PARTING SHOTS: Learning the Value of A Harvard Education

This spring, Harvard gave me money for a post-graduate trip to research baseball, which is basically akin to giving a five-year-old money to research a candy shop. And on the day that the fellowship paperwork arrived in the mail, I understood exactly why Harvard was “Harvard.”

Not because of its age and its location, not because it offers fabulous classes like “Dinosaurs and Their Relatives” and “Wit and Humor,” but because Harvard afforded me the opportunity to pursue an academic path as random as baseball. And because Harvard gave me all the tools to find that path in the first place.

Like so many idealistic fools, I began freshman year as a pre-med biology concentrator. I was going to be a doctor who saved the world, as were scores of my friends who grew up in the heyday of “ER.”

But I stopped by a Crimson open house my freshman fall, mainly for the free pizza, and everything changed. I began writing. And writing, and writing, and writing.

This is the last of nearly 250 stories I have composed for The Crimson, and perhaps the most difficult, because it is my one and only chance to explain what Harvard has given me.

I fell into the world of the daily campus newspaper by accident, which I suppose I could have done at any university. But The Crimson is old and established—its alumni successful and loyal—and a better first experience in journalism is difficult to imagine.

The Crimson led to summer internships at a television station and a daily paper, and eventually a summer gig with the Baltimore Orioles, the team I grew up adoring, in the stadium—Camden Yards—my father and I had treated as our cathedral.

The Crimson was my original springboard and an experience to which I constantly referred, from the summer following my freshman year to this past winter, when I applied for grant money to write in the Dominican Republic.

I proposed an extensive trip to a country where the words “baseball” and “life” are synonymous.

I proposed excursions to the training academies of major league teams, where young local players hone their skills.

I proposed journeys to the smaller cities, where children play with sticks and rocks, their feet shoeless and chalky in dusty lots as they imitate their major league idols.

In short, I proposed to study baseball, my first love, and to write about it. And Harvard gave me the money to do it.

When I explain that Harvard is sponsoring my research of America’s pastime, the first question I always face is accompanied by a laugh: “How’d you pull that off?”

The answer is simple: I asked for it. I submitted a thoughtful proposal, which Harvard rewarded with a check and its blessing.

A sadly common student complaint is that Harvard does not care—that professors are not interested in their students, and that the university itself is indifferent.

It seems to me, however, that these students are waiting for the good stuff to come to them.

The first story I wrote for the Crimson was God-awful, as I was told several times upon publication.

A little part of me wanted never to return—it was the first month of school, after all, and nobody would remember if I never came back. But a larger part of me wanted to prove my editors wrong. So I applied myself, and the Crimson rewarded me tenfold.

I strongly believe that Harvard’s celebrity is justified by the astounding number of opportunities available to students, from travel to research, from extracurriculars to the classroom.

The burden rests on us, as students, to take advantage of these chances, rather than complain when do not land in our laps as we sit and wait.

The same students who complain that professors are inaccessible rarely go to office hours. The same students who complain about the dining hall food rarely fill out comment cards.

And what kind of an education would we receive, really, if things came too easily?

Harvard may not be as perfect as we desire, but neither is the real world.

I graduate today. On Saturday, I leave for the Dominican Republic—a land of sun and palm trees and baseball and writing.

Harvard is paying for my ticket, but the university began to provide for this trip four years ago.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at rebecca.seesel@post.harvard.edu.