what Harvard taught me, what it can teach you
Perhaps you know already, but tomorrow is the Harvard-Yale game. If you have tickets, please go and cheer on your respective team.
As you may have noticed, my posting frequency has sort of slacked off (thank you CS 50). But, expect major site changes in the next week or so.
Until then, enjoy watching the game from the stadium “Dedicated to the Joy of Manly Contest.”
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 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.
It is finally that time of the year when Harvard releases its students from the grip of its off-kilter academic calendar, and Harvard students scatter to many parts of the globe to have fun, help others, study abroad and earn marketable skills.
Freshmen are (generally) wonderfully oblivious to the Harvard obsession of “doing something worthwhile” during the summer. They prance through January worrying about books only to realize in February that a number of deadlines have already passed for e-recruiting and grants. (In my opinion, however, this oblivion is generally a good thing for freshmen.)
So, what exactly do Harvard students do during those beautiful summer months? (This is a completely descriptive, non-life-hackery post.)
These are my experiences about learning, written from the perspective of a math student. I do think that my advice is applicable to other theory intense subjects such as physics and economics.
So I used to be the smart guy in high school. Doing well in math competitions, not listening in class and all that stuff. Basically I was a smart jerk. Needless to say, when I got to Harvard, I wasn’t the smartest in my class anymore. My freshman year, I enrolled in math 25, the honors class for math majors. I did pretty well in that class, but had to work really hard. Now, looking back at that experience, I see a couple of things that, given the chance, I would have done differently.
One could say that I was good at math, but not at learning math, if that makes sense. In high school, the emphasize for me had been at problem solving, while math studies in college are much more theory oriented.
How do you efficiently learn so much theory?
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