<p>my blocking group has 2 from TX, 2 NY, 1 TN, 1 CA, 1 PA, and then me.
i think i am friends with about half of the north carolina contingent in my class (maybe 18 of us? i’m not really sure). in my entryway of 30, there were 6 from the south, so i’d say we’re well-represented enough. i don’t really seek out friends from any particular regions, and i seem to know plenty of internationals, californians, southerners, new englanders, etc.</p>
<p>Woah, thanks for those links bandit_tx</p>
<p>sneakypete - I live in NC also so I’m a bit interested in the whole make-up of the class. I saw somewhere else that Harvard usually accepts around 40 people from NC each year. Not really sure if it’s accurate or not. I’m from a pretty average high school and I’m not going to Governor’s School or any of the typical NC-prestigious programs but…hopefully Harvard will like me.</p>
<p>But anyway, this is a really interesting thread…lots of people here on CC have emphasized how people are “name brand obsessed” and that Harvard really isn’t what it’s all hyped up to be.</p>
<p>And how to you think that Harvard got to be a name brand??</p>
<p>Yes, it’s basically Harvard capitalizing on the self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>In answer to the name of the thread; I DO!!!</p>
<p>Seriously, every week (if not every day) I see more and more reasons to love Harvard. From the house system, complete with pride and tradition, to the classes which are NOT as impersonal as the NYT would have you believe (two of my professors who I am on first-name basis with are Nobel prize winners) I love Harvard and almost anything about it. It’s true that Harvard has some flaws, and the people who claim Harvard to be perfect are fooling themselves, but every institution has flaws and the only difference with Harvard is that we own up to ours and even when we don’t we’re so much in the public eye (and everyone loves a ‘Harvard isn’t so great after all’ story) that other people point out our mistakes for us. And then we do our best to fix them.</p>
<p>In response to the Southern contingent question, you definitely can find a Southern feel if you want it (I’m from Cincinnati, which isn’t Southern, but definitely not East or West Coast). My blocking group is Jacksonville, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and Texas, and our linking group is almost all from Texas, Virginia, and North and South Carolina.</p>
<p>I think Harvard may be as good as everyone says. I won’t be able to visit (probably) before I apply, so I was just hoping people could point me in the right direction with these things. The people I have known wern’t crazy about it, but I guess that was just their preference. </p>
<p>Thanks ye Harvardians who took the time to respond. It’s helped out tremendously. </p>
<p>Also, as a side note, anyone who goes to Harvard should look into taking a class with Jorie Graham. She held a reading once at my high school. Won the Pulitzer back in 96, I think. She’s really wonderful. Insightful, intelligent, and she teaches at Harvard. Also, the main reason why I ever thought about applying.</p>
<p>I love sentence fragments! I feel like Vidal. haha.</p>
<p>I know someone who transferred to Harvard just to take classes with her.
The poets on the Advocate love her.</p>
<p>I love it so much that I couldn’t bear to leave for graduate school. I was totally besotted in my first few weeks there, and my feelings never really changed.</p>
<p>The truth is, you won’t win many friends outside of Cambridge admitting that you feel this way, so people try very hard to be low-key about it.</p>
<p>Hanna, What makes you love it so much?</p>
<p>More than anything, it’s because I found more soulmate friends in my first three weeks there than in the rest of my life before or since. I felt understood and accepted there in a way I never have elsewhere. I got to do such extraordinary things musically with my best friends. I loved the city. I loved my classes. I loved the fact that there were about twenty more cool things to do on campus every day than I had time for. I loved my House. I loved the freedom.</p>
<p>Just as an illustration of the fact that I’m not alone in my cheesy love – and also that my attitude is not simply the result of nostalgia and the passage of time – here’s how the current members of my singing group describe in rather cheesy terms what it’s like for them, eight years after I graduated:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/veritone/auditions_whoarewe.htm[/url]”>http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/veritone/auditions_whoarewe.htm</a></p>
<p>Hanna, you were in Veritones? I knew you sang acapella but I had no idea. I LOVE the Veritones. I heard them sing at Junior Parents Weekend this past March, and it was wonderful. They sang one of their songs so achingly beautifully that it brought tears to my eyes. It was dark there in Sanders – which was fortunate since I’m normally a no-tears kind of guy.</p>
<p>The Veritones are wonderful.<br>
I also know a young man who just graduated. He was in the Krokodiloes. He told me he was a bit adrift his first semester at Harvard. And then he discovered the Kroks and he found his niche. The Kroks go on tours (Asia, Europe, the US); he told me every year they get to spend a week in the Bahamas, courtesy of a Krok alum, in SF, courtesy of the mother of a Krok alum, etc… We went to a Krok concert earlier this year; it was one of their anniversaries. And there were several rather elderly alums who came up on stage to sing along with the current members. I’m told that Krok alums tend to show up for concert regularly.
Several of S’s friends are in the Glee Club and also think of it as their “home.” The Glee Club also tours, but perhaps not as extensively as the Kroks because there’s more of them. There’s a lot of hanging out together and eating together after rehearsals.</p>
<p>Thank you! I love them so much.</p>
<p>“Several of S’s friends are in the Glee Club and also think of it as their “home.””</p>
<p>Oh yes. As a law school student, I couldn’t sing with the Veritones any more, so I was in the Collegium Musicum, Kuumba, and the Sisters of Kuumba. They’re all amazing communities.</p>
<p>Hanna? Is that you Hanna …? I’m in the Veritones too! It’s Gene! And coureur, it’s wonderful to know you enjoyed our performance that much!</p>
<p>Wha – no way!</p>
<p>Well, thread readers, I guess this is external validation for my descriptions of delirious happiness at Harvard. Two Veritones who joined the group ten years apart independently find our way to an internet thread that asks us to gush about why we love Harvard. (And of course, even though h-bomber joined years after I’d finished law school and moved 1000 miles away, we know each other, because that’s just how it is. 
)</p>
<p>Does anyone know if the Veritones will sing on frosh parent weekend? Now I really want to hear them after all the good press.</p>
<p>My son starts Harvard in the fall. Prefrosh weekend changed the way I look at college for my subsequent children because the Harvard reps at the seminars I attended stressed repeatedly the flexibility and effort that will be expended for undergrads to persue worthwhile endeavors.</p>
<p>That’s just another thing that makes Harvard so special. I can recall some colleges that my son considered that were very rigid and truthfully I didn’t get it until we were on campus for prefrosh.</p>
<p>ahem…that’s pursue.</p>
<p>Yes, the Veritones will of course be singing on frosh parents weekend. In term of flexibility, if you’re interested in the Veritones or other a cappella groups on campus we stress flexibility and the ability to work with other EC groups. Many a cappella singers play varsity sports, write for the Crimson, etc, etc. In general at Harvard, you’ll find that EC groups are willing to work around other groups as long as the demands are reasonable.</p>
<p>It is impossible not to love Harvard!!!</p>
<p>I had a choice between three schools: Stanford, Yale, and Harvard. All are amazing and I wish I could spend some time at each one, but in the end I discovered that Harvard is the closest thing there is to a perfect university and I decided to join the Harvard Class of 2011. Academically it is at the top of nearly every field, from physics to history to classics and everything in between. Cambridge and Boston are amazing. Most of all, when I visited in April everyone I met was extremely intelligent, interesting, and down-to-Earth. It was a very tough decision but by the end it was impossible not to love Harvard. Go Crimson!!!</p>