Ask any student rushing from their dorm to a morning lecture, clutching a cup of Blank Street coffee, about their day ahead, and you’ll hear a whirlwind of commitments: guest speakers, club meetings, and networking events. At Harvard, everything—friends, food, a library shelf with your name on it—feels just a few steps away. The proximity […]
I’ll never forget the day I got into Harvard. I was standing by my gate in the middle of Newark International Airport with my parents. It was around 7 p.m., and my flight to Orlando was taking off in 50 minutes. As the hum of flight announcements and the sound of rolling suitcases filled the […]
Trigger warning: mentions of suicide. We remember hospitals to be quieter than they truly are. Their hallways form “private rooms:” large spaces partitioned by sheets of blue instead of walls, so that while a patient might not see anything around them, they hear everything. Footsteps reverberate off the tiled floor while noise grows and fades […]
About 10 weeks into my first semester at Harvard, I sat down with a friend for a catch-up, and we both ended up breaking down over our Harvard journeys so far. Although it was difficult to express how burnt out we were feeling, I was unexpectedly reassured when I realized I wasn’t alone in experiencing […]
For Taiwanese Cultural Society members, Wednesday dinner means family. Even though the food is standard dining hall fare (with an occasional grass jelly dessert), the sense of community always leaves members wanting seconds. Such meals happen every week, when the small but close-knit TCS gathers in the Eliot private dining room to catch up on […]
It’s 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, and I’m dodging pedestrians and street signs on Rue de Bonne Nouvelle in Paris as I jog at a relaxed pace. Suddenly, the runners around me speed up, and I find myself sprinting down the road, passing neighbors at a speed I didn’t think was possible after running nearly […]
At the start of the semester, just a week after winter break, two friends sat in Bluestone Lane deep in conversation about studying abroad. One, a junior who had just voided her final opportunity to study abroad for the spring, admitted to feeling unsure about whether she would come to regret the missed opportunity. Her […]
To an outsider, the world of American politics might seem more like a brilliantly written SNL skit than a functioning institution. From the White House producing ASMR-style deportation videos to a billionaire worth more than the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of 140 countries running a government department, stepping into this political arena feels not just […]
My Harvard career began with failure. Feeling unmoored as I arrived on campus, I threw myself into trying out for the College’s varsity squash. In high school, squash wasn’t just a sport—it was a defining part of my identity, and within weeks of arriving on campus I was training relentlessly—running sub‐five‐minute miles, working out tirelessly, […]
By the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, there were no anonymous notes slipped under my door and no bouquet of roses from a secret admirer. It seemed there was only one plausible solution to save my first Valentine’s Day at Harvard: Datamatch. Datamatch is a Harvard-invented matchmaking service. It started as a solution to Harvard […]