Current Harvard student taking questions

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>Yes, this is shamelessly stolen from the "Harvard alum taking questions" thread. But it's a nice idea and I'd just like to say I'm willing to provide my perspective on any questions asked.</p>

<p>I'm a current sophomore at Harvard. A lot of my high school info is still fresh in my mind so I can answer questions regarding</p>

<p>High school: the application process, writing app essays, interviews, recs, etc.</p>

<p>or</p>

<p>Life at Harvard: dorms, student life, classes, picking concentrations, placement tests, languages, etc.</p>

<p>or</p>

<p>anything else. This is probably going to compromise my secret identity but my "cover" has been blown by at least 2 CC users so far so it's only a matter of time. I can't wait to be ruthlessly mocked.</p>

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<p>I have seen many people graduating from Harvard and becoming great political leaders like Pakistan’s ex-President, Ireland’s, Indian’s, US Senates, Presidents, etc. How does Harvard helps someone in becoming a political leader?</p>

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<p>How does the House system work, and how would you compare it to Yale’s Res. College system?</p>

<p>How does placement work in math and science courses?</p>

<p>What are some outstanding freshman courses / who are some outstanding profs to look out for?</p>

<p>How are the dorms? </p>

<p>What’s the dating scene like?</p>

<p>Where do H kids hang out? Is it easy to hook up with the opposite sex from other schools?</p>

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<p>A number of amazing people certainly do graduate from Harvard. This is probably for one of two reasons:</p>

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<li><p>They were already amazing, Harvard accepted them because they were amazing, and when they graduated they were still amazing. In other words, a few exceptional people made their way into Harvard and would have done great things no matter where they went.</p></li>
<li><p>Perhaps Harvard did help people realize their potential, their ambition. Harvard is a place where there isn’t any hand holding. You can go there, study for all your classes and graduate. The Harvard name may give you a slight advantage in getting a job in some fields, but in others it may not. If you just go to your classes and do nothing else, you won’t have gotten everything you can out of the school. Or, you can take advantage of the research opportunities, the funding for overseas travel, the internships open to Harvard students, the ECs that often times are respectable organizations in their own right, etc. Harvard forces you to get up and chase after things, a necessary life skill for the political leader especially. It’s also probably true that would-be political leaders made good connections at Harvard but I’d be surprised if a future US president lacks the charisma to make good connections anywhere he/she goes. </p></li>
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<p>In my case, I am a very type B person who is naturally uncomfortable with trailblazing. Getting into a top-tier school required some of it, sure, but a lot of things in high school are more streamlined than in college. I think people like me are a minority at Harvard, and going here really helped me to become better at seizing the initiative.</p>

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<p>Yes, thank you! Horray for current student represent :)</p>

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<p>You are randomly assigned to dorms freshman year. After that, you can form a “blocking group” of up to 8 people, or you can enter by yourself as a “floater.” This group of up to 8 is guaranteed to be in the same upperclass House together, but this House is randomly assigned. Each blocking group can “link” with another blocking group. These two blocking groups are guaranteed to be in the same housing “neighborhood,” i.e. Mather and Leverett or Cabot and Currier, but they are also guaranteed to not be in the same actual house.</p>

<p>I was accepted to both Yale and Harvard so I spent some time looking at their two housing systems. Yale’s system is similar but, if i remember correctly, the house to which you are assigned remains your house as an upperclassman. There are pros and cons to this. A bad thing is that almost all of your friends may not be in your housing group, so you have no option to room with your friends. The good thing is that I imagine most people make friends within their housing group anyway, whereas you can always hang out with your non-dorm friends in your ECs, spare time, whatever. Alternatively, the Harvard system tends to promote living with the same friends you have in your ECs, classes, etc. I don’t know much to say about all this because I’ve never found making friends to be a problem. </p>

<p>I will say that the Yale facilities are typically nicer than Harvard’s. </p>

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<p>You take placement tests in the summer before your first semester. These tests are upwardly-restricted but not downwardly-restrictive. Meaning, if you are placed into Math 55, you can take intro Math. But if you’re placed into intro Math, you can’t take Math 55. AP tests can also be used for science placement but they don’t satisfy requirements. You take the same number of classes whether you use AP scores or not, unless you activate Advanced Standing which almost no one does.</p>

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<p>Hard to say. Are you interested in math/science classes or humanities/social science classes?</p>

<p>In the humanities and social sciences, there are very few “freshman courses” and very few placement requirements, though there are some courses that are typically taken by freshmen (e.g. Gov 20, though don’t take it unless Levitsky is teaching it). Economics is an exception since I think you have to take Ec10 before you take a lot of other courses.</p>

<p>In the sciences, especially the pre-med track of sciences, things are a bit more rigid. Most freshmen majoring in a biological science or are otherwise pre-med take LS1a (Fall) and LS1b (Spring). Most people don’t like them, though I didn’t mind LS1b. Most also take a math, I think most commonly 1a/1b or 21a/21b. A lot of people who took BC Calc in high school end up taking 1b, which is technically the same material, because their high school’s class wasn’t sufficiently rigorous. </p>

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<p>I’m not the biggest fan of the dorms here, though that’s just my opinion I’m sure others disagree. The quality varies. Quad rooms, New Quincy, Mather, Dewolfe are all pretty solid. Dunster is fairly bad. Senior housing (seniors have a separate lottery before juniors, who have a lottery before sophomores) is usually pretty good, except for dunster. </p>

<p>The buildings are generally old, which is nice if you like older architecture but not so great if you like…space. Harvard is apparently putting some money into working on the dorms. There’s a Crimson article about it somewhere.</p>

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<p>Pretty much what you’d expect of people who are really busy. Either people are in very serious, committed relationships or have casual sex. There generally isn’t much of a middle-ground, though obviously there are always exceptions.</p>

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<p>The “you can always go to Boston-area schools to party” line is mostly a myth. I mean, yeah, kids probably know kids at BC, BU, etc and might party there sometimes. But since the T stops running at like 1:30, you’d have to either stay there (requiring you to have a friend or two there who doesnt care if you stay over) or take a cab back which is expensive. It’s always easier to just party at Harvard.</p>

<p>I don’t know what you mean by “is it easy to hook up with people from other schools.” Ask yourself; if you have game at one school you probably have game at the other. The hard part is being able to go there in the first place, which requires knowing people there pretty well. You don’t want to spend 30 minutes taking the T to BC and your friend who was going to get you into a party isnt responding to your texts and you can’t get in.</p>

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<p>This was probably going to be asked sometime, so I’ll do it.</p>

<p>Why Harvard over Yale?</p>

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<p>What objective and subjective criteria did you personally use to choose Harvard over Yale?</p>

<p>Edit: lol, pkm2232 beat me to it!</p>

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<p>What did you write your admissions essay about and what do you feel was the strongest part of your application?</p>

<p>Also, how did financial aid work out? Is Harvard different from other ivies or are they all the same in terms of aid?</p>

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<p>My admissions essay was introspective and self-critical, which I enjoyed writing because I like making fun of myself more than I like bragging about myself. In high school I was a student leader at my youth group, responsible for running bible classes, plannings events, etc. I talked about how, as I started to get busy with high school work, I stopped going to the youth group as much though nominally I was still a “leader” despite being able to recognize many of the new faces showing up. So the essay was about how certain events at the youth group taught me about superficiality and meaningless titles and things like that. It wasn’t an amazing essay but it was solid I think.</p>

<p>I don’t think I had a particularly strong point in my application. I mean, my numbers and grades were very good, and my ECs had leadership positions but nothing national or breathtaking. I can’t speak for the admissions officers that reviewed my stuff but I think I was a well-rounded applicant with interests and activities that were each individually strong, but not part of some larger pattern. That’s why when people on this board say “Oh, well, since you’re a poli sci person, you shouldn’t emphasize your math activities as much because you seem too scattered,” I have to question it. Colleges don’t expect cookie-cutter molds, and if it were up to me I would discourage them.</p>

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<p>I don’t know enough about other schools’ aid to really compare them on details, that is all researchable online. However, Harvard’s policy is very generous and at the time that I applied, only Yale and Princeton(?) had similar policies. At Harvard, if your family makes < $60k a year, your family doesn’t contribute anything. You are sometimes asked to contribute $1200 which is estimated to be typical summer earnings, but this can be mitigated by applying for outside grants which many states have. I am from a low-income background (<$60k) and to put it in perspective, some semesters I have paid nothing but rather picked up a check for $200 because my aid money exceeded the cost. If your family earns between 60k and 120k(?), your family pays only 10% of that income. Paying $12k a year is a very cheap price for American universities as you know.</p>

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<p>Objectively I couldn’t decide. I liked Cambridge better than New Haven, I liked Yale’s dorms better than Harvard’s. I didn’t know what I wanted to major/concentrate in, so I couldn’t really compare two departments. (Though actually, now that I’m studying Middle Eastern history, I realize that Yale has a stronger department). </p>

<p>It came down to a subjective call and I picked Harvard. I felt as though the academic environments are slightly different, and a few other people have had similar impressions. Harvard tends to be more EC-focused than Yale. This is my subjective assessment, but: If you ask someone “so what are you up to at Harvard,” chances are they will say “I am writing for the Crimson” or “I am doing research at MGH” or “I am organizing a service trip to Haiti.” If you ask someone at Yale, they are more likely to say “I am taking a fantastic American history seminar in which I’ve been looking at these rare documents of the first Black churches…”. Of course this is a super-generalization and Yale kids like ECs and Harvard kids like academia but there is certainly a “career cloud” that looms over Harvard in which internships and resumes are ubiquitous. I picked Harvard because my natural inclination is to not be like that, and I thought it would be a good chance for personal growth. Certainly I have done things at Harvard that are out of my comfort zone.</p>

<p>Sometimes I regret my choice and sometimes I’m thankful I made it. Both schools are excellent and it’ll always be hard to pick.</p>

<p>There are tons of threads about this that do a better job comparing than I do. Current students can feel free to back me up or point out how terribly wrong I am.</p>

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<p>Have you seen or spoken to any current Harvard students who had relatively low test scores?</p>

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<p>People who aren’t stand-outs won’t get in. There are low scorers who get in, but they have amazing extracurriculars or unusual circumstances. Therefore, for most people, passing the first “hurdle” of test scores and grades is essential to being considered for admission.</p>

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<p>Thank you for the great response Mr. President!</p>

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<p>Well, you’re terribly wrong that there’re tons of threads out there that do a better job of comparing than you do, but besides that I pretty much agree on everything else :]</p>

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<p>The only Harvard students whose scores I know about are the people I “met” on CC before running into them in real life. (Can’t recall clearly, but I think at least three of them might have had 2400s though.) In any case, once you’re college, SAT scores tend to be something that no one cares very much about.</p>

<p>/hijacking thread</p>

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<p>Like Calico, I have no idea what other students’ SAT scores were. It’s just not something that comes up.</p>

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<p>Feel free!</p>

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<p>What did you guys do in the summer before freshman year? What would you suggest for a prospective pre-med type?</p>

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<p>^ All around the world in 120 days! :)</p>

<p>Felix - internship!</p>

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<p>Concerning specifically math and science classes, do students at Harvard only focus their efforts on completing the problem sets and acing the tests, or are there many students who spend hours working on a problem that they thought was interesting? Essentially, are there students who will work on challenging math problems just because they think it’s fun?</p>

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<p>^Same question but more general: would you say Harvard students are more driven by acquiring knowledge or strictly by future success?</p>

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<p>It’s impossible to make a sweeping generalization about “Harvard students” like that. Certainly there are some students who see Harvard as a necessary prerequisite to securing a career, and there are some whose primary objective here is the pursuit of knowledge. I’ve met both kinds and it would be up to you as a student to figure out which one you are.</p>

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<p>I worked at the summer camp at which I worked throughout high school. I can’t recommend a “pre-med type” program; look for opportunities yourself and see which ones you want to do.</p>