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.
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Freshmen are greeted by a 1000+ page book detailing all the courses they could possibly take (and many that they’ve never heard of) in the fall. Contrast this to even the course selection at the largest and most awesome high schools, and many a freshmen sort of freeze up, freak out at narrowing down what they want to do with their life, major, career and beyond!
While I can’t tell you whether to take that Psych 1 (yes the numbers start low here) class or that freshmen seminar, there are a few basic rules you can follow to make your life easier and narrow down your selection.
Course selection for freshmen should be primarily directed toward concentration exploration and workload/difficulty balance.
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One of the best pieces of advice that freshmen receive is: Do not try to plan out your four-year academic career. This piece of advice will be tucked away in that guidebook that freshmen get, in a section addressing course selection and academics.
The guidebook will then continue in a reassuring tone: Just make sure you’re taking the classes you need to take in order to set yourself up properly for your classes next year.
As I’m looking forward to my junior, senior years and my career plans, I’m realizing just how wise that advice is.
There’s no need to stress yourself out by planning each detail of your life.
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What you need to know about…deciding whether or not to study abroad at Harvard.
Some students view a term abroad as an integral part of their undergraduate experience. That being said, amongst it peers, Harvard does not have the best reputation for encouraging studying abroad. While many things have improved in that past several years, there are still TEN important things to consider.
To study abroad or not to study abroad…THAT is the question.
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On the Admissions Tour, the perky Harvard undergraduates kindly inform you how delightful it is that Harvard is one of the few schools with an extended amount of time set aside for reading period and that we have an extended amount of time set aside for finals period.
However, they’ve conveniently glossed over a few essential facts about reading and finals period.
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Reading Period is that time of heaven/hell when students have approximately a week and a half of “no” classes to spend time reviewing for their finals and writing their final papers. It’s wonderful because classes meet less often. It’s awful because it’s a mammoth amount of free time to re-remember what you should have learned this past semester.
Kids at other schools looong for this. Harvard kids have a tendency to love and hate it because it is and isn’t quite the original conception of the “Reading Period.” Sometimes classes still meet, sometimes you have four papers due and take-home finals.
Here are some tips I’ve gained from my 3 previous reading periods on how best to survive and utilize this precious but damning amount of free time.
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The folks at lifehack.org have an interesting article titled “How to Be a Friend of Yourself” –
We often focus on building relationships with others that we forget the essential first step: being friends of ourselves. That is the crucial first step if we are to have good relationships with others. How can we have good relationships with others if we don’t even have good relationship with ourselves? (read the rest)
It’s a fantastic article — but I think in order to be a good friend of yourself, it doesn’t just mean being able to accept and embrace yourself. Rather, to be your own best friend, you need to start treating yourself like you would a best friend.
Would you demand as much from your good friend as you do of yourself?
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Harvard, fortunately, has what is known as a “Shopping Period,” in which students have a full week before actually deciding on which courses to register for. This is the perfect time to test out a new professor, see how interesting that Lit class is, or just to sit back and relax as school starts (sort of).
While we all know that previous year’s recommendations, Professors, class size, syllabus, workload and difficulty are important, there are some things that are notoriously overlooked…
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