After overcoming the burden of finals in early May, students face the next few months with mixed emotions. At first, we are near-sighted, with a romantic view of the approaching summer.
Updates from LinkedIn about what our ambitious friends are doing shake us out of this honeymoon phase, reminding us to enhance our résumés. The grind never stops.
Among students here at Harvard, it is a shared belief that we should use the summer to get ahead. Or, realistically, to avoid falling behind our peers. However, the daunting question is how we confront burnout after returning to the fall grind so soon.
For many of us, our mental restoration can occur once we leave campus and return home, with the change in physical setting signifying closure to a rigorous school year. Yet some of us are ready to return to the Harvard scene before the fall. Harvard bustles with undergraduates and high schoolers throughout the summer who find an optimal balance of working and feeling productive while also finding time to pursue fun, relaxing activities that only summer lends time for.
As a rising sophomore, I spent the majority of my summer on campus taking a class through the General Program for undergraduate and graduate students. I did not feel I had done enough preparation for an internship the summer after my freshman year. Plus, I was reassured by hearing strong recommendations from upperclassmen friends to fall back on summer resources provided on campus. They told me Harvard has a more laid back vibe in the summertime.
My qualms, which centered around feelings of monotony for being around campus too long, still lingered. I questioned whether campus would feel empty or start to be repetitive. To my surprise, I found many familiar faces on campus working for various summer programs, researching for professors, or working for Harvard-affiliated organizations like Phillips Brooks House Association. A popular attraction for many of the students I knew already was the proctoring program, which acts as a part-time job but also provides benefits to undergraduate students, such as housing accommodations and a covered meal plan.
My blockmate and fellow Indyite Kaitlyn Hou ’27 served as a pre-college proctor while working as a research assistant at Harvard Business School. Hou heard of the proctoring program and its promise of free housing and a meal plan through one of her rowing teammates who had previously done it. When asked what prompted her decision to stay on Harvard’s campus for the majority of summer, Hou emphasized the freedom to explore someplace away from home.
“I wanted to be in Cambridge over the summer because I feel like your freshman summer, you’re given a lot of flexibility,” Hou said. “I’m from the suburbs of Dallas, and the summers here are just so hot that I knew that, ideally, being in Cambridge on campus would be a good opportunity to utilize a lot of the school’s resources without the business and chaos of the school year.”
If Hou had one drawback to her summer, it was feeling slightly misinformed about the commitment required by her specific proctoring program. “To anyone who is considering applying to be a pre-college proctor, I was not given a fair warning about the amount of time and commitment it was,” Hou said. “Taking care of 150+ high schoolers on a field trip to a baseball game or Rhode Island is not an easy feat.”
On the flip side, Hou appreciated the opportunity to counsel high schoolers across the world who were interested in pursuing higher education. She added, “It was refreshing to have more free time over the summer to be able to leave the Harvard bubble. Whereas during the school year, my schedule was tight, the more relaxed schedule allowed me to take the bus to Newbury and explore Boston at a leisurely pace.”
Catherine Li ’27 was drawn to a summer on campus after looking through Harvard websites this past winter and discovering she could take a class. As a prospective electrical engineering concentrator, Li acknowledged “there’s a lot of requirements to get out of the way,” so decided to take ENSC-138, the summer school equivalent of ES150.
Whereas Hou did the pre-college program, counseling high school students enrolled for two weeks, Li did the secondary proctoring program, looking after high school students enrolled in classes for seven weeks. Li also mentioned that she went into this summer not knowing more than a handful of people. Yet the proctoring position helped her become friends with many of her co-proctors, most of whom were Harvard rising sophomores and juniors.
Li said she was lucky to have her sister keep her company on campus and helped encourage her to explore beyond the realms of Cambridge. Being on the sailing team served as a mechanism to help Li break out of the Harvard bubble occasionally. The sailing team usually sails up towards the Charles River between Longfellow and Harvard Bridge, which connects Cambridge to Back Bay. Li mentioned, “[I] also sailed a few times, not as much as I’d like to have, but did some training there too. So good to get a little bit out of just Harvard.”
I also spoke to Nigel Savage ’27, who cited having friends at work as a factor in avoiding burnout. Working for the Crimson Business Board during the majority of the summer, he pitched ads for companies with other students on the business team. His summer work differed from during the school year, when he was responsible for organizing conferences. An additional bonus was that Savage would be working with three good friends, who he became closer to over the summer.
Just as both proctoring programs described above could become draining due to their long hours, Savage underscored the importance of social events outside of his workdays, even if that meant seeing friends outside of Crim Biz. Savage recalled, “There was one weekend where I went to visit some high school friends [in Rhode Island] for Fourth of July, which was really good.”
When asked if they would spend a summer on campus again, Savage, Li, and Hou told me they might want a different experience for next summer but appreciated that they used their freshman summer to stay on campus. The reviews each of them gave were highly positive. Yet, none of them dismissed the fact they had occasional feelings of campus burnout. They resolved this uniquely with a day trip into Beacon Hill, sailing out of Cambridge from the Charles River, and seeing new friendly faces in Rhode Island. The common denominator in all these situations was escaping the Harvard Bubble.
I was not the only one who viewed having more free time on campus as a double-edged sword. My worries extended beyond monotony, such as concerns I was falling behind my peers with limited work or research experience. It was encouraging to gather insights from my peers who returned to Harvard’s campus as a fallback plan, not necessarily figuring out exciting, relaxing, or résumé-boosting summer plans several months beforehand.
Even though we were busy with our Harvard endeavors, more free time could make the campus feel small. As the summer progressed, I gained a new perspective that my friends also shared: the additional time encouraged us to leave the Harvard Bubble, which is not so feasible during the school year when time is more sparse. While many students, exhausted from the school year, would want to be anywhere but Cambridge from May through August, those of us who excitedly returned to campus made the most of our location.
Lucie Stefanoni ’27 (luciestefanoni@college.harvard.edu) wouldn’t mind taking a summer class abroad.