TYLER ETTELSON ’23 by Neha Jampala ’23
It’s no contest that Neha cares about her writing, always putting her best foot forward, but more importantly, Neha cares. A prime example of Neha’s receptivity to those around her comes in the form of a rowdy freshman’s questions over a nice waffle on a calm Sunday morning. While I was interviewing Neha, a freshman injected himself at our table and hijacked my job as the interviewer, with a complete disregard for manners as he brimmed with freshman ignorance. This child asked a bunch of extraneous questions such as “How do your glasses affect the political and economic state of the world?” To which Neha quipped, “I’m helping the supply chain run by being a consumer.” Neha’s deadpan response elicited laughter all around the table. She didn’t brush off the freshman’s inquiries; instead, without missing a beat, she answered. Over Long Winter Weekend, Neha and her friend Chelsea decided to hike Mount Sugarloaf. Chelsea kept stumbling on the uneven, slippery, and eroded path up to the summit. With a smile on her face, Neha would always help her up despite constantly falling victim to the ice herself. Following their excursion, Neha wrote a thoughtful handwritten letter which her friend was able to repeat to me verbatim. No matter how busy she is, Neha will always outstretch a hand to friends or proctees with a smile beaming from her face, with her left cheek arching slightly as if attempting a wink. This kind, caring center of Neha is hard to see; it’s sheltered. When asking those not well-acquainted with Neha about her temperament, the response was uniform: Neha is a quiet, hardworking intellectual. Over the course of this profile, I have pushed aside Neha’s façade of a quiet intellectual and have begun to unravel the mess behind this neatly pressed curtain. Her humor does not shine through the curtain to those unaware that it’s a curtain, not a wall. To them, her humor and personality falls flat as high-brow intellectual-speak. In reality, the humor is so flat it’s hilarious. They are looking at a curtain and just have not waited long enough for the show to start. It took two weeks, but the orchestra is tuning. Through different perspectives Neha’s curtain is being drawn, revealing her intellectual, kind, and caring nature. In some respects, Neha’s mind assumes the following structure when at an impasse: How may I achieve my goals? What is the person across from me thinking? Do their ideas align with what I desire? Do I care about them (in almost every case yes)? How can I achieve a relative balance between what I want and what they want? Egh, whatever, let’s just do what they want. She insightfully perceives the totality of her surroundings, like a writer crafting a setting of a densely wooded forest with vivid imagery. Yet sometimes, she blurts out whatever is on her mind. To her, this is her largest point of fallibility. She’s constantly telling me: I’m working on it, I promise. What exactly is she referring to? She believes her honesty can come off as rude, and that she needs a better filter. Neha doesn’t like to bother others, her friends always say that they need to text her, that Neha never texts first—especially Zoe. Yet she takes on excessive loads of work, and another friend stated that she always knows when she needs help and always reaches out when that moment arises. The dissonance here lies in the fact that if she never reaches out, does she never need help? Is Neha infallible? No. Neha writes the context of her friendships, always with kindness and thought. But that context is flexible based on the desires of her friends. Neha might not be the infallible author of her own life, but she is certainly writing her desires into existence. Similar to her book’s central message, Neha Jampala has found her own solidarity, her own solutions, and her own hope. //
If you were ever to meet Tyler, your first encounter would probably be at Table 17 in the Dining Hall, and you would definitely be sitting at an awkward 90-degree angle from him if you plan on joining him for breakfast. Tyler is always sitting in his usual back-facing-the-wall seat, and you will find his friend Gabe sitting 180 degrees across from him. Both of them want arm space so you cannot exactly sit right next to them either. Of course, you cannot sit in their seats because it will thoroughly disturb both. For context, Tyler told me once that he and Gabe were very perturbed by the fact that I sit at a different breakfast table every other week. Tyler finds comfort in being in the exact same seat every morning because not only does his seat give him a vantage point of the entire dining hall, but also has a perfectly straight route to his left for coffee. He calls 6:25 am (his average arrival time) a prime-time for work, which is both a necessity and routine that grounds him. Although many attest that Tyler is naturally melancholy, if you greet him on a morning when he got more than four hours of sleep, you will likely get a cheery fist bump from him and a “How’s life?” As he pushes back his hair and fiddles with the bracelets on his left wrist, you will start to notice what he predicts people will notice first: that he’s “Wasian,” coming from mixed descent. If you continue prodding him on what it’s like being mixed, he’ll tell you that he’s mixed in so many other ways (which he obviously doesn’t specify) and that he’s become sort of a chameleon as he embodies the type of person that other people see him most saliently as. His chameleon analogy was an evasive response to a question about feelings, and you’ll start to notice that Tyler is A) incredibly intelligent and analytical in many ways but also B) extremely guarded. (continued on the next page)
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