Harvest Leaders

 are Yale sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They come from a wide range of backgrounds, but all share a love for having fun and learning about farming in the great outdoors.

 popular, hip, and a complete protein. A rising sophomore and lover of Calhoun (the college, not the historical figure), you can most dependably find him in the Calhoun Buttery (affectionately dubbed 'The Trolley Stop') during the late-night hours of operation, where he will be munching on buffalo chicken and photoshopping. The son of a pharmacist and a butternut squash, his interests in food writing and public health are ingrained in his DNA. He doesn't eat carbohydrates for reasons both legitimate and ironic. He can't wait to lead this year!

Austin Bryniarski is like the quinoa in every Harvest food bin: popular, hip, and a complete protein. A senior and lover of Calhoun (the college, not the historical figure), you can most dependably find him in the Calhoun Buttery (affectionately dubbed ‘The Trolley Stop’) during the late-night hours of operation, where he will be munching on buffalo chicken and photoshopping. The son of a pharmacist and a butternut squash, his interests in food writing and public health are ingrained in his DNA. He can’t wait to lead this year!

 

Jordana Gardenswartz hails from Boston, MA, where grew up with her parents and two older brothers. She went to Jewish day school her whole life, danced, and gave out free cookies with her Student Council. She spent the year before Yale studying and volunteering with Israelis in Jerusalem, where she learned to appreciate the ease of the english language. At Yale she is a member of the improv troupe the Yale Ex!t players, is involved in Jewish life, and is a proud member of TD. She can’t wait for Harvest!

Isadora Milanez is what she eats, which is nuts (mostly walnuts and almonds, but Brazil nuts are also on the list). A rising sophomore from Miami, Florida, she wears her favorite pineapple shirt in the winter to remind her of the fact that it’s seventy degrees back home. You will usually find her trying to untangle her thoughts about feminist theory or procrastinating my looking up veggie recipes on the internet. Some of the things Isadora loves are experimental films, painting, cooking, and hanging around thrift stores. She also likes asking people about their ideas. You should ask her about her ideas. 

Matthew Wrocklage is a sophomore in Calhoun College. His idea of the perfect day might very well involve lounging on the dunes back home in Virginia Beach, VA, then heading upland to spend the night singing shanties and climbing trees in the Blue Ridge Mountains with his brother Tyler, a company of animated bearcats, Tom Bombadil, and a platter of fresh-cooked flapjacks to add some depth to late-night conversations under a starry sky in the likeness of Mufasa. It might also just involve spending time goofing off with all the wonderful people he’s been blessed enough to encounter over the years. His favorite movies are The Judge, Amazing Grace, and Interstellar.  He is looking forward to helping get incoming frosh well-planted in their first few weeks at Yale and discover the richness that awaits them during their years on campus and beyond.

 

Eli Brown is not a pineapple.  Unlike a pineapple, he spends the majority of his time above ground studying sociology and conducting orchestral music.  However, much like a pineapple, he can walk backwards as well as forwards and loves to ride his bicycle even for short distances, like the one between the cabana and the ocean.  

Tom Gurin, who owes everything he knows in life to his Harvest leaders Jake and Doris, will be a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College. When not getting his hands dirty, he enjoys wearing bowties and sweaters. You’ll seldom find him sitting around doing nothing, but usually the things he does are not particularly productive for society (like choreographing a dance/lip sync to the Backstreet Boys to help him win Mr. Yale 2015). He loves playing the bells in Harkness Tower and climbing other bell towers just for fun. He often attempts to look stoic in photographs simply for aesthetic contrast, since he embraces his ridiculousnous most of the time. He is very excited to meet the class of 2019!

Caroline Francisco hails from the hinterlands of rural NY, where “Drive Your Tractor to School Day” is a real live holiday, which is pretty neat. Caroline is also a real live rising sophomore in Silliman, and one who’s pretty over-the-moon about this Harvest thing, at that! You can find her acting and building stuff with Dramat, reading Bloom County in bed, singing Ella Fitzgerald, using the word “zesty” whenever possible, and playing pirates. She adores thunderstorms and passionate people and has very strong feelings on Andrew Jackson if you ever wanna talk about that. If Caroline were a pie, she would be a bebop-a-rhebop rhubarb pie; possibly with some blueberries tossed in, just to get extra zesty.

Justine Cefalu is a senior in Timothy Dwight College and an Environmental Studies major. She comes from downtown Cincinnati, OH, where she grew up playing fiddle at the farmer’s market and raising chickens in her  backyard. (Since Justine moved out, her mom has acquired 2 goats that she walks on leashes down the street!)  Justine still plays fiddle in a folk music trio on campus, sings in the Yale Women’s Slavic Chorus and works Fridays  on the Yale Farm. She is going to spend this summer working on farms and singing songs and is so looking forward  to meeting next years group of Harvesters! Like a true Slav, she enjoys cheese and beets and crunchy harmonies.

Sarah Gross thinks life played a cruel joke on her by making her favorite food ice cream but also giving her lactose intolerance. Good one, life. She is a big fan of puns, especially if they involve vegetables. The Yale Farm is in her top three favorite places in the world. She is looking forward to farming with you in August! 

Abby Cheskis is a rising junior and food-lover in Calhoun College. As an environmental studies major, you’ll often find her in classes about climate change and food or on the Yale Farm, but her second home is the club gymnastics team. Abby studied food and governmental policies in Vietnam, Morocco, and Bolivia during a gap year after her freshman year, and she is very interested in the widespread communication of agricultural problems. Outside of her studies, Abby knits all things you can imagine (mittens, blankets, sweaters, you name it!) and loves to hang out in blue state coffee. She can’t wait to see you all on the farm! 

Symba Nuruddin is a rising senior, a Morsel, and a History of art major. This Bay Area pseudo hippie loves avocados, dancehall and anything jewel tone. interested in pursuing a career in arts education,  you can often find her TAing (cough babysitting cough) for children’s studio arts courses at the Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon St. in New Haven. She can’t wait to meet you, future Harvester! 

Cindy Xue is really a grandmother at heart. She enjoys baking bran muffins, knitting sturdy hats (none of that frilly lacy stuff), and kvelling over babies and freshmen alike. Proudly hailing from Buffalo, NY, Cindy is a rising junior in Jonathan Edwards interested in studying education, but settling for cognitive science for lack of a major. Around Yale, you can find her violin-ing, reading food blogs, perusing ravelry (a knit & crochet community) , and escaping on sunny Saturday morning treks to the farmer’s market. Last summer, she had the time of her life in China with current moobah Isabel. Cindy is delighted to Harvest and meet the coolest prefrosh. 

Jake Orbison is a senior in Berkeley and grew up in New York City. He loves tomatoes and watermelon before  any other fruits and plays in a new music ensemble at Yale. He is also happily involved with the Yale Literary  Magazine, Yale Daily News, and Yale Herald. During a recent summer, he spent time working on a small cheese  farm and fostering his love of both sheep and goats. He plans to study English and possibly linguistics. He only  speaks about himself in the third person, and Jake is very excited to get Harvesting!

Sophia Kecskes is a Portland native, raised by hipster teachers in an exotic, lazy, coffee filled land. A rising junior, Sophia is involved with all things global health related on campus. She can also be found deeply immersed (and losing poorly) in an IM Bowling game. To escape from Yale, she loves to run away to the mountains for a refreshingly freezing glacial swim or long hike, accompanied by whistles of the Nicaraguan Sandinista fight song that her nearly Marxist father taught her when she was young.

Brian Brooks is a junior at Kale Univ-oops-Yale University. He loves Mother Earth so much that he considers Earth Day a secondary Mother’s Day. Brian is majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology because he loves quantitative reasoning and the beauty of science but mostly because animals are cute. His favorite foods are pecan pie, peaches, and pickles but not normally all at once. Brian is excited to be a part of your legendary Harvest experience and to eat food with you!

Grace Steig can’t wait to spend time with you on the farm! An environmental studies major, she hails from  Seattle, WA. At those times she isn’t fortunate enough to be growing beets, she bicycles, bakes, or brews beer with friends. If Grace were a bird of the tropical rainforest, she would be a parrot; in temperate fields, a swallow. Until she graduates in December, you can find her organizing with Fossil Free Yale and DJing for WYBCX Yale Radio; previously she edited for Broad Recognition magazine and The New Journal.

Eric Lin, a rising sophomore and LA native, didn’t really like nature at all until he went on his Harvest trip before freshman year. He thought loving nature was just silly New Age stuff, like yoga, Van Morrison, and vegetarianism, things he’d never touch as long as he was sane. Since consuming a meal’s worth of dirt at Harvest, however, he has begun recording his dreams in a dream journal and aspires to be the reincarnated Wordsworth. Eric still loves consuming (food, music, books, and conversation). He can’t wait to consume more dirt!

Rebecca Bakal is a senior from Barrington, which is an almost-rural suburb of Chicago. Today, she is planning  on being a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies major, but she changes her mind approximately biweekly, so  when you meet her she will probably be majoring in something else. Rebecca goes by “Becca,” but it’s an  unfortunate nickname because, coupled with her last name and said quickly, it sounds like a chicken. She keeps  busy teaching sex ed and math (separately) to New Haven middle schoolers. She loves to sing, dance, and make a  fool of herself by showing her lack of talent at both activities. Becca wishes she was still young enough to climb  trees in dresses and roll around in the grass, so sometimes she does when no one else is around. She is so excited  to meet this year’s Harvesters and to welcome them to Yale!

Roger Lopez, a sophomore in Davenport College, hails from the concrete jungle that is New York. Taking his sweet time in choosing his major, he is currently thinking about Political Science? Psychology? Sociology? Does he have to declare a major? Regardless, you’ll find him on campus working with MeChA for social justice and with the Yale Record–he does it for the lulz. He’s also currently involved in Alzheimer’s Disease research. His interests may be all over the place, but he especially loves Harvest and farms and literally anything with kale in it. He likes Taylor Swift and Netflix too but even they can’t compete with Harvest–or kale.

A New England native and Morse adoptee, Julia Ganley likes seasons and dirt and music and stories and holding hands. One time someone called her rugged, and that made her very happy. Another time someone called her groovy (“You’re groovy; you have a lot of grooves”), and that also made her very happy. She can be found leading Yale Outdoors trips, singing in showers (and on the occasional stage), failing to write cleverly profound (profoundly clever?) blog posts, and watching movies on her laptop in various libraries. Farming is fun!

Raised by a family of possums in the hills of central Kentucky, Natalie Warren (MC ‘17) has risen above her humble beginnings to become an aspiring mind reader – I mean, Cognitive Scientist – who now lives with a family of spiders, as well as some weird rocks and a big clump of moss in a pot (and her roommate, who doesn’t get along with the moss too well). She loves gardening, cooking, the outdoors, eating things she finds in her lawn, folk dancing, traditional music, being crafty, and telling people how great Kentucky is. At Yale, she enjoys studying, not studying, adventures, and friends. A bit of a late bloomer (maybe due to the possum family), Natalie is SO EXCITED to join the Harvest community this year!

Edward Dong (sometimes known as Marcelito) grew up under the auspices of a plum tree in Saratoga, California. A junior in JE, he plans to major either in Literature or in Economics & Math. He enjoys helping out at the Yale Farm, writing poetry, and dancing with Ballet Folklórico Mexicano – he is most likely Hispanic. During breaks, he likes to spend time at home with childhood friends, particularly his dwarf lime tree, and to rove the interplanetary space with his Eggplantrian followers. N.B. The consumption of eggplant is prohibited, for reasons both religious and political, in the Eggplantrian Dominion.

Eleanor Ada Marshall is a first-semester junior studying Anthropology. She was born in Iowa City, IA. In second grade, she grew a sunflower that was taller than she was. Although her parents moved to the Big Apple in 2013, she prefers real apples and spent that summer on Friendly Farm, five minutes from her childhood home, planting root parsley and picking tomatoes. 

Drake Goodson, sprung from the bosom of mother California but tempered in the frigid forests of Alaska, is a rising junior in Davenport College. He enjoys excessively meditating on Buzzfeed articles and taking naps in libraries. He still doesn’t quite understand what “chill” means—apparently you can still be chill in eighty-degree weather. As expected from a sociology major, gardening and helping at the Connecticut Food Bank are some of the ways he spends his time—because plants and people are cool. Also, he is terrible at responding to emails, like really bad. He hopes to develop this skill in the future, especially during his time with Harvest!

Malini Gandhi is a rising junior in Morse from Newton, Massachusetts. She grew up collecting red maple leaves in the fall and reading anything she could get her hands on, and is planning to major in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology as well as taking many English and creative writing classes. Malini loves eating cherry tomatoes, making homemade hummus, and hunting for lady slipper orchids in woods near her home. At Yale, she can be spotted taking walks at the Marsh Botanical Gardens or involved with the Yale Literary Magazine. If Malini were a tree, she would be a sycamore tree. At Harvest, she absolutely loves getting her fingers muddy and singing loud, happy songs in the fields (can’t beat Swahili jogging songs while digging for carrots!), and she is so excited to pass down the mud and the songs to more wonderful Harvesters.

Margaret Shultz is a senior English major in the creative writing concentration. She’s from Iowa City, Iowa, where she grew up eating shucking corn and eating fresh goat cheese. In New Haven, she edits the Yale Literary Magazine and works on the Yale farm; her favorite things to eat are home-made kimchi and sun gold tomatoes. 

Michael Lebwohl is the name of the host organism for a parasitic beard that has consumed its owner’s life force and persona. This host organism is a rising junior from New Jersey, and during the year works in the Yale Writing Center as a mentor for JZAMP, and also plays on the Yale rugby team, all because the beard says so. Michael loves gray clothing, knitting, farms, and, of course, paying tribute to our facial-hair overlords. He can’t wait to get on the farm this August to spread the love of Harvest and Yale!

Kayla Tarlton is a rising junior in Morse College and is so excited to be a Harvest leader again this summer! When she’s not at the Yale Farm or wishing for eternal spring, you can find Kayla running around campus with the Club Runners, singing with Something Extra (some of the sweetest, most talented aca-women you’ll ever meet), and maybe even trying her hand at gymnastics with the Club Team. Kayla is an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Major, and finds all aspects of life science fascinating, from nutrition to cancer biology. The Yale Farm and the Harvest community make her feel incredibly at home and at peace, and she can’t wait to share that with you!

Maya Averbuch likes to think she’s good at lying in the sun. But if you don’t see her on a patch of grass, she could be looking skeptically at the stack of books on her bedside, writing non-fictitious things for The New Journal and The Yale Herald, or attempting to play Balkan clarinet music with Orkestar BAM! She is from New York City, where there are few farms toromp around, but she plans to move far away at some point, and she’d love to take you with her. 

Isabel Cruz is a rising junior in Davenport College, so she’d like to think that her spirit animal is a garden gnome. On campus, Isabel can be found talking about feminism in the Women’s Center, dancing in the studio and randomly on the street, and tossing discs with her frisbee buddies on Old Campus. One of her proudest moments at Yale so far was when she was so hungry at dinner one night that she ate more than the football player sitting next to her (considering her petite stature, she thought that this was a pretty impressive feat). Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, Isabel is a city girl with a not-so-secret love of food, farms, animals (baby or otherwise), and awesome people. Harvest is the perfect combination of all of these wonderful things and she is so excited to share this experience again with the new prefrosh class and all of the lovely leaders (see, dreams do come true!).

Hannah Nesser is a rising senior from Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes, flannel, and nice people.    She is studying environmental engineering because she likes the environment and building things with her hands.  To her, playing with dirt and making mud pies qualifies as ‘building things,’ but the engineering department is less certain.  Because of this, she spent a semester in Madagascar, playing with dirt and cow manure and studying biogas.  In her free time, she loves to laugh, camp, and be an activist, preferably all at once.  Her spirit fruit is the honey crisp apple, which was born across the river from her home in St. Paul in the great city of Minnie-apple-us.

Tali Perelman was told yesterday, by someone she met yesterday, that she seems like someone who used to play in the mud constantly. That made her really happy. Tali would like to point out that that is in fact true, and that she also really enjoyed eating sand (the texture is so crunchy!). Although Tali no longer eats sand, she does still love playing in mud and can’t wait to do it lots more this summer with fellow Harvesters. Apart from mud, Tali loves traveling and learning and reading and cooking and being outside and the sound and smell of the ocean and peanut butter and sunhats and talking to both people and chickens. Although Harvest does not usually include sounds and smells of the ocean, it does include everything else on that list. Tali, then, really loves Harvest.

 

Talia Katz is a rising junior in Ezra Stiles College. While originally from the Washington DC area, she has lately given in to wanderlust and is currently studying abroad in Tel Aviv. When not people-watching on the Yale campus (under the guise of her anthropological studies), she can be found practicing West African dance in Senegal, harvesting rice in Nepal, or bargaining in Istanbul’s historic bazaars.Over the course of Harvest, she would be happy to talk with you about her interests  in global health, evolutionary medicine, language learning, or anything else you might desire!