Monday 16 April, 2007 at 8:46:38 pm
filed under personal, school
I wasn’t expecting it, but I actually quite liked Harvard. It seemed to me, in many ways, Yale done right: dignified and a little bit snooty without being oppressively so. Most importantly (of course), there was not a single neo-Gothic building in sight. All that brick was a little unsettling at first, but I got used it.
I had a chance to meet with two students there. The first was a junior by the name of Frederick, who goes by “Bindy” for reasons still unknown to me. Bindy gushed. He glowed. His friends were wonderful. His dorm was excellent. A history and lit major, he was spending his summer in Europe doing research for his senior thesis - a trip paid for entirely by the college. Harvard, in short, was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Alex, the other student, was much more candid. He was going to graduate in a few weeks, and had just finished interviewing for grad school at MIT. While he also was very pleased with the professors and upper-level courses, he had some serious issues with the way courses for freshmen and sophomores were run. The organization of Harvard’s core curriculum requires that students take the classes that are farthest away from their chosen discipline. This would not in itself be a problem except for the fact that these core offerings were limited, and comprise mostly of offerings like the “Modern Literature for Dull Engineers” that my father hasn’t ceased to complain about since he graduated from college 30-odd years ago.
Generally, Harvard seemed like a nice (if somewhat bland) place to go with really exceptional faculty. But again, there’s the acceptance rate and the price tag to worry about.
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