A year ago, Harvard students faced their first Christmas under COVID-19. At the time, vaccines were still a distant dream, Delta the variant du jour, and Harvard staunchly committed to remote instruction. COVID-19 had completely shaken up everything anyone thought was possible in a university setting. If you got the virus, you and your loved […]
One of the lesser-mentioned casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic here at Harvard College is the practice affectionately known as Shopping Week. For the uninitiated first-years and sophomores, Shopping Week occurred during the first week of each semester. Prior to the official start of classes and course registration deadline, students had the opportunity to “shop,” or […]
How hard is this class? Will I get an A? These are, for many students, the first concerns when deciding whether to take a class. Searching for answers, students turn to Harvard’s Q Guide, which publishes student feedback on classes at the end of every semester. Also known as the Harvard FAS Course Evaluations in […]
Having conversations about people’s future plans, and realizing just how impressive they are, is a quintessential Harvard experience despite our awareness of the impressiveness of professors and students alike. Such is the case with Professor Martin Surbeck, from the department of Human Evolutionary Biology, who will be spending much of the winter and spring semester […]
Color kits, nose swabs, sets of eyes above blue disposable masks. These sights were defining features of campus life this fall. Though most students were compliant in wearing masks indoors and completing their weekly testing, more students disagreed with Harvard’s COVID-19 policies this semester than one might expect. And as the surging omicron variant renders […]
The Harvard Undergraduate Council has called an emergency meeting for Friday, December 3rd, at 3:00 PM to lower the voting threshold in Act 40F-78, according to internal messages and an email obtained by the Independent. President Noah Harris ‘22 called for the meeting at 12:23 PM on Thursday, December 2nd in the internal Slack of […]
Already the Fall 2021 Harvard Undergraduate Council presidential election was wrought with controversy leading up to the start of voting on November 11th. The council dissolved a ticket that allegedly broke rules on early campaigning and presenting false information, which was then reinstated after the Dean of Students office intervened. Another ticket accused the UC […]
Have you ever gotten nearly 13,000 likes on a tweet? No? Me neither. Believe it or not, some of Harvard’s most beloved professors have. Indeed, Economics Professor Jason Furman’s most popular tweet has received 13.2k likes and 2.4k retweets—even more likes than Justin Timberlake earns. “I try to generally stick to things where I bring […]
TikTok, an app for creating and sharing short videos, has blown up over the past few years. Currently, it has over 1 billion users worldwide and has been downloaded more than 200 million times in the United States. The Independent spoke with four Harvard TikTokers who have amassed large followings on the platform: Brad Wolf […]
15% of Harvard undergraduates have been diagnosed with a mental health issue, according to a 2018 HUHS survey cited in the July 2020 Report of the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health. 11% were in treatment, and 46% (including over half of all women) had “concerns” about potential undiagnosed issues that they may have […]