Current Harvard students: are you HAPPY?

gadad
Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:09:07 +0000

Yes I agree with the above posters. I don’t understand why this “Yale kids are happier” myth gets thrown around.



This is my take from having two kids there right now. My kids adore Harvard. Their friends adore it. The vibe I get throughout the campus is rampantly enthusiastic.

But at Harvard, you may have 80% or so of the students who went to Harvard because they loved it. The rest may have loved Yale or Stanford or Brown or NYU and really wanted to go there, but eventually yielded to what they perceived to be pressure to accept the Harvard brand name - kind of like having to part with your true love to enter into the arranged marriage that your parents set up. I think that the 80% are just as happy with their college life as any students anywhere. The rest might come around or might go through all four years with the weight of “what might have been.”

Elanorci, given your disappointment with Yale, you have the potential to be in either the 80% or the 20%. I think you’ll need to be honest with yourself about whether you can enthusiastically embrace campus life at Harvard. FWIW, though I have no direct connection to Yale, my sense is that the two schools are about as similar as any two schools in the country. It seems to me that other than having a strong feeling about the difference in their settings, a student should be able to go from one to the other with about the same degree of familiarity as English speakers go back and forth between American English and British English.