In my first few months here at Yale, I faced the ultimate decision: do I become a G-Cal warrior? If you had told me in high school I’d be considering such a trivial thing, I’d think you were crazy.
When I first arrived at Yale, I faced a barrage of high-effort demands: register for classes! Participate in lecture! Sign up for improv! But the most repetitive, recurring, never ending rejoinder? “Let’s get a meal!” I’d never heard the “wanna grab a meal” question as much as I did when I first arrived at Yale. It’s an invitation to get to know anyone you find remotely interesting on campus, while also an added pressure to have three distinct meals with new people all the time. And I was surprised to find this question almost always culminated in the same notification ding: the Google Calendar request. Or, as it is fondly referred to, a “g-cal invite.” Every time a new invite lights up my inbox, I feel a bit of my individualism die.
I’m not sure if anybody pops onto Old Campus as a pre-loaded Yalie. This starter pack, if one existed, would include low rise jeans, belts, trading in your backpack for an inconvenient purse, boots, and of course wired headphones playing esoteric music (we know it’s house). Suddenly you no longer look at the camera when you take pictures; you look a little bit to the side to seem more caught off guard. Yes, I just look like that.
We can’t all possibly naturally converge on the exact same aesthetic, but perhaps we all share the same costume. G-cal has become synonymous with the Yalies’ performatively busy schedule. I’ve been privy to some people’s g-cals that practically schedule in their own breathing. Sleep, eat, study, coffee: do these all need to be planned? We pose being busy, and then are sometimes consumed by the very thought of our own busyness, which ends up hindering any work getting done at all. It’s an overwhelming, endless Cartesian Circle—and everyone seems to buy in. Maybe g-cal is about getting ahead in your career. We seem to all taking the idiom “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” very seriously. But if you look around at the Yale student body, how is it possible we are all going into the same career?
Perhaps it is because we have all sacrificed a bit of ourselves to conform. In my case, this is definitely true. Ever since elementary school, my family has shared an Apple Calendar. My mom’s color is red, my family’s is purple, I am orange, my sisters are purple and green, and my dad is blue. If dogs could join, I’m sure Finley and Piper would get colors, too. When my sisters and I all swam on the same competitive swim team you could see all of our colors overlapping on the calendar, a testament to our lives touching and our proximity to each other.
I’ve abandoned my roots in a lot of ways here at Yale. I no longer regularly drink sweet tea, I’ve found myself lessening my Southern accent, and I’ve encountered new attitudes to life I’ve never experienced before. . Leaving home means suddenly having to explain where you come from, and often in a less nuanced way than how you would like.
It really isn’t a big deal to most people; use g-cal or don’t use g-cal, who cares? At the end of the day, you’re a busy student—you still have to schedule your time. However, maybe you will consider using Microsoft or Apple Calendar just to be a little crazy. You could even go back to the old school paper calendar and find pleasure in the pressing down of a pen to schedule out your time.
I think I’ve grown to understand that it is your prerogative here to decide what parts of Yale to embrace and what parts to resist. But for me, resisting g-cal reminds me of my roots, my personhood beyond Yale’s corporate grind. As the constant onslaught of invites continues to fill up our inboxes, we should remember to book time for individuality.
