GSAS: A Sum of the Parts

Like many other students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). Herman Marshall straps on his helmet each morning and bikes the four miles from his apartment in Medford to the Astrophysics lab. But within the intangible institution of GSAS--which has a scattered student body, a sporadic academic calendar and few buildings of its own--Herman Marshall, as president of the Graduate Student Council (GSC), has a clearly defined role.

Marshall, a fifth year graduate student who expects to receive his Ph. D. in Astrophysics next year, sees himself as both an organizer of graduate activities and a conveyor of student concerns to the administration. This spring he spent his spare time organizing GSAS intramurals, sending a delegation to Washington to protest proposed student loss cuts, and trying to convince administration officials that graduate students have many of the same social and counseling needs as undergraduates.

"Life as a graduate student should not be cloistered." Marshall says. "It's important to develop all three [aspects]--the social and the physical, in addition to the mental."

Marshall himself exemplifies this balance. In addition to his work for the council, Marshall has published several articles on quasars in scientific journals, travels to France and Italy regularly to compare notes with other members of his field, and shuttles back and forth between Cambridge and an observation site in Arizona.

"All graduate students share a special situation. You are working on an independent project--one which you alone know about best. You are fending for yourself." Marshall says that this "independence" is sometimes indistinguishable from isolation and makes "social interaction" all the more essential. It's very easy for graduate students to isolate themselves to the point where if they have a problem or become depressed, no one realizes it. Marshall says, adding that this may have been one of the underlying factors which led his predecessor, former graduate student council president Thomas McDonell, to commit suicide last December. This, Marshall contends, is "one of the biggest problems" in graduate life.

This feeling of isolation combined with a concern that GSAS was being "dwarfed" by other, more formidable Harvard graduate institutions--the Law. Business and Medical Schools--first prompted Marshall to join the GSC in his second year of graduate school. Marshall has a favorite anecdote that illustrates what he sees as the plight of the GSAS student.

When as a senior at MIT, he was accepted by the GSAS, he couldn't wait to tell his friends the good news. The nearly universal response: "So what graduate school have you been accepted to--Business or Medicine?"

Marshall sees the graduate student as "living within the infamy of Harvard." The programs that Marshall and the GSC are trying to implements--a student center, a pub, intramurals and counselling services--are designed to make the graduate students feel like they belong to Harvard. Most grad students, he says, sit in their offices working and have little contact with the University outside their department after orientation week of their first year. Although he cannot after the basic nature of graduate studies Marshall does feel that the quality of the life can and will improve. "I think we can carve our own nice in the rock of Harvard.