Learnings from the petition for Yale’s sauna

I still get emails about how, during my second year of college, I tried to convince Yale to rebuild the main gym’s sauna. If you’re one of those people trying to do something similar, see below for my key takeaways from that experience and how you should go about it.

Context

I got really into weightlifting and was going to the gym every morning. Back when I’d been training at home, I would often use a sauna for recovery, and I’d heard whispers that Yale used to have one.

I dug a bit deeper and found out that there was a sauna in Payne Whitney Gym, that they closed because of covid. However, instead of re-opening it once restrictions eased up, they quietly converted it to more changing rooms. I felt this was a huge shame and took it upon myself to argue for the reopening of the sauna.

Gameplan

This involved creating a petition and making a lot of noise (see Yale Daily News Article). I wrote up a proposal and mass emailed it to every single student. I did it in batches, because with my yale address I could send 500 emails at a time, 1500 a day, and other emails I made had a much higher rate of going to spam. After a two week schedule with many follow-ups, I got 1600+ signatures, or 1 out of every 4 undergraduate students.

I brought this to the administration, got meetings with all the relevant departments, and was consistently rejected on the grounds that after strategic consideration of the growing needs of the Yale community, the repurposing of the space created a more inclusive and accessible environment.

Takeaways

1. Know why you care: an undertaking like this requires significant time and effort. I wanted it a myraid of reasons and felt very strongly that, as one of the richest institutions with one of the biggest gyms in the US, we needed to have a sauna.
2. Be more annoying than you thought possible: every single person knew who I was because I’d been in their inbox. Not once, not twice… many, many times. You may think you’re operating at an intensity of 10/10. believe me, you’re not. You can always do more. Make your emails funnier, use more sources in your research, reference quotes from people that respond to you voicing their support, add the petition to your email signature, get intros from student council reps to relevant admin… I did all of these things and more. Do anything you can think of.
3. Be ready to deal with pushback: not just from administration, but random people too. I got hate emails (some were really crazy), was blocked, etc. etc. Know when to listen and when to ignore (almost always do the latter).

Overall, I failed. I could have kept arguing, and even started writing up a budget & reconstruction plan to show that it could be done, but ultimately had to value price my life and decided that I was spending too much time on this for too little potential upside. I 100% don’t regret doing it because it did put me in front of a lot of people, I learned a ton, & now it’s a great story :)

If you have more questions, I am easy to find online & always willing to chat.