Tag Archive for 'how to'

On Surviving Shopping Period

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…

How To Choose Your Courses as a Freshman

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.

Read more…

Recommendation: Todoist for Your To Do List

In a previous post, I examined ways of organizing your busy busy Harvard life. At the time, I didn’t have a good “To Do List” or task management organizer for you.

Now, I am proud to recommend Todoist.com

Todoist is a website that allows you to create To Do Lists (complete with deadlines and project breakdowns) that would make any dork envious.

Read more…

Presentation Skills: What Harvard Doesn’t Teach You

People are shocked when I tell that the only time I give presentations at Harvard is for my Chinese class. “Business” majors everywhere else in the country are working on group projects and giving final presentations for pretty much all of their classes.

If you’re shy and/or socially awkward (which may or may not be the case for a Harvard student), then you may need some tips on how to sound confident and competent when you’re presenting your recommendations for a multi-million buck project. While Public Speaking is a natural given for theater geeks, it CAN be learned. I somehow managed to learn it even though I was that kid who would never speak in class unless called upon.

Presentation skills are essential in today’s work force. Don’t let your Ivy League education hold you back from presenting yourself well.

Read more…

On Surviving E-Recruiting

E-Recruiting is one of those phrases you hear tossed by upperclassmen as a freshmen. They bemoan it, love it, hate it, need it. And as a freshmen, you’re not quite sure what to make of it. But, once you hit sophomore year, that word “e-recruiting” is on everyone’s lips.

Some start early and fast — attending the recruiting sessions for SENIORS as sophomores during the first week or so of September. Others realize belatedly that deadlines start as early as mid-reading period for the first semester!

Here are a few tips for surviving e-recruiting (as it pertains for those searching for internships).

Read more…

How to Prepare for Your Freshmen Year

Harvard is an overwhelming experience. Every incoming first year will receive a packet of ALL the events occurring during the first two weeks of school. It will be packed with events — some mandatory, others highly recommended, and way too many of them will involve extracurriculars.

You’ll hopefully meet everyone in your entryway, and then everyone at every table you sit at in Annenberg. You will forget everyone’s name, maybe even your own. You’ll probably shop at The Coop and get ripped off, talk to advisers who tell you everything you already know, and receive more course syllabi than you’d actually like to sit and read through.

Here are a few tips that I found helped me out those first few months as a freshmen.

Read more…

How To Learn Math

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?

Read more…