# @yale on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DYXqufIiaa6
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/65476539-yale-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/2f262a59ec.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-05-15T18:44:09.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Yale University (@Yale) — https://gondola.cc/Yale

## Caption

Get to know Yale College Class of 2026 graduate Miles Zaud! #Yale2026 🎓

If Miles Zaud isn’t reporting and writing a story in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe, odds aren’t half bad he’s writing or playing music in a style dear to you. Jazz, folk, gospel, classical, musical theater — they’re all in his repertoire.

Maybe he’s seated at a concert grand, maybe he’s stomping his foot, fiddle and bow in motion. Maybe he’s scoring cues for a film.

Whatever the endeavor, Zaud is absorbed, a young man immersed in the timelessness of a creative flow state.

The Saybrook senior grew up in Topanga, California, just north of Santa Monica, playing piano, surfing, and undertaking homeschool adventures, including travel to “primitive skills gatherings” around the American West. These are back-to-the-land festivals in which participants, hundreds strong, aim to live in tune with the ways of early humans: Starting fires with sticks, handcrafting atlatls (javelins) and traps for procuring food, sleeping under the stars.

Participants may bring tools and tents, Zaud said, “but most people really don’t — the point is to do it yourself.”

The gatherings eventually became the subject of his Yale senior project, a 20,000-word work of gonzo non-fiction that he ranks high among his collegiate achievements, along with a series of original musical scores recently performed on campus under the title “Curious Opus.”

It was last September that Zaud set out for a skills gathering in Rexburg, Idaho, aiming to cast a reporter’s gimlet eye on a culture he’d known since childhood. As sometimes happens, he met a girl, a wildland firefighter, and fell in love.

“The gathering itself took some really unexpected turns,” he said.

🔗 Tap the link our bio to keep reading about Zaud’s Yale journey and to meet some of the other outstanding members of the Class of 2026!

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## Tags

yale2026

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