Hillbilly Elegy

for a sitting U.S. senator.
Yet, for all of the joy and intrigue,
Yale planted a seed of doubt in my mind
about whether I belonged. This place
was so beyond the pale for what I
expected of myself. I knew zero Ivy
League graduates back home; I was the
first person in my nuclear family to go to
college and the first person in my
extended family to attend a professional
school. When I arrived in August 2010,
Yale had educated two of the three most
recent Supreme Court justices and two
of the six most recent presidents, not to
mention the sitting secretary of state
(Hillary Clinton). There was something
bizarre about Yale’s social rituals: the