Adjusting to College in the Lower 48

John Pananen '89-'90 couldn't stand it anymore.

Too many people. Too much noise. And much, much, too much studying.

So he left. He left Harvard after the spring of 1986 because freshman year was more than he had bargained for, and school was too far away from his home in Salcha, Alaska.

As the rest of his class returned to Cambridge that fall, John set himself up in a cabin 50 miles east of Fairbanks, Alaska, and began life alone as a trapper, using the skills his father had taught him as a child. Every day he would rise, strap on his pack and set out to check his traps for whatever they might yield--martens, wolverines, lynx and the like. Subsisting primarily on flour pancakes and the occasional moose or caribou steak, he was prepared to trap through the end of the trapping season in February.

"I hated freshman year," Pananen explains. "I had no intention of coming back to Harvard--ever."

When Pananen came out of the wilderness after four months, he went looking for work in Fairbanks. He had gathered only 12 animal pelts--a low total for the time he'd spent trapping; he had several frostbitten toes; and on one occasion, he had fallen through the ice on a river that flowed by his trapline. He was ready for a new job.

In Fairbanks, Pananen worked for a short time as a plumber and then behind the counter at the local MacDonalds. Unhappy with both jobs, he reconsidered his decision to leave Harvard.

"I recognized the necessity of getting a real job," he laughs. "I thought maybe I should come back and stick it out."

Pananen is now back in Cambridge, finishing his sophomore year. But when the biology concentrator looks back to the hardest moments of the last several years, he doesn't only talk about falling into freezing rivers or living alone in sub-zero temperatures. He'll just as soon mention taking Chemistry 10 as a freshman.

"That was a nightmare," he says. "I had no clue how to study. I just hated it."

Tok Thompson '88 tells a similar story. Thompson came to Harvard from Kenai, Alaska, where his nearest neighbor was more than two miles away. After a "horrible" freshman year, he transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara. But, like Pananen, Thompson reconsidered his original decision to leave Cambridge. The anthropology major will graduate in June, having written his thesis on a small group of commercial fishermen in southwestern Alaska.

Pananen and Thompson both hail from America's largest and least settled state--Alaska--where it is dark for as many as 20 hours a day in the winter and where temperatures drop as low as 60 degrees below zero. Pananen and Thompson are not alone at Harvard. They are two of the 13 Alaskans currently enrolled at the College. Migrating from towns such as North Pole and Copper Center, these students travel nearly 4000 miles to come to school. None of the 13 agrees exactly what it means to be an Alaskan at Harvard, but most are in accord about one thing--it's a big adjustment to make.

"I was so used to having the mountains around," says Scott Merriner '90, of Dillingham, Alaska. "Here you can't even see the stars."

But not all residents of the state known as "the last frontier" have trouble with the transition. While Mia Costello '90 acknowledges that coming to Cambridge from Anchorage required some adjustment, she downplays the difficulty. Costello found a niche on the Harvard swim team soon after her arrival. This February she led the women's swim team to its first-ever title in the Eastern Intercollegiate Women's Swimming League championships. Finishing first in both the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke events, the sophomore also swam the breaststroke leg for Harvard's winning 200- and 400-yard medley relay teams. Her season's efforts earned Costello a spot on this year's All-America women's swim team.

"The swimming helped me adjust," Costello says. "With the team, suddenly I had lots of friends."

All the same, Costello says she understands Pananen's nostalgia for their home state. "I do miss it," she admits. "It's a great place to live. There are so many misconceptions about what it's like to live there--I wish people knew the state better."

If Pananen and Costello represent opposite poles of Alaskan students' experiences at Harvard, there are some things which almost all of them seem to agree upon.

"The winters are worse in Cambridge," says Kenai resident Philip Araoz '90 of Quincy House. "It's so wet in Cambridge."

Merriner echoes Araoz's complaint. "I've been as cold here as I've ever been in my whole life," he says. "It's the wet cold that gets you."

Alaskan students also share a common academic problem. Their home state's schools rarely offer good language programs, making it difficult for Alaskans to fulfill Harvard's language requirement.

Tom Kennedy '91 was an all-state wrestler three times at his high school in Kenney Lake, but he was forced to give the sport up this year. "I was failing Spanish," he says. "Lots of people in my class have had three or four years [of the language], but you know, my school wasn't accredited or anything."

Merriner recommended that future Alaskan students avoid "mainstream" languages like French or Spanish altogether.

"If they haven't taken a language before, I would say stay away from the mainstream ones," he advises. "Take Ukrainian or something--where everyone starts at the same level."

Despite his problems with Spanish, Kennedy says his biggest adjustment at Harvard has not been an academic one. He and several other Alaskans say they find life in the Northeast far more structured than they are used to.

"Rules. That was probably the biggest thing," Kennedy says. "You can get in trouble really easily here--you have to be a total pacifist to get by."

Kennedy notes, for example, the displeasure of his proctor when it was discovered that the freshman had given a dislodged parking meter to his Secret Santee in December. "Rajiv Gandhi's limousine had knocked it loose, so I dragged it up to the third floor of Canaday," he remembers. "We had to hide it, though, because it looked like I might get in trouble."

A more mundane, but nonetheless significant concern for Alaskan students is the cost of their Harvard education. The Alaskan economy is inflated beyond that of any other state, a consequence of which is the state's notoriously high cost of living. As Merriner explains, "Because the economy is really expensive, [my parent's] salary is inflated, which makes it hard to get financial aid."

Jennifer Linkous '90 agrees. "Whatever adjustment Harvard makes for us, it's one half of what my dad says it should be."

To offset the problem of tuition, Linkous has worked during the summer at her father's photography store in Fairbanks. For his part, Merriner has fished for salmon on the state's southwestern coast and for crabs in the Bering Sea. Pananen plans to fight fires for the state government this summer--a job, he says, that pays well and is hard to get.

The financial problem is exacerbated by the high travel expenses for Alaskan students--a round trip airplane ticket may cost as much as $2000 for students who don't live in one of the state's largest or southernmost cities.

Even looking at colleges outside of Alaska proved costly for some students. Kennedy originally decided to come to Harvard after visiting more than 40 colleges between his junior and senior years of high school.

"I had made $4000 after my sophomore year, so I just bought a Fly America plane ticket, which let me visit something like 12 cities," he says. "I would rent cars and sleep in the backseat."

Despite all the difficulties associated with going to school in what Alaskans call "the lower 48," the limitations of the Alaskan school system prompt them to travel far from home. The state government has traditionally recognized this necessity by loaning its migrant students approximately $5000 apiece toward each year's tuition, says Anchorage resident Scott Hunt '89.

However, Hunt also notes that the state now demands repayment on the loan, although it used to observe a "forgiveness" clause that wiped out students' debts if they lived in the state for five years or more following graduation.

The state clearly hopes to recover its most talented scholars after their college careers, and some of Harvard's Alaskans say they feel an obligation to their native state.

Hunt and Costello, both government majors, say they think they ought to go back. "As a Gov major, there is a good opportunity to work in Alaska," Hunt says. "Under the right kind of leadership, it could lose its backward reputation. That's what excites me--what would bring me back."

"The state is in a position to become a leader among the states--if for no other reason than its [natural] resources," he says.

But Araoz says Alaska's depressed economy and limited job market might keep him from returning to the state. And Thompson agrees. To further a prospective career in songwriting he plans to move to Los Angeles after graduation. "I want to give this civilization bit a chance," he says.

Most of Harvard's Alaskans say they are undecided about their plans for the future, but one of them isn't. Pananen knows he is going back.

"Definitely," the former trapper insists. "Alaska's the best. It's hard to explain. It's kind of...a mood."