(soulful rock music)
- So I usually start out the day
by getting up maybe around nine or 10.
I'd make breakfast, so maybe it'd be eggs,
or a breakfast burrito, or sometimes it would be
something like a granola bar,
because I'm not a morning person,
and I usually don't get up.
And then I go to class for usually 10:30 to 12:30.
(mellow music)
And then, after that, I grab lunch,
maybe from a food cart or at a dining hall,
and then head to practice.
So practice would be from 2:30 to 5:30,
and I'd maybe do a bit of rehab
for my back injury beforehand.
After practice, we'll watch a bit of film
on the team that we're gonna play,
and then usually, we'd shower,
go to dinner with the team,
and hit the library after that.
And then I'd go to bed,
and it'd all pretty much repeat itself.
(bright music)
Hi, my name is Claire Feeley, and I'm a senior
history major and D1 athlete at Yale University.
This was my practice jersey for volleyball in high school,
and the senior skip day shirt that we had made,
and stuff like that, and pictures of my cats.
It's a nice little reminder of home.
♪ Where you paint graffiti ♪
- So these are the rings that we got
from our championships freshman and sophomore year.
So this was the one from freshman year,
which was a bit big, and then this is my favorite one.
I'd say my journey to Yale was largely based on volleyball.
so I really wanted to play volleyball in college,
but I also wanted volleyball to make sure
that I got into a really good school.
So I actually gave up a scholarship to come to Yale.
- [Announcer] The chop shot over the block.
(players cheer) Staggering
out of the middle is Claire Feeley.
- The biggest part for me is,
Yale lets you be a student and an athlete,
where I felt like at other full-time D1 universities,
I would be more of only an athlete,
rather than just a student.
So that was pretty important to me.
It gave me a chance to get involved with other clubs,
to major in what I wanted,
and also be a bit more involved
in other student activities in the spring,
when I'm out of season.
I really wanted to go to a great school,
and I think when I came and visited here my junior year,
of my unofficial visit, I loved it.
It was completely different than everything
I've seen at home.
And with all the gothic architecture,
and just being in the Northeast,
and seeing fall color leaves.
♪ Obey ♪
- So this is Old Campus,
so this is where all the freshmen live.
So unless you're in TD or Silliman,
which are the two larger colleges,
you're gonna live here your freshman year.
So I lived in that far corner,
kind of reddish brick building, called Farnam.
And so you're still gonna live
with all the freshmen in your residential college,
so each building is for each individual residential college.
And it's a really fun place to spend your first year,
'cause you're surrounded by all the other fellow freshmen,
and great kinda place to meet a lot of people
in the beginning of your time at Yale,
and make some great friends here too.
(singing in foreign language)
So we're in front of Sterling Memorial Library,
and this is supposedly one of the biggest libraries
in the country.
I think it's second to the amount of books
that the Library of Congress has.
I think that's an ROTC demonstration's happening,
so if you're going to join the army afterwards,
but they help pay your way through school,
so sometimes they do practices or demonstrations like this.
(singing in foreign language)
Societies, which sometimes people
know them as secret societies,
or here we just call them senior societies,
they're pretty unique component of life at Yale.
I'd say a little over half of the senior student body
gets involved in them.
It's usually a group of about 16 people.
Typically eight guys, eight girls,
but sometimes a couple societies are all guys or all girls.
So I guess you could kinda compare it
to Princeton's eatings club, or Harvard's finals club.
So this is my residential college, JE.
It's also called Jonathan Edwards,
but we just call it JE for short.
So this is where I lived my sophomore and junior year,
and I ate most of my meals here and studied a lot here too.
(mellow music)
This is the basement of JE.
So the basement is kind of like a labyrinth
that goes around, and usually you can access
any part of JE by going up through the basement.
So if you're cold in the winter,
and don't wanna put on shoes or something,
you can just walk through the basement.
This is the student art gallery.
So they post student art.
I usually come down here late at night on the weekdays,
because they have a student cafe open,
where they make more like late-night food,
and it's really good when you need a break from the library,
and they have pool tables down there, they have a gym,
there's a printing studio, for if you're interested
in like a printing press,
and they try to mix it up and keep a lot of cool things
in the basements of the colleges.
I chose to be a history major mainly because
it was my favorite subject in high school.
Yale has a really good history department,
and they've recently changed it,
so you can take two different tracks.
You can either do a global focus,
or what you could do is pick a specialized track.
So I picked two different specialized tracks.
I'm a European and a cultural history specialized major.
I love the history major.
I think you can study a wide variety of things within it.
I've taken classes on Roman history,
or African encounters with colonialism,
or France since 1871,
and tons of different subjects like that.
This is the courtyard of JE.
We hang out here a lot in the spring,
when they plant the tulips.
Sometimes when I'm calling my parents
to just catch them up on the week,
I'll come out here and just hang out
on the swing and call them.
Or like a nice way to relax after studying before dinner.
So Mory's is more of a restaurant
that a lot of students will like to go to.
It's not like an every night kind of thing,
but Mory's is a place more of Yale tradition.
So it's this little white house on York Street,
that's actually a restaurant and a bar.
It's full of Yale tradition.
You have crew oars just hanging from the roof,
you have pictures of championship teams
and players all over the walls,
framed team pictures or action shots.
So it's a really fun bar place that students will go
every once in a while.
I wouldn't say it's like the weekend spot,
but everyone goes to Mory's every couple of months.
♪ Hallelujah ♪
♪ Oh, I'm down there on the beach ♪
- So I just got a hockey ticket
for this past weekend, we had two big hockey games,
and they're tons of fun.
So got two tickets.
♪ In heaven there is no beer ♪ ♪ No beer ♪
♪ That's why we drink it here ♪ ♪ La la la la ♪
♪ And when we're gone from here ♪
♪ Our friends will be drinking all our beer ♪
(bright music)
- So this is the outside of Payne Whitney,
so this is where all the magic happens,
and yeah, this is pretty much
where I spend my entire fall semester.
♪ I wanna go where you hide out ♪
- This is the locker room,
this is where we get ready for practices and lift.
Our training regimen would probably be,
we lift three times a week in season,
and we also have practice every day for about three hours.
And then sometimes we're traveling
on the weekends for games.
We have games every Friday and Saturday.
Yeah, so these are our different pillars
of volleyball culture that we established a while ago.
So we always try to put up stickers of this,
and reminders of this throughout the locker room.
And then there's just the fridge that we use.
We got plenty of Muscle Milks for getting swole.
- [Announcer] And Yale takes it in five.
Huge win for the Bulldogs.
Massive Ivy League implications
and spoiling Princeton's perfect Ivy League season.
- I don't know how to describe this team
in a kosher-- - It's indescribable.
- Charismatic. - Charismatic, yeah.
I'd say we're quite charismatic.
People like to have a lot of fun,
they're really energetic,
can be very, very loud sometimes.
- We're a really tight-knit group of girls.
Right now we have 16 on our team,
and we spend a lot of time together.
So we're each other's best friends,
we hang out on and off the court,
and it's a really great group of people to be involved with
and have to have your back, or just hang out,
and support each other.
- When I came in, we had already won
three Ivy League Championships consecutively,
and then my freshman and sophomore year,
we also had two additional Championships.
So these past couple years, we've gotten second,
but I think next year's gonna be a great chance
for the rising seniors to win another ring.
- Definitely makes you nostalgic
to think about all the good times
that you've had playing volleyball, especially at Yale.
So it's also exciting to see what they're gonna do.
What we've taught them, and how they're gonna
bring our lessons into the future.
- It's a group of girls that can
always come to each other when they need something,
and even though we're really competitive,
we know that we can always rely on each other.
And I'd say that's been one of my biggest parts of Yale,
and probably one of the reasons
why I loved my experience at Yale so much.
(singing in foreign language)
I think Yale kinda gives you the opportunity
to do whatever you want.
There's tons of different extracurricular groups.
If you're really interested in singing,
they have a huge a cappella group life here.
There's Greek life, there's sports, intramural sports,
there's different kind of academic societies,
or clubs promoting business or other things like that.
So I think you can really make the experience
whatever you want with it when you come here.
(upbeat music)
- If you're interested in hearing more
about the world's top universities,
don't forget to subscribe.