Your Will to Survive
By HUNTER RICHARDS
There are plenty of ways to hate your life that don’t require doing a thesis, so why bother spending 9 months suffering when there’s plenty of one-time instances you can lose your will to survive!
- Taking a class with quizzes at the beginning of each lecture that you can’t just send a clicker with a friend to get you attendance credit. The only thing worse would be when you drunk message your professor after ghosting on their email to you earlier this week that you suddenly feel too guilty to ignore. This is the one time that drunk texting your ex would have been a better use of your time.
- Climbing all the way up onto ol’ Johnny Harv and getting stage fright before you can let loose. Of course someone pulls out their iPhone and you know this is going to end up on someone’s Snap story, and you’re already kissing goodbye any chance of running for public office. You try to forget that you had to grab the foot to climb up there and noticed it was already wet, but it’s senior year and you still can’t convince yourself that it was dew.
- Being the kid who cries on housing day. And then seeing yourself in the background of photos of giant mascots with swollen red eyes that give your reaction to your first Harvard midterm a run for its money.
- Swiping right too eagerly to realize that you just matched with your tutor. There’s really no good way to ask for a letter of recommendation or even schedule a time to meet for advice after seeing what a basic f*ckboi your tutor is. You also know that the dog in his photo isn’t his because you’d have showed up to study breaks by now if there was a pet in the mix.
- Forgetting to turn the sound down on your laptop before going into that 100 person lecture with great acoustics and having your friend sitting right next to you send a meme on Facebook that echoes throughout the Northwest Labs’ basement. Not quite as bad as when you opened a Snapchat video from the night before that you didn’t realize had volume during a presentation in your 12-person seminar, but still pretty rough. Okay, not nearly as bad but you were only a sophomore and thought that that was the worst it could possibly get.
- Being that guy who gets drunk at First Chance Dance and hits on the girl that lives down the hall from you by bragging that you go to Harvard. And forgetting that you can’t use that line while on campus when it’s kind of the only thing you’ve had going for you for a while.
- Being the ID checker in Widener because you need a campus job to support your Chipotle habit and somehow working the shift that your ex decides to swipe in with the person they swore there was nothing going on with. And then seeing them walk back out 15 minutes later with one of their zipper’s undone and the other’s hair matted up a bit in the back. Which meant they had 5 minutes to get down to Level C, 20 seconds to do the deed, 5 minutes of him promising that he swears this never happens, and another 5 minutes to leave.
- Shopping a class that is a requirement to graduate and feeling good about it. Until your professor introduces the TFs for the course and you realize you’ve given head to the head TF. Yes, in theory, hiring TFs and CAs for courses from current undergraduates who have previously taken the class sounds like a great plan. But, in practice, it is possible to do shots with the person grading your homework that you’re about to ask for an extension on because of blacking out…. there’s just a lot to unpack there.
- Somehow ending up on one of those email list-servs that nobody remembers signing up for and receiving an onslaught of “Please remove me from this list” for the next 7 hours. You thought your grill order was done but it’s actually just yet another underclassmen with too much time on their hands.
If you’re looking for a way to abandon your will to survive, dropping it off on the steps of your department may be the way you go but it’s important to remember you still have options, especially since your thesis was required!
Hunter Richards ‘18 (hrichards@college.harvard.edu) is alive and well, as far as her mother knows.