Welcome to Davenport!

Dear Class of 2027,

Woo hoo! You are a fellow GNOME! (All students in Davenport are gnomes, which is frankly the BEST MASCOT THERE IS.) Today is a great day in which we welcome you to the club. There is much to introduce you to and we are so excited for the gates to be thrown open in August to bring you in and start acquainting you with the Dive (what?), the cottage (huh?), the BEST food on campus (yes, really.), the wildly awesome first-year counselors (they’ll be in touch), your new suite mates (they’ll be in touch too), and other Gnomes who will make up your Davenport family.

August will hold a very big day for all of you: Move-in. Coming off the pandemic, it’s very different this year and we are very excited to welcome you to Davenport. More info will be coming to you on that but do check out the Move-In page there is lots of info. Move-in is the culmination of all your hard high school work finally paying off. So as you walk into the Davenport courtyard as a Yale student  for the first time, don’t forget to pause and soak it in!

Welcome and we can’t wait to meet you! In the mean time, you can check out Davenport in this video we made!

Have a great summer; we’ll be together before you know it!

From our Head of College!

Dear Fellow Gnomes,

Davenport is one of fourteen residential colleges, which function as communities within the big University. There around 450 undergraduates in Davenport, where we typically have slightly more than 100 students in each of the four undergraduate class years. The College offers a setting that allows you to get to know people with different interests and backgrounds, many of whom (if experience is any guide) may soon become lasting friends.

Davenport students live in the college, take meals in our dining hall, study in our library, attend events in our common room, and generally make the college’s spaces home. We have a spacious upper courtyard that functions like a small park—a perfect space for outdoor studying, relaxing with friends, and playing ultimate frisbee or Spike Ball. A smaller lower courtyard offers a quieter spot with a picnic table, a hammock, and sometimes even a vegetable garden. The courtyards offer easy access to our dining hall, library, and common room. In the basement labyrinth underneath the college we have a small gym, a pottery studio, a printing press, student kitchen, buttery (aka the Dive), and an auditorium. New to the college is a room for yoga and other de-stressing strategies.

More important than the facilities are the people who make up this community.  Davenport students are amazing, they come from an extraordinary diversity of backgrounds and they have a stunning set of talents. Even better, they mix their brilliance with generous camaraderie and kindness.

In addition to the students, there is a dedicated staff in the college’s administrative offices, in its dining hall, and on its beautiful grounds. Also, there are resident faculty living here in the college, as well as faculty with offices in the college, not to mention several dozen graduate affiliates in a variety of fields ranging from STEM disciplines to the arts.

All of Yale’s residential colleges have a head of college and a dean. The head of college is the chief exeutive officer in the college and is responsible for fostering its intellectual, cultural, and social life. The Head of Davenport College is Anjelica Gonzalez, who is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Faculty Director of Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking. Professor Gonzalez’s work is centered on the development of artificial human tissues but spans a range of applications from drug discovery to medical device development. Professor Gonzalez spends a lot of her time writing scientific articles, opinion pieces on topics of diversity in STEM and creating ways in which Yale students can launch their own start-ups and explore their own innovative pathways. These are all related to the classes Professor Gonzalez teaches that focus on the development of biotechnology with ethics, culture, politics and affordability as the central tenants of appropriate design. Beyond her academic work, Professor Gonzalez has engaged the Davenport community through intellectual and cultural events in the college’s common room. She loves to eat, so you’ll also see her in the dining hall with some regularity. She lives in the college with her twin boys, Alex and Jackson, who will try to trick you by switching names to make sure you never learn their true identities!

The residential college dean is the principal academic and personal adviser. The job of the dean is to look after the undergraduate experience. You can visit the dean’s offices with questions big and small.