Things you cannot get back…
By HUNTER RICHARDS
By the end of your four years at Harvard, you’ll grow as a person and gain quite a lot. But you’ll lose even more. Here are some of the things you will lose around campus during your undergraduate career:
Sleep
You’ll hit the “snooze” button more times than you’ve swiped on Tinder, and you’re roommates hate you for it. The amount of all-nighters you’ve pulled is starting to outnumber the amount of lectures you’ve been to this spring semester. In four years, you learn how to accessorize those under-eye bags and own them. Yeah, you’re exhausted but that is a LOOK and you’re pulling it off.
Canada Goose Jacket
We’ve all seen the posts in the “Class of” pages. If you didn’t lose your Canada Goose jacket at a final club, did you even really go to a final club? Dean Khurana’s distaste for single-gender social organizations all stem from the winter he was especially cold because someone grabbed his jacket by mistake, and we all see how that turned out.
Track of Time in Lamont
You know that part of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief when they walk into the Lotus Resort and Casino, only to realize that time doesn’t exist inside and you can be trapped for decades? Yeah, that’s Lamont but the Café’s ambrosia is shitty coffee that you can’t complain about because on what else are you going to use your BoardPlus?
Food
You’ll learn how to live with your trust issues of sharing a fridge. Whether you left that pint of Ben & Jerry’s in a common room fridge in your house or whether it was in the tiny freezer compartment of your mini-fridge in your double, it’s long gone by now.
Goals
You’ll have switched your concentration at least once by the end of freshman fall. You were never a fan of commitment and immediately started itching at the collar after declaring, which is probably why you’ve bounced between departments multiple times before settling back down where you started. That thesis you thought you were going to get honors with? Yeah, that went up in flames when you realized how much you hated writing. Feel old yet?
Virginity
You’ll probably hold onto that bad boy until junior year or so, but by then you know virginity is a social construct and It’s Not That Deep, Fam™. Unlike your jacket or socks, you can’t exactly send over your house list looking for this. Especially since you likely have fallen trap to House-cest and your virginity is in a paper bin next to his desk 2 floors above you right now, and it’ll probably still be there for a solid month because he’s gross and never takes out his trash.
Dignity
Whether this is from those countless hours in the depths of Lamont, the number of times you’ve swiped into a single meal, or how much clothing you’ve lost, it happens. And it’s okay. Just because you lose a couple leaves doesn’t mean you won’t grow back some new ones and take off on a new branch.
The “Best Friends Forever” bracelet from High School
You haven’t even texted your best friend from High School since you told her you’d be coming home for winter break. Even then, you didn’t actually make plans to “catch a meal sometime,” regardless of the fact that you’re next-door neighbors. You did, however, fly across the country to hang out for a weekend with your freshman roommate. But it’s nothing personal.
Sanity
You got really great at keeping track of who last took the garbage out, but at what cost? The amount of problem sets you juggled, along with the recruiting you did just to get rejected from the jobs you hoped for, can really take a toll.
Multiple Pairs of Socks
No matter how hard you try, you’ll never come to one-up the washing machines in your dorm for all your four years here.
Keys
Taping the door has become your brand. The security guards know your name and room number by heart after all the late-night lock-outs you had before you realized you had a roll of packing tape lying around. Yeah, you’ll get term-billed but it’s about the friends you made along the way.
Weight
Just kidding, those Freshman 15 keep hitting you where it hurts (your ass). Just like your student loans, the weight starts gaining interest and you’re looking for ways to default on this, too.
Hunter Richards (hrichards@college.harvard) is not quite done with Harvard, and is still searching for things lost and things not yet found.