<p>A question for current Harvard students. My daughter is a junior in a highly competitive magnet high school. She’s doing really well academically, but frankly she’s exhausted. We were just having a conversation of where she wants to apply next year and she said that Harvard is not on her list because she thinks it’s a cut throat and extremely competitive environment just like her current school. Is that true? Or is the environment more collaborative?</p>
<p>Your daughter sounds very much like mine. After graduating from a competitive magnet high school, my daughter was exhausted. When she was accepted to Harvard, she wanted to take a gap year, but she didn’t have a plan, other than to wait tables. My wife and I thought that wasn’t the best plan, and insisted that if she didn’t want to travel or do something with her year off that she should attend college. My daughter has found Harvard to be less stressful than her high school — if only because at Harvard you take 4 classes, instead of 10, which was what she was taking at her high school. That said, Harvard is hard; it’s an environment where for the most part collaboration is frowned upon and most student’s care deeply about their GPA and getting an ‘A’ (although they outwardly profess not to care in the least). After her freshman year at Harvard, my daughter took a year and half off from school because she needed a break. She ended up waiting tables during that time — which is what we probably should have let her do in the first place. She’s now back at school and is a super-senior and will graduate in December of 2014. Here’s what I would suggest: Have your daughter apply to Harvard and other top schools. Once admitted, if she still feels exhausted, she can take a gap year. The hardest part of Harvard and YPSM is getting in!</p>
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<p>Harvard recently updated their policy on plagiarism and collaboration. Reading it over should answer your question: [Harvard</a> Plagiarism Policy § Harvard Guide to Using Sources](<a href=“http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=icb.page355322]Harvard”>http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=icb.page355322)</p>
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<p>Gibby, your insight into the minds and motivations of 'most student’s ’ is truly astonishing.</p>
<p>^^ Okay, I’ll amend my statement: it’s an environment where for the most part collaboration is frowned upon and where my daughter, her roommates, and friends, care deeply about their GPA and getting an ‘A’ (although they outwardly profess not to care in the least). Maybe my kid and her friends are not the norm, but my daughter prides herself on having a 3.921 GPA after 3 years at Harvard.</p>
<p>With about 6700 undergrads on campus, there are many different takes on competition and collaboration. Here’s another viewpoint:
<a href=“https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/collegeadmissionsstudentblog/2010/11/30/ill-be-there-for-you/[/url]”>https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/collegeadmissionsstudentblog/2010/11/30/ill-be-there-for-you/</a></p>
<p>^^ While that blog was written in 2010, I find it interesting that in 2011 the administration felt the need to enact the ‘Freshman Pledge’ as some Harvard students were not “thoughtful or considerate in their actions with their peers.”
[Harvard</a> College Introduces Pledge for Freshmen To Affirm Values | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/9/1/pledge-freshmen-students-harvard/]Harvard”>Harvard College Introduces Pledge for Freshmen To Affirm Values | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>As you said, “with 6700 undergrads on campus, there are many different takes on competition and collaboration.”</p>
<p>Here’s a recent Crimson article on the issue: [Let?s</a> Be Less Serious | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/column/tico-travels/article/2012/12/4/serious-harvard-annoying/]Let?s”>Let’s Be Less Serious | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>Harvard is somewhat competitive, more so in some domains than in others. I think a lot depends on where you come from. People from easy high schools are probably facing a lot of external competition for the first time, so they find it more competitive than people like me and your daughter, since I went to an extraordinarily intense magnet high school from which Harvard is a step down in intensity. So I think it’s pretty collaborative, but my sense of this may be skewed. This does tend to even out after freshman year, when more people are finding their footing. That said, I do think particular warnings about pre-med and pre-finance probably apply, because I think if any groups on campus are “cutthroat,” those would be them.</p>
<p>Personally, I was exhausted after high school, too, in a major way. Harvard does have plenty of problems, so I’m not here to deny them or to generalize–just to say that, for me, it worked out beautifully. My own first year and a half or two years here were pretty hard–but my first two years at any college would have been hard. (Going to a high school where LAN parties were the most common kind of parties didn’t really taught me how to socialize in the ways I, as a humanities type, prefer to.) </p>
<p>Over all, despite the problems, Harvard has been an overwhelmingly positive experience in my life. For the first time, I have a large group of friends, with lots of nice acquaintances beyond that. Through early college, I had thought the slight nervous/neurotic vibration running through everything I thought and did was just how I was. It disappeared in the past couple years, though, and I have, to my surprise, come to enjoy a new and deeply satisfying internal equilibrium. I think this is a more positive experience than most students have with college, and I’m sure it’s more positive than average at Harvard. But at the same time, even coming exhausted straight out of high school, I am now and for the first time flourishing. If I could do it again, I don’t know whether I would have taken a gap year first (probably not), but I would still choose Harvard.</p>
<p>I am not the intended target for your question since I’m not a current Harvard student, but I am an alumnus. I went to Harvard Law School and cross-registered for an undergrad class, and there was no competition among students that I saw in either place. In the law school, why compete, since you’ll all get great jobs? I hear from friends who went to undergrad there that people at Harvard College were rougher around the edges than in the law school, though.</p>
<p>My daughter did not find Harvard to be cut-throat. Her experience was more like the what is described in the blog in post #5 above.</p>
<p>My own opinion is that Harvard is big and varied enough that you can find what you are looking for. If you are the competitive sort you can certainly find like-minded people to compete with. If you are more of a collaborative mind you can find those sorts of students too.</p>
<p>Huh, I didn’t know Gibby was a man. “My wife and I thought that wasn’t the best plan…”
Gibby, like the name Gabby, just sounds female, not that it matters. </p>
<p>I think it very much depends on which field you’re in. For example, my experience has been that premeds do face a lot of very fierce competition, and as a biology student taking many of the same classes as they, I’ve felt it as well - but I don’t feel that my experiences in humanities courses have been at all similar in this regard. </p>
<p>I also think that the word ‘cutthroat’ may be a bit off the mark. Harvard is a competitive place in that everyone cares about achieving highly and that everyone is in some sense in ‘competition’ with everyone else. However, in my experience, there are rarely explicit acts of meanness/sabotage/belittling/etc amongst students. More often than not, the pressure comes from within: you can’t help but compare yourself to all of your high-achieving classmates and feel an internal pressure to exceed and compete with them, but it’s not like any of them are making fun of you if you don’t. </p>
<p>My son has also told me that most of the students he has encountered seem to be self driven and not engaged in any sort of overt competition with other students. His group of roommates and entryway is incredibly collegial, actually…students in the same class often study together or help each other with problem sets, etc.</p>
<p>I am not a current student, but I just had my interview and I asked my interviewer the same question. She said that, as a whole, the environment is more collaborative than competitive, but there are definitely some concentrations and tracks (she mentioned pre-law and pre-med, her own track, specifically) that can be/are competitive. The smaller concentrations shouldn’t be as competitive as other, larger concentrations.</p>