Discover Life on Your Own Despite Plethora of Advice

The summer before my first year, my mailbox was predictably flooded with paper. Between curriculum guides and rooming forms and unsolicited letters from the German department, it looked like Harvard was a primary culprit for deforestation. Along with all that paper came an abundance of something I didn't expect: advice. Everyone from Crimson Key to the Harvard Independent had wisdom to impart: Compete in intramurals. Be open-minded. Make new friends. Take German.

When I arrived at school in September, the advice just kept on coming, now in the form of actual conversations with upperclass students. Our prefects assured us that they were there to tell us "anything we needed to know about Harvard," and students from campus groups would routinely stop by our entryway to introduce themselves and offer to answer our questions. My second week, I got an e-mail from a junior who introduced herself as the niece of the neighbor of my orthodontist's assistant. Any questions, she assured me, feel free to ask.

All this help bolstered my confidence. I was in ahead of the game, and I assured myself that I would heed the timeless wisdom handed down from upperclass students. I promised myself I would learn from others' mistakes and would avoid making any of my own. It looked good in theory. But I've never been good at trusting other people's advice.

People told me to avoid Widener for as long as I could, and I got lost in the stacks sometime in October. They suggested taking class location into consideration during shopping week, and I spend a semester sprinting from Boylston Hall to a seminar at Hilles every Monday. They warned me against dating people in my entryway, against taking early classes, against eating the sweet and sour pork at Annenberg. I did it all.

After 300 some-odd years and hundreds of Crimson scrutinies, everything there is to know about living at this institution is known. Thousands of students have taken the classes and lived in the dorms and taken the red line to Park Street. Upperclass students dutifully pass the wisdom down to first-years, supposedly doing them a great service by allowing them to learn from other people's mistakes. But any new student who blindly follows everyone else's advice will likely have a rather boring time.

I had a rough-and-tumble first year, probably more so than most. Maybe it would have been easier if I had religiously followed all that advice I got last summer and neatly mapped out a plan. But I feel like I packed more into a year that many of my classmates did, just because I figured out my path as I went along. I survived, and this fall I'm blustering right back in through the gates and looking for new rocks to overturn.

All the brochures say that a great deal of education takes place outside the classroom, and I couldn't agree more. First year students learn a lot more by stumbling around a bit--it not completely in the dark, at least in a little shade.

Here's a bit more unsolicited advice: forget everything anyone has told you about Harvard. Instead of coming here already knowing everything, try to discover things by yourself. Chalk your mistakes up to life experience and collect some good stories. Your experiences will come in handy when you give in to the urge to tell the Class of 2004 exactly what they're getting into.

--Jonelle M. Lonergan '02 is a reporter and staff writer for The Crimson.