Doing the Orientation Week Dance

Much like a high-school reunion, speaking in public and a first junior-high dance, Orientation Week is much better experienced after it is over. The unique combination of anxiety, freedom, novelty, social awkwardness and a new beginning spell nine days (from move-in until the first day of classes) of a terrifyingly mixed blessing. Only now, two years after my first week, do I look back at that time with nostalgia and wistfulness.

Unfortunately, as a first-year, I was too lost in the trees of moving suitcases, buying supplies and taking placement tests to see the forest of the only time period of my Harvard career (at least until Senior Week) devoted entirely to students. My days were packed with unpacking. Unloading my bags and retrieving boxes proved to be quite stressful. Getting my new computer from the TPC was a trial by fire while trying to set up my network connection bedeviled even my computer-literate dormmates. Lines at The Coop houseware store were reminiscent of Russian bread queues; the presence there of excited parents comparing different styles of ironing boards worked wonders on my homesickness. (My parents didn't trek out from California to move me in.)

The placement tests were no breeze either. It didn't feel like I was starting exactly on the right foot when I began taking exams not four days after my arrival in Cambridge. Though I now realize that the majority of them were the only examinations I would take at Harvard that wouldn't really count, they nonetheless felt like AP exams at the time. Yet even around the tests lies an aura of nostalgia. I still remember discussing with a new friend, later to be a Quincy House roommate, several questions from the first QRR test I was to fail. En route to lunch, we had a heated, if good-spirited, argument about standard deviations.

Meeting fellow classmates posed the biggest challenge and, in retrospect, the best opportunity of any Orientation Week experience. It was a thrilling mixture of nervousness and excitement to meet scores of new people in nine days. ("Where from? " "Phoenix. " "Oh, I've been through Arizona before. " "What dorm? " "Hollis. " "Really? Do you know this guy Ray lives in Stoughton? " "What prospective major? " "Biochem. " "Sure! I took some physics in high school! ") Only weeks afterward did I realize that most of the people with whom I had the typical conversation would slowly drift out of my life, though even now I still say hello to many of those most shallow of acquaintances.

Never again would I have the opportunity to reinvent myself at an event like the ice cream social; there will never be another informal, all-first-year dance where I could really let loose in a stress-free, school-free environment; and I will never again see a First-year Union table of entirely new faces with whom I could begin a conversation that would range from college football to language placement and to work-out machines at the still-new-seeming MAC.

Two years after my own Orientation Week, I can view the latest comings and goings with an objective eye, colored only by a vague sense of jealousy. First-years don't know how good they have it during Orientation Week, nor will they know it until afterward. As in that first junior-high dance, they tentatively step onto the parquet floor, nervously approach their classmates and ask them what activities they did in high school (well, the metaphor breaks down after a while). Only once the Orientation Week dance is over do they realize how much fun they had had.

I suppose that is simply the nature of the beast, though. We get so caught up in what we're doing, both during Orientation Week and throughout our years at the College, that only during the summers do we realize how remarkable (hopefully) a year it had been. But while this may be true of most Harvard experiences, even of all novel undertakings, it is most poignant during the first nine days we spend here, tiptoeing around, looking for a building called Vanserg. The entirety of the school seems to hit us at once, while we are still trying our shoes: friends, course choices, tests, roommates, mass-produced food.

Perhaps the expression "You don't know what you've got until it's gone" ought to be replaced by "You don't know what you've got until someone else has it. " I only hope, though don't expect, that the Class of 2001 can enjoy its Orientation Week as much as I did.

Michael M. Rosen '99, a Crimson editor, will be moving into Quincy House on Wednesday.