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