A Fresh Start for Freshman Week

A good breakfast starts a good day; a great week kicks off a great four years. Currently, the Calendar of Opening Days, as freshman week is formally called, is designed to get the formalities out of the way and to encourage interaction between freshmen. But freshman week is not quite sufficient in helping freshmen to jump-start their Harvard careers. As Associate Dean of the College Thomas A. Dingman ’67 takes over as Dean of Freshmen this fall, we commend the College and the Freshman Orientation Advisory Committee (FOAC) for reexamining freshman week, and we offer a few suggestions of how to make freshman week—and, perhaps, the entire freshman year—more useful in acclimating new students to Harvard. As it stands now, freshman week provides enough free time and structured social activities to allow freshmen to socialize with each other. But the week lacks academic advising for those interested in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as sufficient opportunities for contact between freshmen and upperclassmen.

Some entering students are squarely decided on their future concentration, but the majority is vacillating between two, three, or any number of options. With the goal of exposing freshmen to the philosophies and requirements of their concentrations, the mathematics and science departments hold a joint advising session, and we encourage that the humanities and social sciences departments hold similar events. To assist students who are already more focused in their interests, or students who are interested in learning more about a particular field, we also ask each department to hold its own smaller open house where both instructors and concentrators could provide an overview of their fields. Finally, we encourage wider advising during freshman week for students who are entirely undecided on even a broad field of study. Before their first shopping period, freshmen should have an inkling of where to start in Harvard’s voluminous course catalog.

While the current freshman week schedule provides ample time for first-years to become acquainted with their classmates, there are virtually no opportunities—short of fleeting moments at the activities fair—for meaningful interaction with upperclassmen. Most importantly, the advising first-years receive in choosing their first semester courses is often lacking; proctors who are new to Harvard and many off-campus advisors have no more knowledge of Harvard’s courses than do the first-years themselves. Informal academic advice from upperclassmen would nicely supplement formal advising during the first week, not to mention the fact that upperclassmen would be able to give freshmen a general orientation to Harvard that no ice cream bash or meeting with administrators could provide. To this end, freshmen, perhaps with their entryways, could meet upperclassmen for lunch in a residential house one day during freshman week.

Save for scattered extracurricular activities, there is traditionally little interaction between freshmen and upperclassmen. If the College is serious about breaking this barrier—as the Harvard College Curricular Review proposals for increased peer advising and hopefully abortive noises about formally affiliating freshmen with residential houses suggests—it would be wise to encourage upperclassmen-freshmen interaction from the moment freshmen set foot in the Yard. However, it shouldn’t end when freshman week does. The Freshman Dean’s Office (FDO) should consider expanding the Prefect Program to several prefects per entryway, which may in turn require increased publicity around the time prefect applications are due. And prefects should be encouraged, if not required, to be on campus during freshman week in order to provide friendly faces and convenient advice early on.

It is incumbent on the FDO and the Office the Dean of the College to make the necessary changes: House Committees are overburdened already, the Undergraduate Council will not be in session that early in the year, and the Crimson Key Society’s primary goal is to encourage socialization within the freshman class. Change must come from the top. That’s why the FOAC’s recent survey of current freshmen about freshman week is a good start. By incorporating more upperclassmen-freshmen contact and broader advising, the FOAC will ensure that freshman week lives up to the tall task of introducing students to the cornucopia of resources and opportunities available at this university.