Not on Harvard Time

As Harvard students, we are repeatedly told that attending Harvard demonstrates personal success thus far in our lives. Some of us even let this perspective limit our future potential and pervade our worldview. What’s more, sitting in Cambridge, with the world’s most influential people streaming through our classes and lecture halls, lauding our institution perpetually, it’s easy to believe that every child, everywhere, aspires to our position.

During my most recent visit to Israel, however, these notions shattered and I was able to pick up some lessons from among the rubble.

I learned, most importantly, that there is at least one place (though I’m sure there are many others, some right here in the U.S.) that does not consider attending Harvard—or any college at all—the ultimate goal.

Israeli life imposes different goals on the country’s youth. Unlike in the U.S., where the standard high-achieving teenager likely wants to attend college, type A Israelis fall into a number of different groups. Some want to go to the army: to work in the intelligence, in an elite commando unit, or as a pilot. For these people, the unit they want becomes their Harvard. They train for it physically and mentally. And, like Harvard, many who try to reach these units are not accepted.

For others, attending college first is the aim. But even then, the process is not simply attending, learning, and then deciding on a career. Instead, the Israeli higher-education system forces its students to choose a specialty before enrolling. And most who go straight to college do so through a program that ensures extended military service after graduation; quite a departure from popular post-graduation plans at Harvard, such as investment banking or graduate school.

It was difficult for me to fathom what it must have been like to go to high school where the collective aim, and my individual goal, was not to make it to the best possible college, and I’d imagine the same is true for most of us at Harvard.

Even more jarring is the Israeli conception of maturation—the process of becoming “independent adults” that we are told will be so challenging before freshman year—is entirely different from what people see as maturation elsewhere.

I felt like a toddler in the presence of friends and relatives who were my age or just a few years older. Since graduating high school, Israeli youngsters have completed basic training, learned to fire a gun, and some even patrolled the streets of the West Bank. Others fought in a war and seen brothers-in-arms die. Meanwhile, I’ve toted books from my dorm to Lamont and back. Learned material, forgotten it, relearned it during reading period, and promptly forgotten it again.

But when my friends asked me how often I see my parents my response shocked them. They exclaimed: “You only see them a few times a year!” Their disbelief grew deeper when I assured them that even students who attend college only a few miles away from their homes seldom see their parents. Many Israeli college students, even those who are in their mid-twenties who have already served in the army, return to their parents’ house weekly, appreciating home cooking and, generally much less interested in blazing their own trails.

The course most Harvard students take toward adulthood is hardly the only or necessarily the best one. Although I appreciate being a Harvard student, barreling down the tracks to some career or another, my trip to Israel crystallized the fact that there are talented people for whom that course is neither the most appealing or most logical option.

But then again, that’s easy to say for a Crimson editor who is doing summer research rather than spending time with his family.

Jonathan B. Steinman '10 is a Crimson sports editor in Winthrop House.