When she arrived at Yale College from Birkenhead, England, Stephanie Addenbrooke Bean recalls feeling that the world was her oyster. She was the first person from her high school to attend university in the US and was excited by the opportunities Yale could offer her. “I loved that there was so much to do and so many possibilities to choose from,” she says. “I also recognized Yale as a place where I could explore and try new things.”
With that mindset, she signed up to write a story for the Yale Daily News (YDN), but it did not quite go as planned. “My first story was so bad they wouldn’t print it,” Addenbrooke Bean says. “My high school didn’t have a newspaper, and I wasn’t sure how to write a reported article. Even so, the editor in chief at the time encouraged me to continue writing and set me up with reporter training.”
Addenbrooke Bean kept at it, first writing theater reviews for the Weekend section and eventually becoming a writer for the A section of the paper where she covered both university affairs and the city of New Haven. Three years later, she was elected the YDN’s editor in chief.
“Not many twenty-year-olds get to manage a newspaper,” she notes. “It was an amazing opportunity in terms of the skills and lessons that I learned.”
As editor in chief, Addenbrooke Bean worked with alumni to launch a stipend program to make it easier for students with significant financial need to devote time to the YDN rather than to a part-time job. Her goal was to help the YDN to recruit and retain a staff reflecting the breadth of Yale’s undergraduate population, and she believed a stipend program would be an important step in the right direction. “I was able to speak from personal experience that this stipend would have really helped me,” she recalls. “Starting a program that would help other low-income students and have an impact on the future of the paper was incredibly rewarding.”
Addenbrooke Bean also credits her experiences at the YDN with her decision to attend Yale Divinity School following graduation. “A lot was going wrong in the world during the year I was editor in chief,” she recalls. “I realized I wanted to play an active, tangible role in solving some of the issues and problems we reported on in the paper. I saw Yale Divinity School as a path for learning how to effect positive change and make a difference in communities that I care about dearly.”
After earning her M.Div, Addenbrooke Bean returned to England to work with a church youth group for two years alongside pursuing a PhD in theology at the University of Oxford. “I became deeply invested in helping these young people get where they wanted to get to,” she says, adding that the support she received from teachers and mentors as a young person made her dream of attending Yale a reality.