Why There's No Perfect Harvard Student

Harvard has its own vernacular — Harvard Speak — where majors are called “concentrations,” RAs are referred to as “proctors” by freshmen and “tutors” by upperclassmen, and everything has an acronym. One of the more universally used buzzwords at Harvard is a term that I learned before stepping foot onto Harvard’s campus: impostor syndrome.

With Harvard’s admissions rate being as low as it is, it’s hard not to occasionally become consumed by this looming fear that the admissions committee somehow made a mistake, and that the congratulatory message we all received on Ivy Day was addressed to the wrong person — that we’re not meant to be here. That we’re merely impostors.

For a long time, that’s what I believed impostor syndrome to be: a feeling of inadequacy, a fear of not being “good enough.” But I came to learn that impostor syndrome is so much more than that.

In my quest to stop feeling like an impostor and start feeling like a true Harvard student, I began to alter myself to fit into this “Harvard-student mold” that I had imagined in my head. And suddenly, without even realizing it, I became an entirely different kind of impostor: an impostor of myself.

In high school, my goal was clear — college. It was the thing I had been working to achieve my entire life. It’s why I had spent hours of each day studying and going to different practices and rehearsals and meetings. And then I reached that goal. Ivy Day felt like the best day of my life — but it also left me confused.

I didn’t — and still don’t — know what to do post-graduation. There is no longer a clear next step that I’m working towards. So while I was over the moon about this amazing opportunity Harvard presented to me, I was also scared. The possibilities were endless — a liberating but frightening thought. My newfound academic freedom was both a blessing and a curse because I had no idea what to do with it. And I became so afraid of my path being unclear that I veered off in an entirely new direction: conformity.

While many people say that college is the time to “find yourself,” funny enough, I had the opposite experience. Throughout my first year of college, I wanted to become what I believed to be the perfect Harvard student so badly that I completely lost myself in the process.

I tried so hard to convince myself that I wanted to be like the almost 15 percent of last year’s sophomores that declared Economics as their concentration. For what it’s worth, I loved my introductory microeconomics class. And I still believe that an economic way of thinking can be used to solve so many of society’s important issues — but I wanted to become an Economics concentrator for the wrong reasons. Studying economics was just another box to check off on my list of things I had to do to become the perfect Harvard student; it just took me a while to realize it.

I decided to change my intended concentration to Social Studies — an interdisciplinary concentration in the Social Sciences — during a four-hour-long car ride back to campus following a weekend-long retreat with the Opportunes: Harvard’s oldest all-gender a capella group. As we neared Cambridge, all I could feel was dread. The last thing I wanted to do was come back to a place where an impostor of myself resided. I felt like a fraud, and I was tired of convincing myself that I wanted to be someone who I never should have tried to become in the first place.

Ever since that fateful day a mere three weeks ago, I have felt as though a weight has been lifted off of me. Rejecting conformity was liberating. I now have the ability to carve out my own path and study things that I am truly passionate about. After months of being lost, I had found myself again.

Today, I know that I don’t want to be an impostor. Harvard does not make me who I am, nor does it make you who you are. There is no “right” way to be a Harvard student. We are all our own people outside of this institution, so let’s not allow it to shape us into people we don’t even recognize.

Nicole B. Alexander ’24, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Kirkland House.