<p>Can any current Harvard Freshman tell me what most freshman do during their summers? Do many people have internships, and if so, where? Do many people study abroad? What else do people do during the summer after freshman year?</p>
<p>There are a lot of different options for students during summers and on breaks. Travel, paid and unpaid internships, funded projects, etc.</p>
<p>The summer BEFORE he began at Harvard, my son went to Rome courtesy of the classics department. He was with a group of high schoolers and went as a faculty assistant for the high schools involved. Because he was acting in a “professional” capacity, Harvard paid for the bulk of the cost of the trip. During his first summer, he was at the time, a joint physics/classics concentrator and readily found paid work as an intern at a biophysics research lab that is part of the university. So, he spent the summer in Cambridge. He shared an apartment in graduate housing (which ate up a lot of his earning, sadly) with some other buddies who had internships. He had a lot of fun. He later dropped physics and this year, he has a paid internship in classics, sponsored by Harvard, in Washington, DC. During his sophomore J-term (during Christmas break), Harvard paid for him to go to Greece. Next summer, he’s hoping for an internship at an archaeological dig in Turkey, or an internship in Greece.</p>
<p>My son’s experience is that no one comes up to you and offers you stuff, but if you ask around, folks are glad to help, glad to send you in the right direction, advise who you should talk to, and when you get to folks who can directly help because they have positions to give, or the budget to fund something, they’re eager to help. He’s found faculty, even senior, tenured faculty, quite approachable and has good, on-going relationships with most of the faculty in his department. It is in the context of these relationships that he’s mentored, guided, and assisted. </p>
<p>But you have to be assertive, you have to ask, you have to look for the resources you need or want. Be courteous, but don’t be shy. That’s whether you’d like an internship, or you’d like to travel, or you’d like to propose a project and obtain funding. There are a lot of options. Ask your professors, ask the administrative folks in your department, ask other students. They’ll give you plenty of ideas of what you can do, and some of them can point you in the right direction to actually get the assistance you may need.</p>
<p>Agree with the above. I’ll also add that an astounding percentage of undergrads do something in Cambridge over the summer, be it research, internship, coursework, etc. </p>