What exactly is the Harvard Book Award and how does one get it/ does it help your resume/ chances?
- easily found on google – or better yet through searching this site. Often discussed.
- chosen by teachers to award to a top Junior if one is lucky enough to attend a school where the local Harvard alumni club decides to send a book to.
- it doesn’t
I would add that, while today the Harvard Prize book is always some cheesy promotional thing about Harvard, in the past the prize was intrinsically worth winning. I was lucky enough to win eons ago, when the book awarded was a history of the world in outline form. It’s a profoundly questionable volume, in terrible scholarly taste (so chronological! so event- and personality-focused!), and no other reference work in my house has gotten more use. (At least no other reference work in print. The combination of Wikipedia and smart phones means that it gathers more dust than it used to.) It’s still super if you have 30 seconds to figure out wtf happened in the Tokugawa Shogunate and how various Hapsburg monarchs were related to their spouses.
Let’s just say the girl who won the Harvard book award in my class was rejected from UPenn.
I was the only person in my class to get into Harvard, and I didn’t win a single book award.
The book award makes no difference.
When DS received the award this is the book he was given:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Harvard-Book-Selections-Centuries/dp/0674373014
Ironically, the Harvard alumna who presented it to him is influential in his life, and encouraged him to go to Princeton for undergrad.