Say Goodbye to the Harvard Intro

Harvard students are terrible at meeting new people. Every introduction follows the same mechanical ritual. Name. Pronouns. Class Year. House. Concentration. Goodbye.

This robotic exchange is so common that it’s managed to earn its own label — “the Harvard intro.”

Simply put, the Harvard intro is straight nonsense. It’s dull, overused, and, most of all, entirely useless. Yes, telling someone your name and pronouns is important. But your house? Whatever microscopic difference exists between the living conditions in Dunster and those in Leverett certainly isn’t important enough for a first impression.

I bet that before you arrived at Harvard, you never introduced yourself with your home address. Yet, for some reason, we’ve all decided that one’s dorm is an essential distinguishing feature of one’s campus persona. Unless you’re making dinner plans, it’s completely unnecessary information.

On top of that, the Harvard intro reduces one’s identity to their concentration. Harvard requires all freshmen to enter college without a major and urges students to explore. And yet, the Harvard intro makes one not only choose their likely course of study but identify themselves with a field before they’ve even made it to their second semester.

Introducing one’s concentration may be beneficial for networking purposes, but it’s unfortunate that the beginning of all social interactions is predicated on that introduction.

Whenever a student does break the mold and elaborates on their concentration or lack thereof, the conversation is almost always more interesting than what we do most of the time: summarize all of our academic curiosities into a single word.

Concomitant with its painful simplicity, the Harvard intro implicitly leads us to make assumptions about each other. While the intro is a quick way to convey basic facts about ourselves, it compels us to place ourselves into a bucket, presenting a drastically flattened version of our characters and leaving the rest up to speculation.

If the goal of the Harvard intro is to help us get to know each other, it fails miserably.

Think about it: How many times have you instantly forgotten someone’s name immediately after asking? If the name alone is difficult to retain, every detail following it is even harder.

It’s a simple psychological fact that we can’t encode large amounts of information in our short-term memory at once. (Any seasoned student should know how hard it is to cram for a test and remember everything for only a few hours.)

Some research suggests the human brain can actively hold about seven pieces of information at once. Maybe it’s possible to memorize a Harvard intro if you really dedicate the effort. But the truth is, most introductions are made in passing, and we really don’t have brain space available to stuff with clutter.

Harvard intros are also boring. I pity the freshmen who have been forced to endure the group Harvard intro — a class full of students, each one sharing the most banal information possible… I’d lose my mind.

With that being said, the Harvard intro is not malignant; it’s just trite. It’s an attempt to get to know someone, but it’s ultimately unsuccessful because you can hear a lot without learning anything.

The problem is not the content itself, but rather the procedural formality the intro imposes, rendering it a final answer to the question “who are you?”

In order to truly get to know each other, we cannot seek merely to optimize efficiency and extract facts — our intros should spark deeper discussions with one another.

Rather than using the same old intro, we could share highlights from our day. Instead of just stating our concentration, we could talk about our hobbies and passions. Maybe the Harvard intro makes us forget it, but we can ask any sort of icebreaker question — it doesn’t just have to be the boring stuff.

The possibilities are endless! If you’re feeling adventurous or romantic, consider using “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” from The New York Times or check out We’re Not Really Strangers on Instagram for a wealth of alternatives.

Tell me anything! But please do not ask for my house and concentration.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House