It's All Downhill From Here

Dear First-Years,

When your class arrived on campus last week, you were inundated with events meant to prepare you for the four years ahead at Harvard—the Harvard University Police Department safety video, an activities fair and field trips into Boston and Cambridge. Yet nothing could be more misleading about the next four years of college than your booklet of the 100 Freshman Seminars. The ever-expanding Freshman Seminar Program now includes tiny classes taught by our provost (on addiction), our former Dean of the Faculty (on antibiotics), and our president (on globalization). Prominent scholars at the Medical, Design and Kennedy schools also lead seminars. But even without the big names, the program also offers you seminars with a range of talented post-docs and professors who’ve done fascinating research and teach well—a batch of courses that makes any upperclass student jealous.

First-years, the good news is that you have 100 gems before you for the taking. The bad news is that it may be a couple of years before you’ll get another experience anything like the ones available on that freshman seminar list. Take advantage of them while you can—the rest of your tenure at Harvard could easily include many large lecture classes where the professor doesn’t know your name. You will have to take tests for which you simply spit back learned material instead of being forced to think on your own, discuss with your peers or do original research.

Of course, many small seminars pop up in our curriculum, although they are reserved for a select few. Those of us in small concentrations with an emphasis on one-on-one learning—I’m in history and literature—have myriad opportunities to get to know professors, to sit around a small table and debate and to write 20-page papers on original topics with original research. But many of my upperclass friends in larger concentrations lament that they haven’t had a small discussion class since their freshman seminar.

So until smaller classes are more widely available across concentrations and undergraduate years, master the system—seek out as many seminars and conference courses as you can. Before shopping period ends, look through the whole course catalogue. You’re not yet locked into any concentration; now is your time to take a seminar in a discipline you’ve never studied. You’ll have plenty of time to fulfill your Core requirements after you’ve set your concentration—why load up on Core classes your first year at Harvard when you have the unique chance to explore? Don’t be fooled by professors who parade the stage with bravado and with a joke at every turn. Once Siegfried and Roy pack up the show, you’ll still be left with the reading, exams and papers that will define the course. And despair not if economics or government is your calling. Those who wind up in large concentrations find ways out of the monotony of vast lecture hall after vast lecture hall. Get a citation in French if you’re a biochemistry concentrator. Become an expert in another field—enough of an expert that you can get into English graduate-level seminars to spice up your physics concentration requirements—because Larry Summers will be too busy to put up with you more than once.

—Claire A. Pasternack is a news editor.