METROPOLITAN DESK

OUR TOWNS; WORKING HIS WAY THROUGH

YALE, NONSTOP By MICHAEL WINERIP, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT) 953 words Published: May 4, 1986

NEW HAVEN, May 2 -

Mark Hulak is a great guy, his Yale University roommates say, if you can find him.

Saturday mornings, he is around for a few hours after he finishes working the 1 to 9 A.M.

shift at a parking garage. And Sunday nights he is around by 1 A.M., after his job at the

engineering library. And weekdays he is around by midnight, after his computer-lab job.

''I'm usually working three to four jobs at a time,'' Mark said, hurrying to a shift at the

computer lab. Over his shoulder was a knapsack packed with screwdrivers, pliers and

wirecutters, in case he had time to drop by the electronics lab and build some integrated

circuits. He was also carrying a cardboard box, filled with 10 pounds of notes, printouts

and rough drafts for a term paper.

It was a lazy day at Yale, classes were over for the semester and exam period had not

begun. While students were tossing Frisbees or going someplace on their skateboards,

Mark had scheduled himself to work 11 hours.

The few people who know what he is doing do not know how he does it, taking a double

major in economics and electrical engineering and working 40 to 50 hours a week at jobs.

''I don't know when he sleeps,'' said Prof. Joseph Gordon. A roommate, Tim Crisp, said,

''In my opinion, Mark does too much. He gets dark circles under his eyes.''

Mark, a 20-year-old junior, said he ''pretty much'' had not been to a campus party since

freshman year and had no time for a relationship now. The last two summers, he worked

at Yale as a counselor, which entitled him to take two free courses he needed for his

double major. He spent spring break here, researching a paper on joint ventures in the

semiconductor industry.

His hope is to get master's degrees in engineering and business and someday become a

corporate manager. ''I have people here who tell me I shouldn't be in pursuit of such a

bourgeois life style,'' he said. Mark tells them that he is just trying to squeeze the most

from a Yale education and keep down costs to his parents.

His mother is a secretary, his father is retired from a printing job. They raised five

children in a Brooklyn apartment, not far from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. ''Having

five people go to college in our neighborhood is just unbelievable,'' said Mark, the second

youngest.

He was the sort of boy who stunned the kindergarten teacher at his Brooklyn elementary

school by knowing all 64 colors in the Crayola box. In eighth grade he won a Boys' Club

scholarship to the Browning School, a generally upper-class Manhattan private school.

The first week he wanted to quit. He had not written much in public school, and this

school wanted five-page themes every week.

It was his oldest sister, Christine, a public-school teacher, who pushed him on. ''Christine

is a very inspiring person,'' Mark said.

By his junior year at Browning, he was carrying around a plastic bag full of notes for a

50-page paper on Alexander Hamilton that won him the school history award. As a

senior, he was the only one to get into an Ivy League school.

''My family really made a big deal of it,'' said Mark, the first Ivy League Hulak. Christine

threw a party for him at her place in Queens and gave him a new ball-point pen.

''My family likes telling people I go to Yale,'' Mark said. ''I mean, it is a thing to be proud

of. You've just got to be careful not to let it go to your head. Getting into Yale is one

thing, getting through Yale is another.''

Christine was smart enough for Yale, he said, but as the oldest, she stayed near home,

attending Brooklyn College. She writes him every week. ''I tell him we're concerned how

hard he works,'' Christine said. ''He says, 'Don't worry, I'm having fun.' He takes it on

himself. He doesn't want to feel he's draining the family.''

During one stretch, Mark was drinking 12 cups of coffee a day. ''There was a time when I

drank a whole pot of coffee and fell asleep,'' he said.

He drank so much coffee, his hands shook, making laboratory work hard. ''If you're

shaking handling a silicon wafer, it's easy to drop,'' he said. ''The day I dropped my wafer

was a day everything went wrong.'' He has since cut back on coffee and tried to go the

fruit-juice route.

He buys books second hand when possible and tries to avoid late-night snacks, because

the cost adds up. ''Some people say I'm missing part of life, but if you're missing that, you

must be doing something else,'' he said. ''What some people call missing, I call delay.'' He

gets A's and B's. Mark knows that most Yale students do not work so hard. ''I'm Yale's

blue collar, that's the way I picture myself,'' he said. ''It's not very glamorous, working in

a garage and watching kids picking up their BMW's. But they respect what I have to do

and I respect what they have.''

In high school, he used to tell Christine of classmates who went on European vacations.

''I think it bothered him at first, that they didn't worry about jobs, that something was

lined up for them,'' Christine said. ''I told him that one day he'd travel, he'd catch up to

them. I tried to convey that I wasn't so impressed. I said after you finish college and have

a profession, you'll have it, too.''

Sometimes, on his way to a job, he will stop at the anti-apartheid shanties that students

have erected and watch a protest. He said that he is slightly conservative and would not

get involved. ''I don't know where they get time to do that,'' he said. ''They have lots of

rallies.'' Last week he pulled another all-nighter to finish his paper on the semiconductor

industry. It was supposed to be 15 pages, but he wrote 37, he found so many interesting

documents. As he left the computer center, the sun was rising over Grove Street and he

felt good.

Photo of Mark Hulak (NYT/Rollin A. Riggs)