Would Harvard be a horrible fit for me?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>Hi, everyone, I'm a graduated senior considering applying to Harvard this fall/winter. I think my opinion of Harvard keeps dropping the more I read about it, and I'm unsure of how well it fits what I'm looking for in a college. At this point I'm just wondering if it's worth the application fee, haha.</p>

<p>I LOVE Middlebury (will apply ED if I'm able to) and Bowdoin. I'm planning on double majoring in either English and history or English and theatre (I know I can't double major at Harvard). I wouldn't describe myself as a "hippie," but I am very liberal (socialist/communist liberal, not just "Democratic" liberal). I'm definitely not a super high-strung person, and I don't think I'd be able to handle an elitist or conservative environment.</p>

<p>I know Harvard has a reputation of having a very elitist student body - is this true? Also, I absolutely don't want to attend a school with Greek life - how similar are the finals clubs to Greek life? I've heard that they're pretty much the same thing, but I don't know if this is true.</p>

<p>Also, I love rural New England (I've lived in a farming town in NE my whole life) and the small LAC environment. I visited Harvard and remember liking at least part of the campus, but how urban is it really? (I visited a while ago, long story). Also, Harvard is a much larger than any of the other schools on my list - I apologise because this is probably a super vague/poorly worded question, but how big does the student body feel (i.e. how cluttered is it, etc.)?</p>

<p>I'm not really worried about it being a horrible academic fit or a horrible financial fit (we did the EFC calculator and it was manageable).</p>

<p>I realise that there are similar threads posted in this same forum, so I apologise for making another - but thank you very much for taking the time to help me out :)</p>

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<p>As a student who was just admitted (and will be attending) for next year, I don’t have a whole lot of experience when it comes to the life at Harvard. However, while I was attending the visiting program for Harvard, I found that all of the students were surprisingly nice, down to earth, and just plain good people. I also come from a small town and was worried about the “elitism” at Harvard. I really couldn’t have been further off. One of the highlights of my visit was my last night there; a few other pre-frosh and myself stayed up until five in the morning talking about EVERYTHING that came to mind. That’s what made my decision. </p>

<p>From my experience and from most of the opinions I’ve heard, Harvard is actually a very liberal school. Either way, you will be able to find others who have the same political ideals as you at almost any college.</p>

<p>Again, I’ve had a very limited time thus far at Harvard, but while I visited, I never once felt cramped from all the other students. The dorms are HUGE so everyone has their own private space, and although Harvard may be larger than most LACs, you also have to take into account the graduate school. If you look at the total enrollment for Harvard, it’s around 18,000 students, 12,000 of which are graduate students. So in reality, there are only ~1,600 undergrad students per class at Harvard, making it relatively small (although I don’t know what your list includes).</p>

<p>Hope this helps!</p>

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<p>Look, if your idea of a wonderful college is Middlebury or Bowdoin, Harvard is probably a poor fit for you, but mainly because it’s a large, urban, sprawly research university, not because of its politics, or elitism, or whether it has finals clubs.</p>

<p>If you would describe yourself as a socialist/communist, that will put you on the left fringe of the community at any elite US college, including Middlebury and Bowdoin (both of which I think of as relatively conservative places in the New England LAC spectrum). Like most universities, Harvard tends toward the liberal, but a wide range of views is reflected in its student body and faculty. You wouldn’t be the only communist there, but you wouldn’t have problems with crowd control at your secret cell meetings. At lots of colleges, it’s common for students raised in super-conservative or super-liberal environments to have a sharp change in their political views, as they get exposed to intelligent expressions of other ideas for the first time. But I think that happens less at Harvard than elsewhere because the kinds of students Harvard accepts tend to have started questioning their parents’ orthodoxies, and making up their own minds, long before college.</p>

<p>Elitism is a strong value at Harvard, but if you have missed that elitism is also a strong value at Middlebury and Bowdoin you are not paying close enough attention. Elitism does not mean snobbiness. There’s snobbiness at Harvard, too, but not so much that you can’t choose to ignore it. (Same at M and B, too, although probably a few ticks less, because the snobby people are maybe a few ticks less impressed with themselves.) Most people there, as elsewhere, are down-to-earth and friendly, especially if you can understand what they are saying. If you are really allergic to elitism, you ought to re-think your college search entirely (and you will have to ditch your aversion to fraternities, because that’s 100% an elitist attitude).</p>

<p>As for the finals clubs, see “snobbiness” above. I think most people at Harvard are oblivious to their existence. They really affect only their members (who tend to like them), a small group of people who wish they were members and aren’t (I have never met any of these, but I assume they exist), and an even smaller group of people who choose to obsess about their existence as an expression of their own psychological problems. All three of those groups added together still constitute a fringe element of the Harvard undergraduate student body. And, by the way, wherever you go, including one of the no-fraternity colleges, will have some exclusionary social cliques composed mainly of relatively wealthy, cool kids and their friends. That’s life, not college.</p>

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<p>Look into Vassar. Very liberal. Beautiful campus with lots of open space.</p>

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<p>Why can’t you double major at Harvard?</p>

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<p>LAMuniv,</p>

<p>“Hi, everyone, I’m a graduated senior…”</p>

<p>Do you mean that you’re a graduatING senior, as in, you’ll graduate in the spring of 2015?</p>

<p>I’m assuming that’s what you mean. Otherwise, it sounds like you took a gap year, perhaps.</p>

<p>All types of folks go to Harvard. The politics of my son’s friends and acquaintances runs from vegetarian anarchists to rock-ribbed Republicans to crypto-monarchists to old-left liberals to anarcho-capitalists. The overall political environment of Harvard is mainstream liberalism. My sense from my son, though, is that politics are not foremost on most folks’ minds. Most of the folks he knows are far more interesting than their politics.</p>

<p>Although the overall environment isn’t politically conservative, keep in mind that Harvard is a prominent institution of the “establishment,” and many folks at Harvard seem fine with that. Not a few are at Harvard with the intention of becoming part of the establishment.</p>

<p>“I know Harvard has a reputation of having a very elitist student body.”</p>

<p>If you mean academically, intellectually elite, yes. Very bright bunch of folks up there in Cambridge. But if you mean “elitist” in a pejorative sense, my son hasn’t encountered much of hat. Most of his friends and acquaintances are children of the middle- and upper-middle class. A few of his friends come from wealthy families, or families of publicly-prominent people, but no one’s yet laughed at him because he doesn’t have a yacht. </p>

<p>I don’t think the Final Clubs figure prominently into the lives of most students. At least not for my son or any of his friends… There’s enough happening at Harvard apart from them.</p>

<p>Finally, Harvard’s campus is urban, there’s no getting around that. There are some park-like parts to the campus, but it sits amidst the city of Cambridge, and from one place to another might well require crossing busy city streets. It does not have the look and feel of a small LAC, at all.</p>

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<p>

It’s a minor point, but the foregoing phrase is an oxymoron. Back when the distinction between the “New Left” and the “old left” mattered, the main difference was that members of the old left (so-defined, of course, by members of the New Left) were doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists, while the New Left picked and chose their Marx and cared little (if at all) for Lenin. Within either group, calling someone a “liberal” was one of the worst insults possible. They hated liberals more than they hated conservatives, or each other.</p>

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<p>@rstein3 As far as I know, I can only choose one concentration (major) and one secondary concentration (minor) at Harvard, but I could be wrong. </p>

<p>@notjoe I am taking a gap year; I am high school class of 2014.</p>

<p>@WasatchWriter‌ I’ve looked at Vassar, but I’m still on the fence as it’s further from home than I’d like to go. I’ll research it in more depth :)</p>

<p>Thanks for your input, everyone!! :)</p>

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<p>I’m trying to figure out why it is on your list at all, like you are trying to make yourself like it or have people convince you for some reason. </p>

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<p>^^ Me too, as Harvard does NOT offer any theater related degree. @LAMuniv: Maybe you should do a bit more due diligence on the school: <a href=“HarvardKey - Harvard University Authentication Service”>HarvardKey - Harvard University Authentication Service;

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<p>See the handbook: <a href=“http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k95151&pageid=icb.page584275”>http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k95151&pageid=icb.page584275&lt;/a&gt;

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<p>@BrownParent It’s on my list because I visited as a senior and remember liking it, and I like a lot of what I’ve heard about it, but at the same time I have also heard some not-so-great things about it, and I want to get those cleared up to make sure that I am making as informed of a decision as possible. :). I also visited it when I was applying to college as a senior rather than a gap-year-er, and I visited at a time when my ideals of what I want in a college were very different than what they are now. I loved Harvard looking at it from my former mindset, but I also want to make sure I love it in my current mindset.</p>

<p>@gibby Harvard has a secondary field in dramatic arts, which would be my way of studying theatre there. I was apparently getting Harvard confused with another school with the “no double majors” thing (I did extensive research when I applied to college as a senior, but haven’t done a whole lot of refreshing since…). Unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to joint concentrate in English and history because of the history departments rules… Thanks for correcting me about this issue, though!</p>

<p>I apologise for any stupid typos; I’m typing on my phone and it’s rather difficult to go back and edit.</p>

<p>Thank you, all, again.</p>

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<p>^^ FWIW: Harvard’s secondary concentrations do not even appear on a student’s diploma – so it’s not like a traditional minor found at other schools. If you are interested in some sort of theater related degree, there are far better options than Harvard (and I’m saying this with a kid at the school). Yale, for example, offers a degree in Theater Studies – and third of current Yale Theater Studies majors are double-majoring in other disciplines, including History and English: <a href=“http://theaterstudies.yale.edu”>http://theaterstudies.yale.edu</a></p>

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<p>@gibby It doesn’t so much matter to me if it shows up on my diploma - I have an interest in studying theatre tech and dramatic literature, and I plan on taking enough courses in it to earn a major at a college that offers a theatre major, but I don’t plan on doing anything more related to drama in my future than being a librarian at a dramatic arts library. I applied to Yale last year, but I think it’s a bit too urban for me - it’s fun to spend a day there, but I can’t imagine living there, haha. I noticed after reading through some of my previous response that it had a note of sassiness I did not intend it to have - sorry about that! And thanks again so much for your help :)</p>

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<p>

That made me curious, so I looked up your thread history:<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1665577-lac-chances-gap-year.html#latest”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1665577-lac-chances-gap-year.html#latest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

If you have been rejected just this past April by Harvard, Yale and Williams, you should really rethink your goals. By all means reapply, but understand that institutions keep an electronic copy of a rejected student’s file for 3 years. So, when you reapply to those schools, Admissions Officers will have access to your previous application and the notes they made on your file about why you were rejected. So, they are going to be really looking at whatever you do with your gap year and looking for how you have grown and matured. IMHO, given the odds get tougher every year, I think you’re hoping for a “Hail Mary” play here. You really should be applying to more appropriate schools, such as the ones you were already accepted to – or Middlebury and Bowdoin, which are fabulous schools.</p>

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<p>@gibby I’m totally aware of the fact that I hardly have any chance of getting in given that I was rejected last year, but I raised some of my standardized test scores, and I’m hoping that my year-long internship could boost my application a bit. Also, I applied last year as a physics major, but my lowest grades were science courses and my extracurriculars suggested that my interests were in a totally different area. Now, my choice of major is more aligned with my transcript/ECs. I know that even with the changes, there is probably still a 99.9% chance I will be rejected again, but that’s part of why I made this thread, I guess - to see if it was worth a shot, haha.</p>

<p>One of my issues last year was that I didn’t really have any solid/high-match schools… all either complete reaches, complete safeties, or low-matches (purely based on stats). This is on reason I like Middlebury and Bowdoin - they’re reaches, but not as out-of-the-question as Ivies and the like.</p>

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<p>You don’t seem to like Harvard. That’s FINE. Different strokes for different folks, and that’s why they make chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, and so forth. Why are you trying to talk yourself into it? </p>

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<p>@Pizzagirl‌ I loved it when I applied to colleges last year, but I want to make sure that now that I’m applying to colleges again, I still love it. I just have some negative things I’ve heard about it that I want to verify are not true.</p>

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<p>You don’t ask other people if you love something. You either do or you don’t. </p>

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<p>@Pizzagirl I loved it, and now I have mixed feelings about it, but those mixed feelings may be due to some incorrect things I’ve heard. I’m not asking people if I love it - I’m asking about the issues that made me nervous about Harvard, and from that I will decide for myself whether or not I still love it.</p>