THE NEXT STEP: RACHEL YOST-DUBROW SPA ’12, Yale University ’16 As she set out on her first campus tours, Rachel YostDubrow ’12 knew she should look past variables like bad weather or tasteless cafeteria food before forming any opinions about each college on her list. But there was one wild card that did figure prominently in the first impression she took from every visit—the tour guide. “It’s probably not the best tool for trying to understand a college, but it was something I cared about because the tour guides are the first example of a student at that school, and I think it tells you something important,” she says. In fact, the negative vibe she got from her guide at MIT put her off applying, in spite of her strong skill set in math and science. “I just knew it wasn’t for me.” Yost-Dubrow’s final list was relatively small but also fairly diverse; it included a few smaller liberal arts colleges as well as large research universities, all with strong programs in math and science. It also included one or two “reach” schools about which she was hopeful but realistic. One of these was a college that never left the top of her list, in spite of the rain and cold that soaked her campus tour. “When I got the acceptance letter from Yale, that was it,” she says. “I probably made the deposit 10 minutes after getting accepted.” How did she know it was the right fit? “It was the people—100 percent the people,” says Yost-Dubrow, who majored in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “Sometimes now when I’m walking through campus, I remember the tour and how lost I felt, and it just doesn’t line up with how I feel now.” But her intuition about Yale’s student community proved right from the start. “The people I’ve met here are amazing,” she says. “They are as excited about learning as I am, and very open and caring and eager to connect.” How humans make connections is, in fact, one of the scientific inquiries that led Yost-Dubrow to her job as a research assistant at Yale’s Social Cognitive
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Development laboratory, where she performed the research for a senior thesis exploring the biological roots of gratitude and generosity. “My working hypothesis is that people who are more grateful are also more generous, and I come to that from an evolutionary standpoint,” she says. “In my research, I found that women are significantly more generous than men—it’s kind of an innate thing. But you can also improve generosity by priming gratitude—if you make someone remember something they’re grateful for, then they’ll be more generous after the fact.” Yost-Dubrow says she’s grateful for quite a few lessons from her SPA experience, especially learning how to speak up in class. “My Intro to Bio had 400 students, but I would raise my hand and ask questions like I was still in my 18-person class at SPA,” she remembers. “My friends and classmates will sometimes tease me that I talk too much, but they also say they appreciate it when I’m in class, because I’m asking things they want to know.” She also appreciated the wise counsel she got from SPA’s college counseling team. “Each student has countless one-on-one time with their college counselors and the whole process is about finding a place that’s a good fit for you,” she says. Their advice made it easier to cope with the almost inevitable rejection letter from Stanford (“I knew that would be a reach,” she says), and to take a closer look at Washington University. “They knew that Wash U cares about students who show an interest in the school, so I went down for a day and really loved it. I don’t feel like I got pushed toward picking a ‘name’ school, but instead toward finding a school that was really a good fit for me.” “I can’t stress enough how much I loved SPA,” says Yost-Dubrow, who will return SPA in the fall of 2016 as a tutor while she prepares to apply for medical school, and a future as a pediatrician. “The teachers there were so amazing, I keep in touch with them now. I can’t stay away.”