Guide to Freshman Hell

TODAY 1602 freshman will begin their first day of class. Now that it's too late for these fresh young minds to avoid the four-year transformation into the class of 1990, it's time to talk about the dark side of freshman life.

Sixteen hundred freshmen implies 1600 freshman stories. Some are funny; most are ordinary. Once in a rare while a freshman story will embody the absolute essence of mortal terror and existential nausea, a crash dive into the dark firmament of human life. In these stories the inscription above Dexter Gate reads not "Enter to grow in wisdom," but instead "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

I am talking about freshman hell, an almost indescribable experience that affects everyone differently. Some of those who pass through Harvard's Hellgate drown themselves in a synapseblowing miasma of drugs and alcohol. Others slit their wrists, or jump off Anderson Bridge.

Freshman hell. My story is one of these.

The elements of freshman hell emerge equally from the individual and from the University--an unfortunate mix of the normal anxieties of adolescence and the sadistic impersonality of this place. If you're emotionally vulnerable, personally naive, or just unlucky, Harvard will chew you up and spit you out like the insignificant piece of teen-age gristle you are.

A complete exposition of my frosh disasters would be only slightly longer than War and Peace, so I will just touch on the highlights, the "Nine Circles of Freshman Hell" that await the unwary traveler. True, I missed out on three of the circles; perhaps that's why I am still around to tell the tale.

Circle 1. Pre-Med Hell

Despite the nasty reputation of the pre-med requirements, taking the Fatal Five courses doesn't qualify as an admission into hell unless you hate science, hate medicine, and don't want to go to med school. I was banished to this circle by my father, who asked me "What am I paying $16,000 a year for if you're not going to become a doctor?"

Harvard's unnecessarily irritating and competitive basic science courses can wear one down to a human parody that babbles biochemical formulas under the breath and has nightmares about flatworm phyla.

My sojourn in this circle began every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8:45 a.m., when Quasimodo climbed the bell tower of Memorial Church and rang the Chem 20 bell. Twenty minutes later, I passed though the entrance of the first circle--coincidentally the entrance to the Science Center--and spent an hour of my valuable time copying blurred illustrations that upon later examination looked like the drunken scribblings of a dyslexic orangutang. Everyone knows that the dyslexic orangutang was never going to score above the median, and since the crafty simian had exchanged his notes for mine, I was in for a tough time. Orgo lab second semester could have been called "Fun with Carcinogens." Every chemical I touched is even now burrowing deep inside my genes, doing who knows what mischief to my cellular structure.

My math class was taught by a prof who combined the intellectual clarity of Immanuel Kant with the accent of Sgt. Schulz. This professor liked to verbally footnote his lectures, and as the semester wore on he dwelled at length on the logical niceties of increasingly obscure proofs, often forgetting to explain what he was trying to prove.

Circle 2. GPA Hell

The sad cases wandering through this zone are all smart people who do the work and the reading and are interested in their classes, and habitually get screwed over by careless section leaders and ossified professors. Science majors are pretty sheltered from GPA hell, since there is usually a right way and a wrong way in science, with the right way getting the A.

Things are not so simple in liberal arts land. To get trapped in the GPA inferno, you typically have something original and interesting enough to say on exams and papers to get the grader flustered, but you are not thorough enough to impress with footnotes in the original Sanskrit. Neither a bullshit artist, a workaholic, nor a genius, the soul in this circle sees his papers and exams as an endless string of B-plusses, while the operators one floor up in GPA heaven thumb their noses and jangle their Phi Beta Kappa keys at the brighter minds below.

Circle 3. Solitaire Hell

Spinoza was wrong. Only some men are social animals. The best I can be labeled is "not an anti-social animal." If you don't know anyone here, and are shy and slow to make friends, the Big H will be a lonely place. One of the few valuable skills Harvard gave me is the ability to make shallow party chit chat with people I know nothing about, but the lessons came too late for the time I really needed them: Freshman Week.

During that week, Harvard offers orientations to various minorites it thinks will have difficulty adapting to the environment. But the University forgets about the one that could really use that service--the shy kid from the sheltered glades of suburbia who lacks the family or prep school connections for a showing of the ropes. Without it, Freshman Week is a blizzard of stammered conversations and embarrassed silences, a cocktail party scripted by Samuel Beckett.

Of course, many of you freshmen already know this. What you don't know is that Freshman Week is a concentrated sampling of what your social life will be like for the next year. If Harvard cared about its students, it would allow anyone who didn't love Harvard after Freshman Week an automatic transfer to Stanford or Amherst, to spare them a wasted and unhappy year. How come you can return anything you buy if it's unused, except for your freshman year?

Because there are no easy outs from the second circle of hell, that's why. Those stuck there have three choices: getting a personality transplant, being extravagantly generous--buy everyone in your entryway a gram of coke!--or teaching yourself solitaire. As the president of a final club once remarked to me, "The meek might inherit the earth, but they won't get punched for the Porc."

Circle 4. Roommate Hell

Strictly speaking, this circle should be named Canaday Hell, after the den of architectural perversity masquerading as a freshman dorm. It's a little known fact that the building of both Canaday and Mather House was secretly funded by Yale.

I was docked in one of the aptly named Singles. My room had previously been occupied by someone with infectious hepatitis. Great, I thought. Strictly speaking, I had no roommates; but the eight gents on my floor who formed a bathroom unit, became one meta-rooming group. I never ventured fully into this circle of hell, living as I was in a sensory deprivation tank of a room.

Nevertheless, I managed to detest one of my "roommates" as much as if I actually lived with him. I shall call him Alan. He was a blond, blue-eyed bisexual from Long Island, a high cheekboned boy wonder at whose door many a frosh female threw herself. In one month he used up as many Trojans as I had in my entire life. That we shared a thin wall is indubitable proof, I think, of one of the following two propositions: (1) there is a God, and He is a Bastard; or, (2) Harvard matches roommates to maximize malice.

Circle 5. Romance Hell

The circle of romance hell is divided in half: the realm of the long-distance relationship, and the realm of Harvard. I traversed both.

When I left Seattle I was desperately in love with a girl named Christina. Our relationship was showing the first signs of going ballistic when I left for Harvard. As time wore on it began to bear a distinct resemblance to a Six Flags roller coaster ride, complete with loop the loops and reality-defying twists and turns.

As is often the case with the instinctively monogamous, my interest in Harvard women varied inversely with the state of my relationship with Tina. In November it looked like a permanent tailspin, and I began to take the fall for a femme on the fifth floor of my entry, coincidentally also named Christina. Nicknamed the "Ice Queen" by one of my friends, she ignored every advance I threw her way for some weeks. Finally she took pity on me and patiently explained that her heart belonged to another back in the Old Country, and even though I was charming and sweet etc., there was a commitment between them that nothing could break.

A week later the Secret Santa program began. This is a game you will join too, whereby students are randomly assigned a person of the opposite sex to give presents to, things like Christmas Carols under the window or surprise decorating of the bedroom.

Soon a message for Alan appeared on the suite door, promising an erotic massage with exotic oils from a willing elf. The next day I was working on a paper at my desk, the door to my room open as usual. I saw Christina in a miniskirt-and-net-stocking elf costume, pay Alan a very personal visit in his bedroom. Hearing the noises through the wall, I sat wondering who had given Alan this incredible present. Perhaps Christina herself suggested it.

Circle 6. Counseling Hell.

All of Harvard's vaunted safety nets and counseling resources are no better than the people who staff them. My proctor, Carla, was a former Eliot House crew and gov jock establishing her professional credentials at the Law School. She was nice, her live-in boyfriend was nice, her study breaks were nice. Whenever you talked to her about your problems, she would tell you how rowing helped her when she was depressed. A great help, she was.

I went into the UHS walk-in mental clinic after a week of anxiety and nightmares. The psychiatrist on duty listened, then suggested encounter group therapy. He told me a group would be starting up next semester. Great, I thought, I might be on the bottom of the Charles by then.

I also tried Room 13, the student volunteer counseling program. It was not really the fault of the guy on duty that he couldn't understand my unhappiness here, or that he was as thick as a table. He meant well.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, there are some existential tortures that I missed as a freshman: lottery hell, work-study hell, extracurricular hell. Next party you're at, pull some wise senior aside and get him or her to talk about it, if they dare. Otherwise, repeat your mantra, rub your lucky rabbit's foot, and keep a crucifix handy, and you probably will sail through freshman year unscathed. If not, don't say I didn't warn you.