what Harvard taught me, what it can teach you
Sorry everyone, for my more irregular posting. A lot of beginning of the year things have been popping up. I should be back on schedule with Sunday and Wednesday posting next week, most likely starting on Wednesday.
BTW, if you missed the Economics Panel, shame on you. That was my spice for the week.
Now, the piece of advice that Faust should’ve added was: for those students still at Harvard, take a language class and study abroad.
For better (or worse), ibanking is dead in the way we once knew it. Lehman Brothers ain’t coming back three or four times this semester tossing magnetic clips and shiny brochures at eager undergraduates and touting their numerous job opportunities.
The seniors this year will be pouting, missing out on the chance to sell their lives for a bazillion bucks a year. (Perhaps it’s too late for them to change their ways.) But, the juniors, sophomores and freshmen should take this as a sign of what will most likely be a turning point for the better when it comes to selecting a career.
If you have no idea what ibanking is, bless your soul. And for those who do know of it, this is why the death of 50% of the e-recruiting jobs is good for you.
The great thing about Harvard is that tons of events, panels, speeches, lectures, conferences, dances, performances, plays, concerts etc. etc. go on each week. The pulse of activities on campus is crazy, but it seems like, a lot of people get caught up with their own extra curriculars and classes that they don’t get to enjoy the vivacious intellectual life on campus.
One thing I started doing last spring was to spice up each week with a random, quirky event. I went to the IOP and saw Elizabeth Edwards, learned about for-profit micro finance from the founder of a firm, and so on. Just this past week, I saw Brian Greene (astrophysicist extraordinaire) and plan to see Neal Stephenson (science fiction master mind who foresaw Second Life in 1992) this very weekend.
If you give yourself leeway in your schedule, you’ll be able to enjoy awesome events that Harvard has simply because its Harvard and end up loving your experience as an undergraduate more.
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.
Today was the beginning of Tuesday Magazine’s annual poster sale (go buy your posters in front of the science center all week, selection available at tuesdaymagazine.org [yes, that was a shameless self-plug]).
And I got ridiculously sunburned, which is stupid, because I’m a supposedly well-educated person who knows that sunscreen is worth its weight in preventative gold.
College gets the best of you sometimes, so here are a few common sense things you should keep in mind.
Comping is truly a unique Harvard experience. You take a bunch of smart kids and make them jump through some hoops of various difficulty to even be allowed to privilege of joining a given student organization.
Some comps are formalities, others are grueling. Some will require perhaps an hour out of your time each week, others will demand a certain single minded devotion. Some comps will cut people, maybe half-way through, maybe even at the end of a long and tiring semester. Other comp directors will turn a blind eye if you’re enthusiastic enough.
Here’s the dirty on surviving this uniquely Harvard “comping” process.
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