Life Lessons in Spring Cleaning

About this time every year, Harvard undergraduates begin weighing their options for the summer. For 400 of them, Spring Clean-Up with Harvard’s Dorm Crew constitutes the first venture into an intense season full of financial internships, community service, and even the occasional family vacation.

For some it will be their first time holding the end of a broom, and after several exhausting days, many newcomers question their judgment at selecting such physically demanding work. Inevitably, some will glance down at their yellow sponge and bottle of Mur-Kil cleaner, and back up to the toilet that they have hunched over to scrub to perfection. One thought most often brings about this moment’s hesitation: How could a Harvard student like me end up in a demeaning job like this? I’m too good for this!

You all remember the day you got your acceptance letter from Harvard by e-mail, proudly declaring you an official member of the newest incoming class. Not only were you suddenly a college student after four long years in secondary-school purgatory: You were a Harvard student! For that brief moment, the modesty that you exuded as you waited nervously for that letter to arrive flew out the window, along with the inferior acceptance letters of Princeton and Yale. For a split second, you felt like a god.

Fast-forward to the toilet that has not yet been brought to a pristine, hospital white. The years have not been as idyllic as you pictured back during that blissful March afternoon (or December evening for others among us). That megalomaniacal rush, that untouchable feeling of self-worth, has vanished. Perhaps it’s tainted, diminished, or even forgotten. Harvard students have been accustomed to being the best, so some might regard that relegation to a mere dorm porter to be a tough pill to swallow.

That feeling of subjugation, a positive plunge from the heights of academic superiority, is for the best. It’s rare to come upon opportunities that offer such a direct means of teaching ourselves humility. We are told that volunteering might war with our ego-centrism, but many programs place the volunteer in a level of hierarchical advantage, whether it’s as a teacher for an immigrant seeking citizenship or even as a van driver for helpless children. Volunteering is very often more concerned with bringing others up than with bringing oneself down to earth.

Maybe that’s why so many of us choose to dedicate four weeks of our summer serving (for pay) in such menial capacities. In the rush of all the events during the school year, we never seem to have time to pause and step off the high road of the Harvard undergraduate. Through Dorm Crew, we are literally given the tools to broaden our minds, a ladder to descend from the ivory tower. Somewhere in that broom lies a life lesson that struggles to impart itself; we ought to be open enough to allow the humility of hard manual labor to take hold.

This May will see those four hundred students with the quintessential Dorm Crew tools—buckets and rags—descend upon the Yard and the Houses. Some are working to earn a bit of spending money for their European excursion, others as a transition between the raucous end-of-year celebrations and the lucrative consulting position that has been on their mind since the congratulatory phone call from McKinsey. In the midst of it all, maybe some of the modesty and perspective that escaped out the window so long ago as that letter arrived will return home for good.

Byran N. Dai ’11, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.