Campus Connoisseurs: The Inside Scoop to Life at Harvard

So, you made it into Hahvahd.

You may have already taken the tour. You've seen the Statue of the Three Lies, and maybe you even rubbed the foot, poor thing. You've talked to the endlessly cheerful folks in Byerly Hall. And chances are, if you got in, you will end up coming here (last year, about 80 percent of admitted students did).

Before you decide for sure, though, you need to delve deeper than the glossy brochures and the shiny Harvard name. A Harvard diploma can open doors, but if you're not happy in the process, then you might as well have gone to Yale. (Almost.)

So to help you make an informed choice, here's the real Harvard, complete with mediocre teaching fellows, intermittent social life and weird naked rituals. But there's also amazing housing, absorbing extracurriculars and fascinating fellow students.

Here are the facts. You decide.

Academic Life

You might expect that academics would be the pinnacle of your Harvard career. After all, it can't be the dining halls' savory baked tofu or the glorious architecture of Canaday Hall that win Harvard top honors in the U.S. News & World Report survey every year.

The dirty little secret about Harvard is that you can read Aristotle anywhere in the world for $8.99 and the price of a bookmark. You can even find someone to teach it to you who's bright, funny and doesn't have to jet off to the State Department every afternoon.

But that's not to say there aren't real advantages to Harvard's academic life. You might not be able to track down Af-Am guru Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. or former Reagan economic boss Martin S. Feldstein '61 in person, but you can sit in on their lectures. (Though why you'd want to sit in on Marty's lectures is beyond us.)

And there are a wealth of professors you haven't heard of yet, but you'll come to relish: Helen H. Vendler and Marjorie Garber in English, Werner Sollors in Afro-American Studies, Robert Coles '50 in psychology.

The amount of personal contact you'll have with them depends on how hard you're willing to try, though. Most professors, and a few students, claim that office hours are a treat and doors are always open. But most undergrads are too busy--or intimidated--to even bother.

Most courses taught by superstars are huge Core classes, some regularly enroll about a thousand students. A Core course is like watching a lecture on T.V., but with uncomfortable seats and lousy audio. In these classes, the real teaching is done by teaching fellows (T.F.s), who range from the superb to the non-English-speaking. Shop around.

Other times you'll find yourself in seminars with only a handful of other students. These can be excellent, unless you haven't cracked the binding on your overpriced books from the Coop. Believe it or not, students can be notoriously unprepared for class, choosing one more slice at Tommy's House of Pizza rather than reading those last hundred pages of Bleak House.

Across the board, advising is a crap shoot. Some lucky souls land the jackpot, scoring an assistant dean with time on her hands, but don't count on anything more than a confused graduate student. Research the labyrinthine academic bureaucracy for yourself and start thinking soon. At the end of your first year, you'll have to choose a concentration ("majors" are just too plebian).

Harvard is best known for its largest departments, economics and government, popular with the Adidas set (they don't call 'em gov jocks for nothing). These departments are vast and impersonal but have blessedly lax requirements. An alternate route is the make-Mom-cry concentration--Folklore and Mythology, anyone?

Science concentrators are among the hardest workers here--and aren't shy about sharing how much time they spend in the library or the lab (beware of intro courses that pit you against the Westinghouse Finalist in the grade curve wars). Interdisciplinary choices like History and Literature and Social Studies win praise for their freedom, but with you-can't-hide tutorials, be sure you looove Lamont Library.

The Active Life

Of course, it's not as important what you study as what you do. The lifeblood of Harvard is its extracurricular universe; with more than 250 independent student groups, everyone gets to be president.

There are those students who plunge their very souls into their extracurriculars. (We at The Crimson wouldn't know anything about that.) One minute you have perfectly normal roommates, and the next they've vanished to produce the Hasty Pudding Show (Harvard's annual drag extravaganza), plan cultural fairs for the Asian American Association (the largest group on campus) or dress up as stags for midnight rituals of the Science Fiction Association (if they're into that sort of thing).

Some of the oldest, most time-consuming activities generate their own characteristic "types": the smooth-talking future senators of the Institute of Politics, the do-gooders at Phillips Brooks House Association, Harvard's umbrella community service agency, and the oft-maligned windbags of the Undergraduate Council.

Publications range from liberal (Perspective) to conservative (the Salient) and useful (the Let's Go travel guide series) to pointless (the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine).

However, even though Harvard has a $13 billion endowment salted away, most student groups are forced to make do with pennies. Many students were outraged when the administration announced plans earlier this year to rebuild a historic ornamental tower on Memorial Hall rather than a desperately needed student center.

Sports teams have little trouble getting money, though. Surprisingly, Harvard even has a few good teams. The women's hockey team won a national championship this year, and men's tennis includes the best player in the country. But only a few of the rest of us actually make it to games--if you want to join a large and enthusiastic bleacher crowd, try the Big Ten. Athletes' facilities across the river are fantastic, but here in Cambridge, pungent crowds and dated equipment fill gyms used by students and the ubiquitous "Harvard affiliates," the MAC and the QRAC.

Harvard devotes its money to collecting not brand-new treadmills but timeworn treasures. There are lots of benefits to Harvard you may never get around to using (the Gutenberg Bible?), but you'll feel vaguely good just knowing they're there. Go see a former dictator speak at the Kennedy School of Government. So many world leaders come you simply won't have time for any who lead countries smaller than France.

The Social Life

But forget lectures--the question you want answered is whether the social life is as terrible as you've heard.

Legend has it that Harvard is inhabited by a tribe of pasty-faced "former" geeks for whom social life consists of reading Nietzsche into the wee hours and obsessively checking e-mail. That isn't true, of course...or at least, it isn't entirely true.

Social life begins at home, first in randomly assigned entryways, and from sophomore year on in up to 16-person blocking groups (the core group of friends with whom you receive your Housing assignment). For students in a rush, grab-and-go lunches in Loker Commons are the norm, but it's not so unusual either to linger over an empty tray in your House dining hall through three cycles of conversation.

Don't worry, Harvard does have parties, at least on the weekend. Extracurricular groups and House committees plan dances (ranging from the tragically lame Bare as You Dare to the pleasantly lame Leverett '80s Dance). The calendar is sprinkled with formals, especially in the spring--look for the Eliot House Fete, which features chocolate-covered strawberries and swing dancing.

Room parties are often fun, particularly if you know the hosts; other times they're just loud, sweaty and invaded by the cops at 1 a.m. when the search for alcohol moves elsewhere (check out the Crimson Sports Grille). But for the athlete elite and the first-year women who love them, final clubs, exclusive all-male artifacts from the Roosevelt era--either Roosevelt--offer late-night festivities.

Interrupting the routine are a few marquee social events. The Adams House Masquerade on Halloween weekend succeeds in drawing costumed crowds, but good luck elbowing your way through the door. Though a shadow of its former self, the Harvard-Yale Game in November is the only time you'll see an outpouring of school spirit. Head of the Charles, a regatta weekend in the fall, is more fun for the legions of tourists than the students they inconvenience. And don't be fooled by the excitement of pre-frosh weekend--it's when the admissions brochure in all of us comes out.

Harvard Square is a magnet for young people in boring suburbs. The Pit People are only the most colorful example--they're the flock of pierced, dyed, leather-clad youths next to the T stop.

The Square is actually fairly cosmopolitan, with an abundance of restaurants and shops. It's also pricey and corporate--Abercrombie & Fitch is planning to open a branch across from the Coop next year. "Good Will Hunting" hangout Au Bon Pain and the ubiquitous Store 24 and CVS are downscale retreats.

If you're looking for students in their preferred element, though, try the banks of the Charles River, Harvard's most beautiful vista on warm days. But this is not Stanford--Cambridge weather is spastic, and the occasional summery spats in the dreariest, snowiest months are a cruel taunt.

The snow is most oppressive if you live in the dreaded Quad. The three Quad Houses are roomy, clean, attractive...and 15 minutes from the rest of campus. Quadlings will quickly bond while waiting at shuttle stops.

The Quad at least offers an element of solidarity that the River Houses have lacked since randomization in 1995. Harvard students used to pick their upperclass digs, and each House attracted a different personality (artsy, athletic, elitist). Now, Houses are little more than ordinary dorms, albeit particularly nice ones, most with amenities like fireplaces and hardwood floors.

If Harvard students are too lazy to walk to the Quad, imagine how rarely they get to Boston. We've heard Boston is a fabulous city, with museums, concerts, clubs and great restaurants. Too bad you'll never go.

The real world does occasionally intrude on campus, though. After a several-year lull in student protest, activism roared back this spring when a three-part rally descended on University Hall calling for a living wage, an end to sweatshop-produced goods and sterner protections against rape (two students were recently dismissed from the College after pleading guilty to sexual assault). Curmudgeonly professor Harvey C. Mansfield '53 called the protest "idiotic," but most are glad to see the student body shedding its recent apathy.

Another longtime controversy is the future of Radcliffe, a former undergraduate "college" that announced earlier this week it will become an Institute for Advanced Study. The Radcliffe Union of Students fears that the loss of the "college" will mean less attention to women's concerns on campus, but the jury's still out. One thing's clear: if you came to Harvard-Radcliffe because of its so-called "dual citizenship" for women, you might want to think again.

Many activists are also frustrated by the lack of faculty diversity. Part of the problem is Harvard's missing tenure track--most assistant faculty members will spend less time at Harvard than you will.

Students themselves are an incredibly varied lot. This is not your father's Harvard--while prep school alums are common, they no longer exclusively run the show. Harvard undergrads come from every state and increasingly from abroad--the international student population is sizeable and growing.

But one thing virtually every Harvard student has in common is ambition. This is the Type A capital of the world--students are driven in their academics, their extracurriculars, even their social life. ("We have to go party now!")

Even the debauchery is ambitious--during Primal Scream, the night before final exams, hordes of undergraduate streakers run naked around the Yard, often in sub-zero weather. No joke.

But when you peel away the intensity, your fellow Harvard men and women are surprisingly normal. You're just as likely to bond with your peers this weekend over "Saved by the Bell" and Molly Ringwald as philosophy or politics.

In a way, that's what your Harvard career will be all about--balancing Shakespearean sonnets and "Sixteen Candles." Don't forget--Harvard is still college. You're here to have a good time, and you probably will.

But don't buy everything you hear in Byerly Hall.