A day in the life

Admiral
Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:28:46 +0000

You wake up in the morning to the sounds of trumpets acknowledging how special you are. As you walk out of your dorm room, you give a quick wave to the common, Non-Harvard people on the way to class, maybe tossing them some loose change or a piece of advice about the SAT IIs.

Your professor reminds you at the beginning of class how fantastic he is, then teaches material that everyone in the classroom finds easy. Everyone scores perfectly on all the tests- that’s why they got into Harvard.

After classes, you might run into Bill Gates, Natalie Portman, or Conan O’Brien around the campus- after all, these celebrated alumni have nothing better to do than spend all their time at the school. My roommate says he saw W.E.B. DuBois at Urban Outfitters once, but I think he might be lying.

You hang around with other students in the evening, talking about the things that Harvard students are interested in- differential geometry, Somerset Maugham, postmodern surrealism, computational economics… The only problems with the conversations is that everyone already knows everything, so there isn’t much to discuss. Sometimes, therefore, the debates just degrade into games of fox-hunting and discus throwing (after all, everyone who goes to Harvard is both rich and an Olympic athlete).

At the end of the day, just to relax, you might grab your Harvard acceptance letter and head into Boston. After all, a Harvard acceptance letter gets you into any club or party in Boston, lets you buy alcohol in bars whatever age you are, and can be used to get out of speeding tickets and most misdemeanors.

The fact that John Adams went here has an impact on your everyday life, as does the school’s age and the size of the its endowment. In particular, having such a large library makes a huge difference! Harvard’s 14 million volumes, most of which are held elsewhere in the country or around the world, offers you SO much more than Yale’s 9.9 million volumes or Columbia’s PATHETIC 6.9 million volumes. Can you imagine having only 7 million books at your school’s library? You’d probably run out of things to read by junior year!

At the end of the day, you curl up in your luxurious dorm room that only Harvard could provide, fully appreciating the advantages that Harvard gives you…

The truth? IT’S JUST LIKE ANY OTHER SCHOOL! You have classes, you have homework, you have friends, you go to parties, you eat junk food, you date, you drink, you act irresponsibly every once in a while just to see how it feels. You go to the extracurriculars you like, you take the classes that interest you, and you graduate after four years having hopefully learned something.

Do you really want to know my day? I finished my Physics problem set early this morning before rushing to a Life Sciences lecture, followed by a Physics lecture. I had pretty bad pizza for lunch at the cafe, then did some work before going to Expository Writing in the afternoon. I went home and hung out on the computer before taking a long nap, then woke up to get to my Life Sciences section a little late (sections are once a week and taught by TFs). We did some work in the lab, then I came back to my dorm to do my math homework, talk to the people across the hall, and then visit collegeconfidential before doing my Life Sci problem set. Overall, it was actually a busy day.

Was that really all that enlightening? No! I just went to classes, did some work, and hung out and had some fun. IT’S A SCHOOL! IT’S NOT A METAPHOR ABOUT PERFECTION AND ACHIEVEMENT OR SOMETHING!

Sorry- I’m just tired of the perception that Harvard offers a fundamentally different experience than most other selective colleges. It’s absolutely true that you can meet brilliant and wonderful people here, that the classes are usually taught by (in my opinion) great and engaging professors, and that the campus and location are fantastic. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a fundamentally different kind of college. Harvard’s not perfect, and it’s not even all that special. So keep a sense of perspective.