<p>This post got long, because your experience sounds similar to mine back in the day. I’m also a double-legacy, and my first visit was also a disaster. Mine was a disaster for slightly more obviously temporary reasons than yours–my host had had the flu badly until a few days before I came and was still recovering, and her phone had died or something, and so then I got stuck in Lamont Library for a bit more than an hour, not knowing where she was or if she was even coming, before she turned up to find me.</p>
<p>In general, I don’t think Harvard students are very good to pre-admittance student visitors, which may cause some bad impressions among prospective but pre-application visitors. It’s all, “what are the chances of you being in the 6% who will be arriving here next year? …About 6%.” It’s not the most nice of us, but even I–who have spent quite a bit of time trying to help applicants during the whole process here on this forum–am somewhat guilty of this in person. I’m not confronted with it often, but if this is a big problem for you, there it is. Sorry about that, if you got any such vibes when you visited. I got similar, and was very ambivalent about the whole thing between visiting in February and decision day in April. I was kind of hoping I’d be rejected, so I didn’t have to make a hard decision and could just go to Chicago, where I’d gotten in EA. (Note to past self: If you were worried about people studying too much, picking Chicago rather than Harvard would have been an UNHELPFUL CHOICE. Luckily, I didn’t.) Harvard hadn’t seemed so great, my visit had gone terribly, but I guess I’d still applied because maybe that was just a bad first impression…</p>
<p>Then I visited Harvard twice in April, after admittance, and knew immediately it had just been a bad first impression. I committed before the actual visit days. (That was a mistake because everybody wanted to talk about how they were choosing between Harvard and Yale, and that was truly obnoxious, while I was just like “eh, I’ve committed,” but that particular brand of obnoxiousness gets beaten out of almost all Harvard and Yale freshmen once they actually enter their respective schools.)</p>
<p>I’m in one of the biggest social science majors besides gov and ec, and I have never had a problem with lack of enthusiasm here. Pervasive (although not overwhelming*) enthusiasm for something was possibly my most important criterion in selecting a college. When I was in high school, I was talking about some article about demographics with an acquaintance on the school bus. I started going off about how this related to (what I understood of) Thomas Malthus, and so this acquaintance and I were just discussing the population trends of the planet with eagerness and maybe not that much knowledge. Then my better friend turned around and said, “Why are you talking about that? I have never heard anything so boring in my life. Let’s talk about movie stars.” When my counselor asked what I wanted out of college, I told her that story and said–I want a place where that could never happen to me again. Harvard has pretty well served.
*I’m a bit cynical, and I might have had trouble with a college full of people who added! too! many! exclamation! points! to their sentences! Some of the more peppy LACs, maybe. But disengagement was, is anathema.
So it’s taken me a while to find my right friend group here, but in all the odd friend groups I’ve cycled through in my time here, they have all had that enthusiasm in common. (Can’t sing, can’t dance, don’t care, but I spent a couple months freshman year hanging out with the musical theater crowd, for example. I wouldn’t type most musical theater geeks as particularly bookish, but I bonded with one girl when she told me how much she LOVED the library, and me kind of agreeing.) I’ve found that baseline enthusiasm for something almost everywhere, whether it’s sports or art or class or solving the world’s problems, or some combination thereof.</p>
<p>However, I would agree that Harvard students can be disengaged, but it really depends on what group and what concentration you’re in. I don’t know how strongly I’d recommend Harvard if you’re looking to major in government or economics and have a lot of lively intellectual discussions about those subjects. My boyfriend’s in one of those two, and he’s that rare creature in his department, even in his upper-level classes–a guy who is really enthusiastically nerdy about the material in all his coursework. He’s struggled some, because a lot of his classmates are disengaged or focused on the purely practical aspects of his subjects. He’s like the only nerd. Sociology’s explosive growth may have pushed it in that direction, but those are 3 concentrations out of something like 60. If your likely major lies elsewhere, I worry less about my recommendation. (I can’t speak with any real knowledge about the life sciences or the premed track. People in smaller biology and science majors also seem very happy.) But even if you are majoring in a typical pre-finance or whatever if you come in with the engagement you’re seeking, you will find and click with people who are also engaged. I think we’re a sizable majority here, but the ones who aren’t have never bothered my life in any way. I can name my hundred closest friends (according to the Facebook definition, perhaps), without naming one who’s disengaged. Most have academic passions as well as extracurricular ones. The one exception I can name is my friend who’s one of the 5 people most important people in the business that is the Crimson, who doesn’t care so much about her classes, but that’s because she cares so much about her extracurricular. Most everybody else really does like their major, as well as whatever they do outside.</p>
<p>Addressing a couple more points in random order.
- When did you visit? The campus you describe sounds exactly like exam-time. “Almost no students socializing” in a dining hall is something I’ve never seen otherwise. And yes, we get intense during exam week when we realize we have to buckle down and maybe catch up on some topics we were too busy doing nonacademic stuff during the semester to learn really well the first time, but I’d guess that’s the same at exam-ish time anywhere. If it wasn’t…it doesn’t sound like the campus I know. Maybe it’s that inhabitants of the River Houses don’t know how to have fun, if you were eating down there
- Some people think I don’t know how to have any fun because I don’t like to go out multiple times a weekend. At my state flagship, it seems normal to go out and get drunk at parties 3-5 times a week. Whereas although I think I have fun, I party with my friends maybe 2 weeks of 3. We hang out more casually much more often, I have time to watch TV, etc… But I suppose that may put almost all Harvard students in many peoples’ definition of “doesn’t have any fun”. I disagree with their definition, but if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s hard to find at Harvard.
- I’m not “intensely” committed to any extracurricular. I do stuff. Less than many people. More than many people. It’s probably hard to have a social life if you’re not even a peripheral member of anything, but if you’re the type of student who can get into Harvard, you won’t want not to join anything.
- Although the odds are still against you, my legacy friend, drop me a line if you do get in and want to talk during prefrosh weekend. It sounds like we shared many of the same concerns about how to choose a college, so I might be able to give you a useful perspective on something. I’m not on this forum that often any more, but PMs get a notification sent to me in my real email.</p>