, to which I was totally ignorant.

But over the coming months, as I volunteered on a consistent basis, I began to feel less like an intruder, and more at home in the cafeteria. I enjoy the lively Spanish music that drifts through the air, wafting above relaxed conversations. And though the language barrier and the rush of lunch hour prevents any serious conversations, there is something nice about seeing the same faces every time I go. I started to recognize the regulars, and they began to recognize me.

All the little steps that had once seemed so foreign slowly turned into muscle memory: a first round of milk, juice and plastic silverware; a second round of soup; then a plate with the main meal, along with little cups of fruit. And those little cups of fruit had to first be organized on the cart in the right pattern: a row of six on each of the cart’s two layers, lined up in a neat row in the center, ready for six plates to be loaded up around them.

After a few months, the feeling of eggshells beneath my feet disappeared. I knew where to find a latecomer an extra chair or set of fork and knife. Even some of the basic Spanish words of the cafeteria– “jugo,” “leche,” “cuchillo” and the ever applicable “más tarde” – became natural parts of my vocabulary. The work started to become automatic.

As I grew more comfortable with the soup kitchen’s unchanging routine, the contrast between the rest of my day at school, which requires constant thinking and complexity, started to become more pronounced. Every suggestion while learning Talmud requires a degree of creativity; speaking up in class requires active thinking about the material. But to serve lunch at the soup kitchen, all these skills could be left at the door. All that is needed is strict adherence to the formula.

Though this rigidity was difficult to grow accustomed to, I gradually discovered that there can be something comforting in the soup kitchen’s predictable rhythm. In a school day that continually demands creativity and active effort, there is something dangerously refreshing about shutting off my brain to follow a defined set of rules once in a while.

Going to the soup kitchen provides a degree of fulfillment I hadn’t even realized I was lacking. While much of the rest of the day is spent working toward larger life goals or building more abstract skills, in the soup kitchen all of the results are tangible and immediate. It isn’t difficult to fall into bouts of cynicism in a boring class, wondering what the point of learning some arcane detail is. But placing a plate before someone wearing a bright smile, adding a cheerful “hello” or “hola,” and receiving a smile and a “thank you” or “gracias” in return – in that moment, there can be no doubting the purpose of what you’re doing.

But more importantly, as “menial” and “thoughtless” as working in the soup kitchen is, volunteering there provides something that can unfortunately be easily lost in the college experience – doing something for others. Especially in an institution like Yeshiva University, which places “Chesed,” “kindness,” as one of its five pillaring values, it rings a touch hypocritical to lie in bed after a long day running between Seder, classes and different meetings, realizing I’ve done nothing that wasn’t centered around myself all day.

So when 12:00 p.m. arrives, and I have to (oftentimes literally) run out of Seder and sprint the few blocks down Audubon, I don’t think of it as a chore. Carving out some moment for active, physical giving serves as a validation of everything else I do at YU. And when I hand out the little cartons of milk and single-serve cups of orange juice, I’m sometimes surprised to find that the smile across my face is unforced.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gavi Tropper

The post Reflections From the Local Soup Kitchen appeared first on The YU Observer.

There’s a unique kind of exhaustion that hits at some point during senior year. More than just tiredness from working, it’s a tiredness from performing. 

If you look around the Sy Syms School of Business, or any other business school, you’ll find the same thing – overachieving students stacking internships, leading three clubs and maintaining unrealistically high GPAs. Everyone is always “so busy” in a tone that is equal parts complaint and brag. Busyness has become our primary credential, proof that we are ambitious and going somewhere. 

But here’s what no one says out loud: research suggests that people who are busy feel more productive, not that they actually are. The feeling of motion and the fact of progress are two separate things. Business culture is built around the feeling. Think corporate offices. Employees are always busy, but are they really productive?

The problem isn’t that we work hard. The problem is that institutions reward busyness so consistently that we stop asking what the busyness is for. GPA is measurable. Club positions are measurable. Internships are measurable. Purpose is not. So, we chase what shows up on a rubric and call it ambition. 

There’s nothing wrong with these jobs we’re aiming for or the way we’ve filled our time over the last four years. But there might be something worth calling out about how we’ve focused on becoming busy without putting much effort into becoming intentional. We were so busy building a resume that we weren’t able to stop and ask, “A resume for what?”

Graduation has a way of forcing the question. You’ve been on a treadmill, and all of a sudden it stops. Suddenly, you’re standing still and have to decide where to go. 

The most useful thing I did in my three years here wasn’t getting the internship with a fancy name, it was finally taking a moment to consider what I actually wanted and where I want to take my life. It was the quiet moment I decided to stop following the default path I had set up, taking the internship return offer and working 60-80 hour weeks, and instead turn it down to pursue something I might actually enjoy. 

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, for whatever it’s worth: What would you be doing if no one cared, if it didn’t show up on a resume? What would you do if the ambition was yours and not borrowed from everyone’s expectations?

We spent four years learning how to be productive. Maybe the next chapter is finally figuring out what for.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chana Waksak

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