To transfer or not to transfer?

College Life
1

I’m a rising junior at Harvard College- and I hate it here. I have for 2 years. I don’t want to sound rant-y or ungrateful, as Harvard has been wonderfully financially generous to me, but I feel like I just can’t stick it out anymore.

TL;DR: How bad do things have to get at Harvard before it is reasonable to transfer?

Let me explain- I have no problems socially. I am president of 3 clubs and I have some great friends. But I have trouble living here and studying here. My living situation is awful. My freshman year I was placed in an older dorm with some , a-hem, vermin problems (like rats. Inside. All winter. and then roaches. BIG roaches. All spring.) and I was assigned to an advisor who sent me an email on the first day that she had no time to be my advisor, so we would never meet, but don’t worry, finding classes wasn’t hard, just shop around. Anyone who has ever been to college can tell you this is awful advice. I did well academically so I can’t complain about that really, but I was certainly frustrated.

I entered sophomore year with next to none of my necessary classes done (heck, I didn’t even know which classes were required, I had only a vague idea of the gen ed requirements at all). So I learned through an automated email from the university that I would have to take 5 classes (most Harvard students take 4) for 4 semesters to graduate (Harvard only allows students to be on campus for 8 total semesters with no summer session, so there is no option of taking a 9th semester to even out my course load). Understandably, I was a little upset. Still worse, I learned that Harvard actually does not have what I wanted to study (I have always wanted to study theology, but Harvard has only the sociological study of religion, and would not make the exception that the DUS of religion had promised me that would allow me to study theology), so I would have to pick something else. Further, because I currently have no department I have no advisor, nor any professor to write me recommendations (I asked several, but they all said that they couldn’t write one for me because I was not really in their department). So I couldn’t apply for any programs or jobs this year. I hate my classes, which in addition to being boring are graded at an incredible slope. For instance, I was getting a 96 in one class up till the final, then I got a 93 on the final, which should have clinched my A in the class. But my participation grade, of all things, is apparently a B- (for NO reason, I attended every class and participated in every section) leaving me with an A-. But neither the professor nor the TF will respond to my emails, and I have no advocate so I can’t protest the grade.

In addition, my housing situation got worse. We still have rats, and roaches, and now termites coming out of the bathroom wall. Further, no one would come to fix the problem, as our House (what they call a Harvard upperclassmen dorm) was being renovated in the 2017-2018 school year, so it “wasn’t a wise use of university resources” (their words, not mine) to assist us with pest control. In addition, the dining hall workers went on strike, closing our dining hall for about a month (which is unavoidable, and not the university’s fault), but the food never really recovered. The dining hall hours are erratic and never posted. Frequently, the dining hall for the House will just be closed with no forewarning or explanation. The food is awful, we seriously had poached cod in mushroom sauce for several dinners a few weeks ago. I have lost 17 pounds in the last 6 months not because I took up exercise but because Harvard has forced me onto a crash diet.

I am now 2 years through Harvard and have 2 semesters of 5 classes down. But I still have no advisor, no department, and no place to get lunch. Recently, applied for a transfer to Catholic U of America, and was accepted with significant scholarships (though, even with the scholarships it would still be about $11,000 more expensive than Harvard). Catholic U has a great theology program, wonderful facilities (i.e. fewer rats but more food), and a great location in Washington DC. My parents tell me that it would be stupid to take on about $20,000 dollars in debt and give up the Harvard name. But I want to go to graduate school and I don’t think I can do that with no help and no recommenders. What do I do? Is transferring worth it?

2

You want to transfer because you don’t like the food, you have bug issues, and the admins aren’t nice to you?

Sheesh, man, suck it up. Life throws you some termites sometimes-learn to cope.

And to answer your question: really, really frickin’ bad. That’s how bad it has to get before you transfer out and pay more. Like your hair is on fire and you’re flunking all your classes. Then maybe.

3

I sympathize with you, but to be honest, it all sounds like flimsy excuses that you are reaching for to justify transferring.

  1. Bad housing situation- this happens to everyone at every school. I know other people that also had mice and bug problems in their dorms, no AC or heater, and a host of other problems.
  2. Your academic advisor situation sounds really crappy, but it's partly your fault for leaving it at that. You could have went to your academic dean, RA, friends, or any upper class men for advice on how to handle the advisor and what classes to take. I learned more about my school's requirements from talking to my RA than my Advisor. Also, there are resources online for this, which I know can be a bit confusing, but you are a Harvard student.
  3. I just don't buy that no one would write you a rec cause you weren't in their department, especially as an underclassmen. Most freshmen don't have an idea what their major is going to be, so it's not like your first year professors expect you to have a definite major. You are seriously telling me that with Harvard's network and prestige, you couldn't land a job or internship?
  4. Also I am not trying to bash theology or your choices but come on. You don't have any other interests that you can go into? I think most theology majors double major anyways since there isn't really much you can do with theology. Maybe you can major in something else and explore theology on your own. $20,000 in debt to go to Catholic U is definitely not advisable, especially to study theology...If you really wanted to study theology, you should have applied to Jesuit schools like BC or Notre Dame.
4

Here’s the thing: you have to step up and sort out your problems.

Did you go to the professor and ask why the B- in participation? Profs don’t do things “for NO reason”. Really. We have better things to do. Could be s/he mixed your mark up with somebody else. Could it be that your participation wasn’t what the prof was looking for. Could be a bunch of things. EVERY prof has office hours: did you go to the office to talk about it?

all of that info is available online, and I’ll bet that you got further mail about it around registration time.

It sounds unlikely that multiple profs (in whose classes you did well) would refuse to write you a reference for a summer job or internship.

Your first year advisor says that s/he has no time for you- that’s pretty bad. But that’s also when you go to the Frosh dean / academic dean / peer counselor / etc (all those people you were told about in orientation) and advocate for yourself

B/c in adult life- which is where you are now- that’s who advocates for you.

And if you transfer without learning how to take charge of your life you will have the same problems at the new place.

5

I really appreciate your opinion, but I feel I left some things out. For your consideration:

  1. I would like to say that these are rats. Like, real rats. I am a rural girl and had never seen an urban rat before this, but I kid you not these things are large and confident. They are not house mice. My roommate and I call the ones that live in the hole in our hallway our “Harvard pets” because they are not afraid of us at all and will just kind of lounge when we walk by. However cute they might be sometimes, I really wish they weren’t there.
  2. Harvard is very departmental, all advisors are assigned through a department (after you declare during your third semester). Other than that, you have a sort of contact professor for each department (called a Director of Undergraduate Study or DUS), and you have a House academic dean who is usually a professor in your House (but each house has about 450 students in it, so this person tends to be pretty busy), and a younger lecturer you lives in your entryway, called a tutor. I like my tutor and did go to her for help. But she is a physics lecturer, and she said something like "Sorry honey, I have no idea what's going on in humanities" I can't blame her, the departments differ greatly. My House academic dean fell ill and has been out for the whole year. She was replaced by a biology lecturer/tutor, also a nice man but he had the same problem as my own tutor. I did and I do speak to upperclassmen and graduate students, in fact, they are the ones who told me to transfer. As did my tutor. And the DUS of Religion.
  3. If you aren't in a department, that means you have no advisor, and really no meaningful relationships because you just bounce from lecture to lecture with no tutorials or advisors to give you any footing (or influence) with professors. So every prof I have emailed has said something like "Sorry you seem nice and you did well in my class, but I don't know you well enough to write an honest letter," that is totally fine, if they don't feel able to write me a letter I can't force them. In fact, I appreciate their frankness. I just wish I had someone who could.
  4. A word on theology. Catholic University of America is a pontifical university, meaning it is under the direction of the pope. So it has a clear theological focus (although they are a full university with lots of other majors). Some Jesuit universities (Notre Dame is actually not a Jesuit university, not to be a know it all) do have theology, but it is not their focus. Also, the Jesuits tend to specialize in a different kind of theology that I am not as interested in (long story, lots of Latin words, don’t worry about it).
6

Again I appreciate your comments, just a few notes in self defense.

  1. I am indeed unable to advocate for myself. I have no influence. I may be ostensibly an adult, but Harvard is not structured that way. You need a tutor (a professor who lives in your House) or a DUS (basically a department head) to put the fear of the Lord into any professor you want to talk to. In the case of my B-, the professor just refused to answer my email, and when I visited his TF (his graduate student assistant) the TF told me (politely it should be said) that he was under no obligation to acknowledge my request for explanation or reconsideration as the course had ended, which I would understand if I were asking them to change the grade, but I just wanted an explanation (No, I couldn't have talked to the professor. He left before the final because he is travelling to write a book). Indeed, I think this grade was given for no reason, as the professor mentioned to me at one point that he "only liked to give one A a semester" and I think he just wanted to have me out of the running. It may be his right to grade how he wants, but I feel very disrespected by the attitude. This goes to show there is little respect for students here. I had to drop the dispute because I had no clout, all he had to do was delete the emails and shove me off on his assistant and I was powerless. Harvard lacks a centralized authority so there is no higher power for me to contact or for this renegade prof to fear. I will attend his office hours in the Fall if I am still at Harvard, but I highly doubt he will have a complete attitude adjustment over the summer.

2.Oh holy moly. On to Harvard’s online resources. None of the info about gen eds or other courses is available on any one website. We have 2 course websites, one run by the university and the other by students in the computer science department. Neither one is well maintained, as in neither one has current courses listed, only a large listing of every Harvard course that has been offered since the beginning of the site. It’s very difficult to sort through all of them. My roommate says that the hardest part of her time at Harvard isn’t the coursework, it’s just finding courses. Also, in both of them it isn’t possible to search for just gen ed courses. You can’t refine the search to, say, just bring you courses that will fulfill your science requirement. You have to just type in “biological science” and then shop that course and ask if it fulfills the requirement. And the whole university is in the midst of a gen ed system overhaul, so that’s another wrench in the works. Further, many courses that the gen ed office says count actually don’t, as the website hasn’t been updated since 2013 Fall (I asked, this is what they said, indeed many of the courses no longer run) Nobody really knows how the course system will work out at the moment. The university is in the process of refining this system because they know it’s a hot mess, but in the mean time its hard to get anything done.

  1. We do not have registration. One comes with a list of courses that are “maybe’s” you attend them for a week ("shop them") and then just stick with the ones that you think work for you. Then you just turn in a study card with the courses listed, either on paper or online (I believe they are going to an all online study card system in the Fall). So there aren’t really any mass emails that tell you what to do, or what courses fulfill what. You just collect several that you think might work and then ask the TF or the professor if they actually fulfill the requirement.
  2. Any professor I talked to just told me they didn't know me well enough to write a letter because I wasn't in their department, which I respect, but really wish that I could enter a department so that wouldn't be the case.
  3. I did indeed visit the Freshman Dean to ask about advising- he told me to stick it out and wait until I got a departmental advisor, wah wah wamp. No one can see into the future and he did his best, to him I was only one of 1,900 freshmen, so it's fair. We actually do not have RA's, or peer counselors. They advising really is kind of a mess.
  4. While I do appreciate that this problem might persist at my next university if I transfer, a lot of these problems are Harvard specific. There is no centralized advising or authority, every department and House has its own rules and really doesn't interact with the others. It's an odd situation.
7

Let’s not forget here you CHOSE to live on campus multiple years. You could have gotten off-campus accommodations after your first year.

8

Bullcrap, and if it were your child having to put up with three different kinds of major pests, you’d all be going nuts.

9

Visit the Harvard counseling center.

And there are rats in Washington too, all types and sizes.

10

Other things about Harvard:

  1. No, you can't live off campus. Unless you have "an extraordinary circumstance" i.e. you are married and parenting or are disabled and Harvard cannot accommodate you, you cannot avoid being put into a House. That being said, you can just rent an apartment and pay for both your Harvard accommodation and an apartment, but rent in Cambridge is nuts and I'm not rich.
  2. There is only a mental health counseling center, not an academic counseling center. Everything else is handled through the Houses or through departments.
  3. While I am aware other cities have rats, these rats are in my room. I'm fine with outdoor rats, I just don't like them running around under my bed and in my bathroom.
11

It is not allowed to live off campus. Harvard is very strict about that. You must live on campus at least the first year, then have to have a very good excuse not to for the next 3 years. Over 99% of Harvard students live on campus.

12

@batgencam1- Granted I’m not very familiar with Harvard, but according to the student handbook, it seems like all you have to do is fill out a form to opt-out of on-campus housing. http://static.fas.harvard.edu/registrar/ugrad_handbook/current/chapter6/nonres_life.html

If there is some requirement necessary, you could get a doctor’s note.

13

While I appreciate your looking into it, while you can opt out of getting a room assignment, you cannot opt out of paying for housing. I know that sounds dumb, and indeed it is dumb, but you can decline to have a room but still get charged as if you did. Because one needs a house for advising, sports, etc., you can’t just decline. You have the option of going to Dudley, but all charges remain the same. So you just pay for housing twice over which I cannot afford.

14

I have chipmunks in my backyard that are undermining my foundation. Think of them as striped rats.

My solution isn’t to move, my solution is to trap them in a havahart trap (they’re about 10 bux on amazon) and relocate them. My mother in law routinely relocates hers to the bottom of her lake, but I’m too softhearted to murder chipmunks (as destructive as they are) so I would suggest you start trapping your rats and either drowning them in the Charles or relocating them several stops down on the T. You can reuse the traps. At some point you’re going to run out of rats.

I think part of you is having a problem with hating a school that you worked so hard to get into. I’ve also hated places/ job that on the surface look like it should have been the most awesome thing ever. My solution to get through it successfully was to reframe it as not some place I liked, but some place that I wasn’t going to let beat me.

Don’t let Harvard beat you-yes, it sucks from what you’ve described, yes you hate it, but figuring out all the solutions to your problems rather than ditching and going to another school (which will present its own unique set of problems you will also have to conquer) is going to make you much more resilient and mature.

My suggestion for getting the ears of the powerful people at Harvard is to make friends with people who are good at this. The things in life I’m not good at-I have friends that will go to bat for me, as I do for them with the things they’re not good at. Throw a rock, hit an influential person at Harvard-they have to know how to bend the right person’s ear. They can’t all be floundering about there-figure out how they fixed it, and do that.