College is, for most people, your first time out in the world as an adult. You’re independent, living without parents and the rules and supervision that come with them. And you simply can’t fly the nest if you’ve still got one wing caught in the twigs. That’s what your high school sweetheart does. They hold […]
It is safe to say that the majority of Harvard’s students are fueled by their ambitions for great academic and career success. This drive to overachieve remains unbridled by many of the “distractions” associated with college life. From pulling all nighters instead of finally meeting up with that friend we swore we “had to catch […]
Are you sick of people telling you to take CS50 with David Malan? Upset that you did not win the lottery for “Meritocracy and Its Critics” with Michael Sandel? Tired of perusing the course catalog during your DIY shopping week trying to find the perfect 4th class? Harvard students commonly have three classes per semester […]
EATING & WORKING: Don’t Go To Blackbird Doughnuts, Go To Flour Bakery + Cafe Before people get upset, we’re not saying that the Smith Center is not a good place to get some work done. We love the Smith Center. However, we think that Blackbird Doughnuts is forgettable and should be replaced. Blackbird Doughnuts has […]
This past July, Maya Bodnick ’26 wrote an article titled “ChatGPT Goes to Harvard” for former Indy member Matthew Yglesias’s ’03 Substack SlowBoring. Bodnick feed ChatGPT essay prompts from all eight of her classes and asked her professors and TAs to grade the resulting writing as they would any other student. At the end of […]
“We’d have issues that had the [Students for a Democratic Society] in one article and the Young Republicans in another,” said James Vaseff, 1984 Harvard Graduate School of Design LOEB Fellow and early contributor to the Harvard Independent. Vaseff used photojournalism to further one of the Indy’s foremost missions: to deliberately provoke university-wide commentary and […]
Harvard prides itself on its liberal arts education model, which, according to its mission statement, “begin[s] in the classroom with exposure to new ideas” and “new ways of understanding.” Harvard executes this mission through the College Curriculum—up to 12 required courses that encourage students to engage with topics relevant to the human experience, such as […]
In response to this summer’s Supreme Court decision rejecting race conscious admissions, Harvard has dutifully committed itself to image-building and damage control. From President Gay’s reassurance that Harvard will continue to commit itself to diversity to administrators affirming that Harvard must always be “a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had […]
“Affirmative action for the privileged.” U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s June 29th tweet following this June’s overturning of affirmative action by the Supreme Court brings up a both necessary and unprecedented question. Calling out Harvard’s legacy admissions process in her post, a practice which the Justice Department recently launched an investigation into, Cortez seemingly equates the […]
Going to Harvard implies having it all figured out. With peers that serve in Parliament, compete in the Olympics, or have worked in Michelin star restaurants, it seems that everyone else is achieving greatness before graduation. Even seemingly less-extraordinary peers are on the path to success—with hundreds of sophomores lining up investment banking and consulting […]