Summer Programs Cull Busy Students

Chelsey J. Forbess ’07 is a pre-med student at Harvard College, but, unlike many of her classmates, she won’t be spending her Friday and Saturday nights during the academic year cooped up in the library, cramming for two of the College’s most grueling courses, the Organic Chemistry sequence of Chem 20 and 30.

Instead, Forbess is spending the summer months focusing her attention on Chemistry S-20ab (and only Chemistry S-20ab), a course offered by Harvard Summer School that compresses the year-long organic chemistry sequence into an intense eight-week regimen.

“With a class that’s as time-consuming as this one...I think it’s easier when you’re only taking one class,” Forbess says.

Each year, hundreds of high-school and college students from across the nation and around the world descend on Harvard’s grassy campus in Cambridge to attend the Summer School, forking over more than $4,000—the equivalent of an entire semester’s tuition at some state schools—to take a course in Harvard’s hallowed halls.

The remainder of the Summer School students are composed of Harvard College undergraduates, who, during term time, could take equivalent courses for no extra charge, but still opt to pay thousands over the summer to sit in the same classrooms—although often with less distinguished professors at the lectern and non-Harvard students sitting in adjacent desks.

The Summer School’s offerings—which range from introductory humanities courses on Bob Dylan to Forbess’ 26-hours-per-week chemistry class—attract students, according to Summer School Dean of Students Christopher Queen, for reasons “quite personal and varied.”

Many, like Forbess, attend the Summer School so that they can devote the entirety of their days to one, sometimes two, difficult courses that, if taken during term-time, would eat away large chunks of their time, stunting their academic, extracurricular, and social lives (not to mention sleep schedules).

Other students are looking to play catch-up—perhaps they decided to take pre-med classes too late in their college careers, or changed their concentration at the last minute.

And then there are students who attend the Summer School with hopes of raising their GPAs, because they believe both that they can devote more time to their coursework than during the school year and that they find themselves competing against high-school and non-Harvard College students.

The Summer School provides College students with an opportunity to achieve their Ivy-League goals in what is often seen as a more relaxed-than-Ivy setting.

As assistant dean at the Summer School Robert Neugeboren puts it, College students “have a better chance of doing better” in Summer School classes than they do in courses offered during the year.

WORK ALL DAY

Brandon J. Chiu ’06 is the captain of Harvard’s tennis team. He also plans to apply to medical school after college—which means he has an intense diet of math and science on top of his Core classes and the courses required by his concentration in economics.

Chiu, who decided to become pre-med as a junior in college, says the summer provides him with a fertile opportunity to achieve his academic goals without completely sacrificing his athletic ambitions.

“I want to spend more time with the team during the year,” he says, explaining why he decided to enroll in Chem S-20ab this summer. “I think in general, Summer School is a bit easier because you’re only taking one class.”

Forbess adds that the course head, Lecturer on Chemistry and Chemical Biology Garry Procter, takes pains to ensure that all the students understand his lectures.

“I think [the professor] tries to...explain things very thoroughly so that anyone could catch on. I don’t think he assumes that everyone is a super-smart Harvard student,” she adds.

Like Chiu, Jason S. Andersen ’05—who is also enrolled in Chem S-20ab—chose to become pre-med a bit late in the game.

“I didn’t start [the pre-med requirements] until the spring of my junior year,” says Andersen, who graduated this past June but still has one pre-med requirement—organic chemistry—to fulfill before he can apply to medical schools.

Chem S-20ab has, with 257 students, the largest enrollment of any course at the Summer School. In fact, it has more than twice as many students as the next largest course, Philosophy S-4, “Introduction to Philosophy.”

But unlike that philosophy course, Chem S-20ab comes with a prerequisite that precludes enrollment by many high schoolers—as well as a warning in the course description that it is “not recommended for high school students.”

Neugeboren says that one of the courses he teaches, Economics S-1010, “Microeconomic Theory,” which is the summer counterpart to Economics 1010a and requires a calculus-level entrance exam, has no high-school students among its 11 members.

The Summer School Registrar Susan E. McGee says that her office does not tally how many Harvard College students are enrolled in each course, so exact enrollment statistics are not available.

MAKING THE GRADE

The perception that Chem S-20ab is less stressful when taken during the summer aside, some students say the course’s structure make it easier to excel than in the term-time version.

Unlike in Chem 20 and Chem 30, where the letter scale is used for every assignment, the quizzes and labs in Chem S-20ab are graded as satifactory or unsatisfactory.

And Forbess says that the mean grade for the first weekly test was a 92.4.

James C. Lee ’06, a Chemistry concentrator who is a lab teaching fellow for Chemistry S-20ab, says the course was “a little easier in grading” to compensate for the compression of a year’s worth of content into two months.

“If I’d taken it over the summer, I would have gotten better grades. But I have no regrets about taking it during the year,” Lee says, adding that engaging the material for a full year was the best way to go about learning it.

Enrolling in summer school to boost one’s GPA is evidenced even more outside of the realm of challenging quantitative and language courses.

“I approached [my Summer School class] with the intention of doing better here” than during the year, says Andy J. Asaro ’06, who adds that the prospect of boosting his grade point average “definitely factored in” to his decision to enroll over the summer.

Asaro is taking English S-180, “Twentieth Century American Poetry,” in order to fulfill a Literature concentration requirement.

Asaro estimates that in his 15-student course, more than half of the students he is competing against are high-schoolers.

“The workload is so light. I do about two hours a week for this class,” says Asaro. Although the other students are no less intelligent, Asaro says that some were less “well-versed in poetry,” making it easier for him to stand out.

Whereas organic chemistry is a specific course that all pre-med students must take, most other Summer School offerings are humanities courses that are not universal requirements—and are filled with high school students.

Jeffrey B. Reardon ’07 is one of the 91 students registered for Psychology S-1, “Introduction to Psychology.” In his 20-person section, all but two of the students are high-schoolers, he says.

Although getting a high grade was not Reardon’s motivating factor in taking the course, he calls the potential to boost his GPA “an added bonus.”

“If I’m competing against high school juniors, I definitely have an advantage,” says Reardon, who is also a Summer School proctor. He calls the 300 total pages of reading outside lecture “the lowest I’ve ever had for a course” at Harvard.

The more than 100 Summer School proctors all have the opportunity to sign up for one course free of charge.

“There well may be a perception that [Harvard College students] can engineer easy courses in the summer,” says Neugeboren, the assistant dean at the Summer School.

But he calls the high-schoolers taking classes alongside College students “academically aggressive.”

“I don’t think the high school students provide that kind of cushion,” Neugeboren adds.

—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.