Current Harvard students: are you HAPPY?

Lirazel
Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:15:35 +0000

Although this is old, my mom got into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton back in the 1970s (early '80s? It’s three a.m. and I don’t want to do math.) as a California kid who didn’t have any prior knowledge of the mythos for any of them. She visited, and this is the story she’s been telling me since I was way too young and college-aware to know that it was weird for my dad, applying as a 45±year-old ex-tenure-track-but-not-tenured-Stanford-professor to law school day programs, to be accepted to Georgetown and rejected from George Mason and American. (Dad says Stanford kids are very sheltered, and otherwise the same as Harvard etc. in competitiveness levels etc., but it comes across as way more casual and less competitive because people are always in shorts and casual clothing.)*
She visited Princeton first, and was like “Well, those people are very cliqueish preps. They seem the Animal House Sort.” (Was Animal House even out?)
Then she visited Yale, and thought that the Yale kids were very nice. She was having dinner with a bunch, and they were talking about why Yale was wonderful. Then they finished dinner, and mom, loving ice cream, was like “Let’s go get ice cream at the ice cream shop next door (literally)!” And then every Yalie in the group she was eating with disappeared back to the library because they had to study. No ice cream.
Visiting Harvard, she met kids who didn’t study all the time, but had lives and went out for ice cream and things. She went to Harvard. She always has attributed the difference to Harvard’s 4 mandatory classes per semester vs. Yale’s 5.

*Note on Lirazel’s college applications and legacy status. No, Lirazel did not apply to Stanford. She did not like it when she was a 4-year-old kid at her first “college visit” playing in piles of NASTY PRICKLY MEAN oak leaves while her father taught classes. She is also pale and unathletic (“weak” might be more accurate), and more than a little bit afraid of high concentrations of tan athletes. Probably false stereotyping. Whatever. She also grew up in the Silicon Valley, and while she loves parts of California (Tahoe! Big Sur! Carmel! MontereyBayAquariumAquariumAquariumAquariumAquarium!) has no wish to ever return to the Silicon Valley. Lirazel did apply to Harvard, despite a sophomore-early-junior-ish period of No I Am Not Going Where My Parents Went Because I Am A Rebel, and got in. :DDD