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