Finding A Different Classroom

The Harvard career of Jeffrey E. Pierce ’04, a goatee-wearing Adamsian with an impish smile, can be divided into two distinct phases.

For his first two years, he was known as a jokester and a drinker—and a sender of copious drunken e-mails to unwitting friends and blockmates.

Sophomore year was his “drinking year,” Pierce says, to such an extent that he pre-programmed a list of friends’ e-mail addresses into his computer so that when he typed in “drunk” he could instantaneously send them all his intoxicated ruminations.

Once—only once, he says—he woke up naked on a couch after a particularly wild night.

But after a junior year spent abroad, working in a Moroccan orphanage and backpacking through Europe, an entirely different persona emerged—one passionate about teaching the less fortunate.

He cut back on drinking, wrestled with some long-standing concerns about his religion and made teaching his top priority.

Friends distinguish between Pierce’s two college personas by referring to his party-animal alter-ego of freshman and sophomore years as “Pre-Moroccan Jeff”—or “PMJ” for short.

But whether in his “before” or “after” stage, Pierce’s passion in college has always been working with kids.

Even during “PMJ,” he participated in BRYE, a mentoring program for Boston-area refugees in which he’d spend every Saturday hanging out with his mentee (“They’re wonderful kids, just the sweetest,” Pierce says).

Pierce was also a member of UTEP, Harvard’s teacher training program, spending this past semester waking up at 5 a.m. each day to make it to South Boston in time to teach high school history classes.

While his international experience left him with a more sober outlook on life, Pierce’s zeal for helping children is the tie that binds his pre- and post-Moroccan selves.

‘PRE-MOROCCAN JEFF’

A native of Columbus, Ohio, Pierce jokes that he was the “token legacy” in his blocking group because his father is the alumni interview chair for central Ohio.

But Pierce claims he had it far from easy—he says he had a very difficult transition into college.

“I was dating a girl back home, and I pulled out of being more social,” he says. “It took me a long time to get out of home.”

Academics weren’t keeping his interest at Harvard either, Pierce explains.

“I came here knowing how to write a paper. As long as you turn in things and know what they are supposed to look like, you can’t get a bad grade in history classes,” he says. “I’ve never had a professor, a semester, or a course where I was like, ‘Wow!’”

Pierce got involved with BRYE his freshman year, even though he spent every other say of the week “goofing off,” but he says working with kids was “something I always did.”

“I was blowing off steam. It was fun,” he says. “It all comes back to not thinking studies were enough for me.”

Pierce was a summer school proctor after his sophomore year, but he dropped the one class he was taking and became disinterested and distant.

“I needed to get away. I shut myself off,” Pierce says. “I needed not to be in school.”

FINDING ANSWERS

A stroke of good luck found Pierce the answer to his disillusionment with college.

A friend of his parents’ was a pastor from Boston who had traveled to Morocco to be a pastor for an expatriate church there that catered to an international community.

Pierce’s parents told him that the pastor also worked for an orphanage in which one could work for room and board.

“They tossed it out in passing, kind of like a care,” Pierce says. “[I thought,] I’ve got to do this.”

And so he went. When Pierce describes Morocco, he can only summon up the adjectives “awesome” and “great.”

“From winters that don’t stop until the beginning of May to sun in February,” Pierce remembers. “Beautiful climate and countryside. The middle of nowhere. Mountains. Simple.”

His responsibilities at the orphanage were not time-intensive (“moving a pile of dirt with a wheelbarrow”), and Pierce says he spent a lot of time reading.

“It was nice to do something other than study,” Pierce says.

After working at the orphanage, Pierce jumped continents.

He backpacked around Europe for a month, hopping from hostel to hostel, before finding a home in England at a Christian study center where he stayed for a month.

It was there that Pierce says his “growing up” happened, adding the appropriate emphasis with finger quotes.

Pierce says he had been frustrated with his Presbyterian upbringing before his time in England.

“I had a lot of doubts and questions that pissed me off about religion,” Pierce says. “It was [like] the Co-op with religion. It was a stimulating time, where the transformation happened.”

“I learned a lot of myself and Christianity and reevaluated [it],” he adds. “Instead of blaming Jesus Christ or myself, I came to see the bigger picture. I was able to step back.”

Pierce says he had time to think while he was abroad and that he returned home more laid-back than when he left.

“When you’re here in class life’s going so fast and you can’t reflect that much,” he says. “Damn papers are killer. They own you...I worked out all the frustration I had with school.”

TEACH THEM WELL

After Pierce returned from Morocco for his senior year, his teaching responsibilities intensified.

During the last semester of UTEP, every student is required to teach classes. Pierce taught 10th grade world history and 11th grade U.S. history at Excel High School in South Boston. He says the school never desegregated itself, and it has a lot of racial tension and “a lot of need.”

“From February 2 to May 14, I was Mr. Pierce,” he says, adding that effective teaching was an “amazingly difficult thing to learn.”

“I had so many students who just gave up,” he says. “It’s about the tone you set. Certain problems you can avoid if you set up fair discipline.”

Pierce says this past semester’s teaching shifted his schedule. His roommates would go out to party on a weeknight, but Pierce would tell them he had school the next day, for which he had to wake up at 5 or 6 a.m. And he was still mentoring on Saturdays.

As for next year, Pierce will be teaching high school history at an international School in Hong Kong—a position he obtained with the help of the Office of Career Services.

He says after his one-year contract in Hong Kong, he will definitely teach, but where is anyone’s guess.

“Maybe I’ll pick a big city in the Midwest or South and set up shop there and teach,” Pierce says. “I wanted to get out of the States while I still could, while I don’t have rent to pay, or car bills.”

When Pierce looks back on his almost four years in Cambridge, his friends are not the only ones who distinguished PMJ from his present status.

“I’ve come a long way from freshman year,” he admits.

Pierce’s appearance bears witness to his college-years’ transformation.

He sports a hooded sweatshirt and a goatee, staples of the scruffy college student.

But he also wears a braided leather bracelet and beaded necklace from Morocco, presents from a friend there who Pierce says liked him and respected him even though he was a devout Muslim and Pierce was in the process of questioning religion.

The red and gray colors of the leather (Ohio State colors) have faded away, and the leather is worn and brownish black.

But for Pierce, they will be a lasting symbol of the profound impact his Morocco trip had on the way he views himself and his Harvard experience.

—Staff writer Hana R. Alberts can be reached at alberts@fas.harvard.edu.