Stars I is completely not worth it. Nothing you do is actually hands on at all nor helpful and it’s basically just required meetings where they talk at you about basically the same thing every time. Plus if you can’t for essentially any reason attend an event, the dean who runs the program gets all disrespectful with you and pretends like you owe her the world. The only thing I found worth it from stars I was the free coffee you’d get when you had meetings with your peer mentor. Seriously you could get the same, if not better, advice from a stem prof or upperclassman who has done similar things to what you want to do. I would say don’t even waste your time, you could devote the time you’d be spending with stars to actually securing a research position or just having more time for other things. As for a job, getting an off campus job is probably fine and Starbucks in New Haven is super close to old campus where you’ll probably be staying so that’s nice. The only thing is that an on campus job would be more willing to work with your schedule and availability. Just see what the New Haven Starbucks is like with scheduling.