In a 2022 interview with The Harvard Crimson, Dean Rakesh Khurana was asked to share a piece of advice with graduating seniors. His words of wisdom? “Don’t gratuitously drop the H-Bomb.”
Upon acceptance to Harvard, most pre-college students are given that same advice. Do not tell people you go to Harvard or risk looking like a pretentious schmuck. What no one mentions is that you risk looking even worse if you spend five minutes tiptoeing around the question. You will be forced to lie flat-out or reveal in an embarrassed whisper that yes, indeed, that “liberal arts college outside of Boston” is actually the famous Harvard University. Dancing around the topic will, ten times out of ten, make it seem a bigger deal than it is. The truth always tends to come out one way or another—do not let yourself be singed by a bomb you should have dropped long before.
In a podcast episode for the Higher Ed Marketer, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Harvard Business School, Brian Kenny, said, “people think about [Harvard] as an elitist brand.” It is fair to be worried about being perceived as a fool who has bought into the idea of pursuing useless academia. Perhaps you do not want to be seen as a product of an elitist institution or be grouped with a socioeconomic class that you do not identify with. Right now especially, going to Harvard carries a stigma—everyone wants to know your personal opinion on anti-semitism at Harvard or Claudine Gay’s resignation.
But what Kenny failed to acknowledge is that our own students forge and reinforce this perception. When we dance around the name “Harvard,” we assume that those who did not attend our school would be incapable of graciously handling the mere name of our institution. By sheltering those around us from the H-Bomb, we decide that dropping it would be that big a deal.
The reality is, they don’t care (at least in the way you might think). Other college students played the same admissions game we did. They too compressed 18 years into a tiny PDF and shipped it off to colleges around the country. They rolled the dice—they got in some places and were rejected by others. Many of them did not even want to go to Harvard—of the nearly four million annual high school graduates, less than 60,000 apply to Harvard. When we use a euphemism like “a school outside of Boston,” we assume that everyone else thinks the H-Bomb is just as important as we do. They don’t.
Once you get over the initial fear, you will start to realize that you can garner positive reactions for being a Harvard student. While we can’t speak on post-grad H-Bomb usage, we do know that, in our humble experiences, other college students love it. It is an opportunity to defy stereotypes when you are not conforming to what people imagine a Harvard student to be like—maybe you are leading a rally at a football game or dancing on a table at a club. When in Boston, people wonder: Why are you out? Harvard students are always studying. Outside of Boston, you’re an anomaly. In any single coffee shop, you likely are one of the only Harvard students hanging around.
Going out both in Boston and at home, we have found that strangers often seem overly invested in the intricacies of our Cambridge lives, asking questions from what our parties are like to how many hours of homework we have per week. We have even heard a tale of a “Harvard Hotties” bottle service sign being waved around at a club in West Palm Beach. We have yet to encounter a negative response to our admissions of where we attend school—that is, unless you count a few unfortunate run-ins with the odd Columbia student (i.e., Harvard reject). Yet, to hide from the spotlight, many of our peers simply say they go to school in Boston.
But here’s the thing. You got in. You deserve to be here. Why let other people’s perception of what you should be stop you from being who you really are—and unabashedly at that? Although some people might not believe that you really go to Harvard (we have definitely been asked to pull out our HUIDs a few dozen times), you should not be ashamed to defy stereotypes of elitism and haughty intellectual superiority. Despite the constant swirl of controversies surrounding our administration or polarizing actions of students, attending Harvard is seen as a privilege. When you tell people you attend this school, it changes how they perceive you, but more importantly, you can change how they perceive Harvard.
When we conceal where we go to school, we only reinforce the stigma surrounding Harvard that Kenny highlighted. What’s more, we don’t allow others to learn what Harvard is really like. We allow their misconceptions of Harvard and its students—a snobbish institution chock-full of insolent, antisocial students—to persist. Instead, we make them dig the H-Bomb out of us, and once they do, they rarely want to keep talking.
Our advice? Just say you go to Harvard. Not just for the congratulations or for the free drinks (although that is a nice bonus), but to fight the stereotype of the pretentious jerk who thinks that he is cool just because he goes to Harvard. Be proud of your accomplishment and treat yourself like a normal member of society. Because, at the end of the day, that’s just what you are.
Mia Tavares ’27 (miatavares@college.harvard.edu) has, while out dancing, signed into her my.harvard portal just to prove to someone that she really does attend Harvard. Jonah Karafiol ’26 (jonahkarafiol@college.harvard.edu) purchased a sleeveless Harvard shirt to wear to the gym immediately after getting in.