Freshmen: Don’t Read This Column

Each year, Harvard’s undergraduate admissions officers set out to attract the most accomplished, ambitious, and driven high school students in the world. Year after year they succeed, with very few exceptions. And if you are reading this column, chances are that you are one of them, which is all well and good, but for one little hiccup—so is each and every one of your classmates.

Look around the dining hall, friends, and behold your competition. For those of you who intend to start down the path to the rest of your life now (and why wait, really?), you’d better start finding ways to contend with the massive pool of talent in which you’re presently immersed and in which, if you aren’t careful, you could wind up submerged.

If you came to Harvard not to build a resumé and get a consulting job, but to explore some of the most intriguing academic questions in the world today and—perish the thought—to actually learn something, good luck. But for the rest of you, I have a few cynical words of advice.

Four years at Harvard won’t be time enough to rise to the top of every student organization that you join, so you’d better start choosing quickly. Don’t waste your time with any group whose membership doesn’t exceed 300—any smaller, and you might as well start your own. A leadership position in something huge, like The Crimson or the Institute of Politics, would look really great on a resumé and can, if Goldman Sachs ever asks, be easily justified as the result of your “passion,” “dedication,” or even “remote interest.” But you should be prepared to jettison those commitments in a year or two, if it looks like someone else is going to end up president. Remember: if all else fails, you can always start your own magazine. Everyone else does.

If you ever feel as though your reaching for the top is betraying the idealist virtues you wrote about in your admissions essay, then you might want to examine some of Harvard’s community service opportunities. There, you’ll find all the raw ambition that you could ever desire, along with enough resumé opportunities to make your head spin. Don’t be fooled by the apparent sappy altruism of your fellow volunteers—they won’t seem so harmless when they snatch up your job at Citigroup. If you happen to enjoy improving the lives of others, that’s great, but never lose sight of the bottom line that if you haven’t built a school in Malawi by the time you graduate, you’re falling behind.

Some have argued that Harvard’s clubs and societies are valuable because they offer students a well-stocked pool of friends and connections to a palpable campus community. For many, that is doubtless the case, but organizations here serve a much higher purpose. For one thing, a student group is a nice small pond, for big fish in search of a marine kingdom. The other members of the Polynesian Ice Sculpture Appreciation Club might be very friendly, but they’ll be much more valuable as pawns when it comes time to engineer your election as club secretary. And as for that sense of community that proves so evasive to so many Harvard students? Well let’s just say that you’ll have all the community you’ll need when a kindly club alumnus, now in middle management, passes your resumé along to the bank’s summer internships director.

Sure, there are plenty of people at Harvard who work at what they love, love what they do, and love things like the environment and the elderly. There are lots of students here who genuinely believe that they can make a difference in the lives of others, and they succeed. A small sub-set of the undergraduate population might even see the value of their opportunities here as extending beyond the margins of their resumés.

For the next four years, while you’re sitting in your single room, contemplating ways to undercut your friends’ (read: competitors) extracurricular ambitions, these people will have a litany of experiences that are both enriching and rewarding. But wait 10 years and see who’s laughing, when you’ve got your own desk on the 50th floor and they’re off “making a difference,” whatever that means.

If you got into Harvard, you should be smart enough to realize that Gandhi was wrong: you shouldn’t “be the change you want to see in the world,” you should collect it until you have enough to pay for an LSAT tutor. Remember, you can’t put “fulfillment” on a resumé, and all the fun in the world won’t get you a first-round interview. You’re a Harvard student now; the world is your oyster. Sell it.

Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. He only writes for The Crimson because it makes a killer line on his resumé. His column appears on alternate Fridays.