Student Profile: Elliot Eaton ’11

During a recent trip to Ecuador with his ornithology class, Elliot Eaton ’11 woke each morning at 4 a.m. He then would spend the day hiking through the forest, making connections between his first-hand observations in the field and the information he had learned in his Yale classes. “We ended up seeing 450 different species of birds. It really allowed us to apply what we had learned in the lab about taxonomy and different breeding systems,” he says. “It definitely wasn’t your typical spring break.” In fact, he adds, it was “the trip of a lifetime.”

That’s just one of the many opportunities Elliot, of Jonathan Edwards College, has taken advantage of since coming to Yale. While focusing on his primary area of academic interest, ecology and evolutionary biology, he has taken classes in a variety of subjects and also participated in men’s varsity lightweight crew, the Yale Precision Marching Band, and the Yale Dramatic Association. And this summer he’s headed for Hakodate, Japan, to pursue intensive Japanese language study.

When Elliot first visited Yale as a high school senior from Spokane, Washington, he realized the University could provide him with unparalleled academic, co-curricular, and study abroad opportunities, but he worried he might not be able to attend. “At first, I was concerned about the cost, but the financial aid package I received from Yale was better than what I got from my state school. I was able to go to Yale without constantly worrying about what the financial cost was doing to my parents.”

Here, Elliot shares his thoughts about his Yale experience so far.

I chose to attend Yale because:

I was really drawn to the tight communities and the individual character of the residential colleges. When I first had the chance to visit during Bulldog Days, the warmth and passion of the other students I met really sold me.

My best class this semester:

Ornithology E&EB 272 with Richard Prum—the lab had the chance to go to Ecuador over spring break, totally funded by Yale. It was the adventure of a lifetime, trekking everywhere from the peak of the Andes to the Amazon basin and finding birds as rare as the tanager finch or as ecologically bizarre as the hoatzin.

The professor who’s taught me the most:

I took an acting class with Deb Margolin, whose focus for the class emphasized writing our own material and cultivating our own desires to the fruition of performance. It was incredibly liberating. I feel like through her help, I learned a huge amount not only about theater and writing, but my own emotional landscape.

My preferred extracurricular activity:

I’ve done a lot of different activities, from acting in plays, to walking on to the lightweight crew team, to battling it out in intramural inner tube water polo, but the best is the Yale Precision Marching Band. 

The greatest book I read at Yale:

The Great Gatsby—I had read it once before, but going through it again with a little more experience and wisdom under my belt made me appreciate the yearning of Gatsby and made the beauty of Fitzgerald’s prose all the more meaningful.

My favorite place to study:

On a warm sunny day, nothing beats sprawling on the grass with a book or two in the middle of Old Campus. It’s not the best way to do it in terms of productivity, but being in the middle of the crossroads of all my friends and all the campus activity makes it much more enjoyable. Otherwise, the newly renovated Taft Library at JE is a gorgeous place that helps me focus.

My plans for study or work abroad:

I just recently won the Richard U. Light Fellowship and will be spending the summer doing an intensive language study through the Hokkaido International Foundation in Hakodate, Japan. The Fellowship covers the entirety of the program tuition, travel expenses—even food and living costs. I’m hoping if I like this experience and my language skills keep developing, I’ll be able to work in Japan at some point.

Something I learned at Yale that I will always remember:

Defining your values for yourself as an independent, free-thinking citizen of the world is one of the toughest things you can do, but one of the most rewarding.

(July 1, 2009)