what Harvard taught me, what it can teach you
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.
After my senior year college search, I thought I was all done with silly applications, essays and interviews until my next senior year job search. Oh, how I was mistaken.
Practically every activity on campus has either an application and/or interview process or comp process. You apply for a freshmen seminar by waxing poetic about marine biology. You write an essay on the proper use of punctuation for that literary magazine. You comp the Crimson with a few hundred other freshmen etc. etc.
This particular entry will focus on recruitment efforts that do NOT involve a comp, but instead have usually, a written application and then an interview for those passing the written part. (This obviously doesn’t include activities that involve try outs.)
There are a few basic tips to keep in mind to put your best foot forward when it comes to the extracurricular application process.
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.
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.
Lots of Harvard’s undergrads are athletes. You’ll find some of the best lacrosse players, hockey players, swimmers, runners, rowers, kickers, catchers, and throwers around. On some nights you’re going to be eating in the same dining hall as the football team, and your reaction upon seeing their eating habits is probably going to be some combination of disgust and amazement.
I am not one of those athletes. But I like to eat - quite a bit, actually. The dining halls don’t always offer the best entrees from night to night, but I can get pretty creative with sandwiches, salads, and burgers (ask me about my peanut-butter-honey-banana-bread or my humus hamburgers!). Food isn’t available after-hours either, but that always gave me all the more motivation to grab a burrito or a slice of pizza before 2 AM if I knew I was going to be staying up late — better safe than hungry, right? So how are you supposed to stay fit and avoid the Freshman-15 when Harvard’s welcoming week involves an ice cream bash, several outdoor barbecues, and a whole new Square of restaurants to explore? By working out.
For me, coming to Harvard was the first time I had full access to a nice gym. In high school, my idea of a workout was a few rounds of DDR, but going to MIT just to play an arcade game definitely wasn’t going to work for me here. Luckily, Harvard has more than a few places to work out, and it’s definitely worth your time to check these places out.
Being clever and one step ahead, the typical Harvard student probably answered many a question in class, asked many a question, and was generally what most would term a “smarty pants.”
However, drop said newly admitted student into a class of 1500+ other really smart newly admitted kids and smarter, older, maybe wiser upperclassmen, and the game changes. Life Sciences 1a fills Sanders Theater, and no one likes that kid who asks the irrelevant make-me-look-smart questions at the end of lecture.
If you’re among smart people and you’re smart yourself, keep your attitude in check to gain respect from your peers.
A “typical” Harvard student is busy and bounces from one activity to another. Events are back-to-back, overlapping, with locations and times changing at will.
No one likes waiting on someone who’s late for a meeting. So, don’t be that girl or boy.
Here are some tips on how to keep organized.
Harvard will keep you busy, but we all get too easily distracted by the likes of gmail, facebook, nytimes.com and youtube. Other times, your roommates will drag you out for an impromptu glow in the dark Frisbee session at night.
Here are some ways to minimize the impact of distractions if you really need to haul some ass.
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