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If you’ve just gotten your midterms back, perhaps you’re not too happy with your performance on some of them. Many people at Harvard are in fact disappointed with at least one midterm grade (or two). Sometimes, the midterms just don’t test what you thought you should know. Other times, you just didn’t attend lecture. Then there are those times, when the midterms cause mass damage to an entire class’s morale.
Regardless, it’s useful to sit back, relax and reflect a little, now that the crunch period is over.
Whether you want to pull up your grades or keep them strong, taking a few minutes to figure out what the hell your courses want from you will, maybe, save your arse in the long run.
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Of particular relevance is how to survive midterms. Those nasty things that generally happen 2-3 times a semester, despite their name-sake. Whether you’ve survived? your first set or are anticipating midterms next week, this post is relevant for you.
Midterms generally count from 20-40% of your grades in whole, and while that is a lot, the bulk of your grades are actually coming in after the “midpoint” of the semester. (Finals and final papers are worth a ton, and you still have all those response papers / psets.)
So, I’ve just survived my hellish batch of 3 midterms in 2 days (why I haven’t posted in a while). This post will touch on the strategies you can use to make your studying more efficient.
(A post on surviving post-midterms will be coming up soon). Read more…
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UHS
My apologies for the silence these past two weeks, that’s what being sick for the better part of a month is like.
I always get really really sick for a ridiculously long time each semester. Granted, it usually ends up being the end of the semester when my body is about to crash from the mental stress of finals.
Because of my numerous encounters with the common cold and the flu, I feel like I’m particularly knowledgeable about the ways to deal with these sicknesses.
Inside, you’ll learn more about the quirks and tricks of keeping healthy at school, ways of minimizing contagion and other wondrous things.
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I remember I would get side whacked by this interview question, “So why did you choose Harvard?” By golly, why did I choose Harvard? I’d fumble and talk about something or other involving academics, nothing particularly compelling.
As I’ve gotten older and perhaps slightly wiser, I realized what they were really asking was, “What is your story?” Stories are funny. If you’ve ever read The Things They Carried, you learned that half of a story are the narrative choices. Other times, you need to fudge things in order to keep the story “real” to its meaning.
No, I’m not telling you to lie.
But, when someone wants to open up your skull and swim around and then make a judgment on your person, a good story about how you got where you are and where you’re going is the key to making a lasting impression and forming a connection.
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Harvard’s great because it’s sort of like a bubbling, frothing melting pot of ideas, youth and excitement. If you leave no room in your schedule to allow for what my pottery teacher called “happy accidents,” you will be missing out on a lot of cool opportunities.
Happy accidents are sparks of ideas or insight that can happen at dinner, talking to a friend, in lecture — those moments when you go, a ha! what a great idea! The trick is to make those ideas a reality. If you don’t have time in your schedule, you might be letting go a valuable opportunity.
Keep your schedule leaner because chances are, you’ll come across a “happy accident” that could blossom into an amazing entrepreneurial opportunity.
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I worked for what is now known as the “Q Guide” one summer. I read many a review, tallied comments, double checked reviews, and pondered grammar. During that time, I learned many things about the inner workings of that review.
While it is easy to just read the paragraphs and accept them at face value, you really need to dig a little deeper to understand a given review in its context.
Here are a few tips to to best understand the Q Guide to help you decide which courses to shop and take.
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Harvard offers its students a stressful luxury known as Shopping Period. This is the time where students bounce from lecture to lecture, grabbing syllabi and wondering if they can stay awake for a given professor.
It’s a prime opportunity to pick core classes, figure out which math class you want to survive, and decide on whether you can survive on Flyby lunches for a semester.
There are a number of ways to keep on top of shopping period in order to optimize your new courses without getting too bogged down.
Read more…
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