The Trend is Nigh: Teaching the "Fellows" How to Dress

As Harvard students, we often commend ourselves on the diversity of our personal interests and our shared inability to shake addictions to mood elevating prescription drugs.

But in doing this, we myopically ignore the most beleaguered and varied population on our campus—Teaching Fellows. Or, as I like to call them, “TFs.”

TFs come in many different forms, but they all have the same job: teaching a crap-load of thankless material to a room full of phenomenally annoying 18-year-olds.

Some have come to terms with this fact and are extremely jolly in consequence. Others need to jealously blog about how much they hated you, your papers, and your $500,000 book deal. It really depends.

But more importantly, TFs, in general, have a very distinct and quirky sense of fashion, which differentiates them from the undergraduate population. Though a gap of merely five to seven years separates the nubile undergraduate from the average woebegone TF, it is very hard to mistake one for the other.

Thus, for interested parties, I have codified TF fashion, in order to both celebrate their Banana Republic fabulousness and inform the surrounding populace about how to identify them on the street. You know, so as not to complain about them in their presence.

Type 1: The “Your first language was definitely not English, but you are so freaking metrosexual that I love you anyway” TF.

These TFs are, in general, very lovable and nice, especially when they take pity on you because you cannot understand the concept that they just explained via diagrams.

For some reason, foreign TFs are the best at wearing tight clothing. If you spot a stray man-boob exposed through a spandex t-shirt, or jodhpurs that snugly encase a pair of highly toned calves, you’re probably looking at one of these specimens.

Type 2: The “You are wearing a linen tunic, but I admire how you are a down-to-earth, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer feminist” TF.

These TFs are usually women and usually in the humanities, and their distinguishing feature, it seems, is their ability to wear linen at inappropriate times.

For those who do not know, linen is a summer fabric. But these TFs wear a black linen skirt with a gray linen tunic in the middle of January. In order to make up for the wild impracticality of all this, they then decide to pair the ensemble with clogs.

If I didn’t know these women were 27-year-old grad students with an abiding interest the lesser-known works of George Eliot, I would think they were 70-year-old migrant workers in a particularly harrowing Steinbeck novel. But they aren’t. They are really doing their dissertation on interior space in the plays of Aphra Behn.

Type 3: The “You went to the University of Wisconsin, so you clearly hate me” TF.

These TFs are the most proudly stylish of the bunch. They are usually outfitted in “very unique” items from thrift stores or, more commonly, in Express pants.

In general, these TFs are better at traveling to third-world countries, better at smoking cigars and much quicker to point out your particular flaws than you are. Through all this effort, however, they stalwartly wear uncompromising, square-toed shoes and consistently try to get their students engaged with learning through projects. No one understands these projects, of course, but they are supposed to be “fun.” You must admire their gumption.



If one must dress like a TF, or at least know how to spot them, I offer:

THREE TIPS FOR TRENDY TF’S

1) Don’t wear makeup. It ruins the pale bags under one’s eyes.

2) Become really interested in the concept of going to graduate school for nine years in order to eventually teach other annoying cretins at a community college and live on a pittance.

3) Every time you think you are dressed like Ricky Martin on TRL, compound the effect by putting on a pair of thick black glasses. You will get girls this way.

—Staff writer Rebecca M. Harrington can be reached at harring@fas.harvard.edu.