What IS GREAT about Harvard

exultationsy
Sun, 14 Oct 2012 13:34:14 +0000

1) People
2) Academics
3) Extracurriculars

1) They’re all so interesting! I just spent the summer at a really ace state school. Everybody there was definitely smart and pretty hardworking, but boy, the things we found interesting were just not the same. The conversations I have here are just more fun for me than conversations I have anywhere else. On Thursday night, my friends and I talked had a conversation that naturally flowed through bad TV, poetry, family, the ethics and security implications of the drone wars, and more. Or on Wednesday, a totally different set and I spent all dinner figuring out which presidents were our favorites and why. (That would be the set that’s concentrating in government, if it wasn’t clear.)
Even when I’m judging somebody for seeming like they don’t belong here, I have never been proven correct. Not everybody is academic, but everybody’s interesting for some reason–this totally non-verbal athlete in my freshman entryway was an amazing sculptor. Or this girl I met one night who was really smashed by 10 p.m. somehow transitioned from telling me her exploits at some final club to how much she just really loved physics and math and wished her classes in them were more difficult.
The people are kind of nuts but I am so never bored.
2) I’ve really liked the professors of: History of Art and Architecture, Classics, History, East Asian Studies, English, and, actually, Economics. (I do not like the ec TFs, but the couple professors I’ve had were pretty nice. And they knew me.) Again with the top state school, my friends there had rather broader knowledge of their key subjects than I do of some of mine. But that was because there seemed to be no way for them to do advanced non-thesis work. They didn’t seem to have seminars. I love seminars! I like the opportunity to do more advanced work on a slightly narrower topic. And they aren’t just limited to upperclass concentrators, like at a lot of places. (I think I remember Swarthmore’s English department offering no seminars open to non-majors.) You can take advanced courses if you’re a freshman with enough background to handle it, which plenty of people take advantage of. Concentrators do get some preference if a course is oversubscribed, of course, but they don’t often oversubscribe.
I’ve been particularly lucky. Immediate-upon-arrival nerd heaven is definitely not true of all Harvard students’ experiences, especially the social science/humanities students in psychology, government, and economics. (I cannot speak about the science concentrations positively or negatively.) I do know some people it’s happened to in psych and ec, but they’re exceptions. It helps, a lot, that my interests range from “that’s interesting now that you mention it” to “hella obscure,” so the professors I like don’t have a horde of people to pay attention to. But if you find a niche, whether freshman year or junior year, the opportunities to pursue that interest are fantastic.
3) Subset of the “people” category: the crazy awesome people run crazy awesome things. Makes campus life more fun.