Summer may have flown by, but it isn’t truly over until Sept. 10, the end of the Add/Drop period. For first-years, finalizing a schedule before even locating the SEC is a daunting task. –
In hopes of helping the lost souls out there—perhaps those preoccupied with whether or not their roommate hates them or is simply a quiet person—the Indy has compiled a collection of our favorite first-year courses. We present you with the Harvard Independent’s Best and Finest List of Freshman Courses.
GENED 1018: How to Build a Habitable Planet is a highly sought-after class. Professor Charles H. Legmuir will teach you “essentially the entire history of the universe,” according to one Indy member. If the promise of learning literally everything isn’t enough, the course is also said to have a relatively light workload (although the Independent does not endorse choosing a course because it does not have much homework).
Offered in the spring for those thinking ahead is English CLR: Introduction to Screenwriting taught by Professor Musa Syeed. Meeting only once a week, it is the perfect class to slip into your schedule. While writing your first student script, perhaps a Matt Damon-esque feeling will engulf you, making it the last college course you ever take!
First-year seminars are always a hot topic; the debate about whether or not to take a non-credit course will never be settled. What we can tell you is that the opportunity to sit in a room with a dozen or so other students and one of Harvard’s world-renowned professors is not all that common—unless you take their first-year seminar. This author was personally a tad confused about her academic trajectory, and took both Cartoons, Folklore, and Mythology as well as Vegetative Humanities: Paying Attention to Plants in Contemporary Art and Culture during her freshman year.
Recommended by Kaitlyn Hou ’27 is the first-year seminar The Economist’s View of the World, in which she had her first, “Wow. This is really Harvard,” moment. I would be personally terrified to attend this class, as I witnessed the Professor, Gregory Mankiw, go head to head with Professor Michael Sandel in the latter’s course GENED 1181: Meritocracy and its Critics. With this in consideration, I would not recommend it to someone with a fear of public speaking, but, for those stronger-willed, I’m sure it will be endlessly rewarding.
A final exam-free course has come to our attention! The Great Food Transformation, taught by Professor Sparsha Saha in the spring, had Ellie Tunnell ’27 brainstorming a start-up involving food from an environmental, public health, and political lens in place of taking a final exam.
Jude Herwitz ’25 and Franny Conners ’26 are taking a stance in favor of EC10a: Intro to Microeconomics taught by Professors Jason Furman and David Laibson. Many a student have crumbled under the p-sets; however, some say that the stress formed everlasting friendships. Adedoyin Adebayo ’26 claims the same for David J. Malan’s course, CS50: Introduction to Computer Science.
Mir Zayid Alam ’25 comes to us with an insider’s perspective on ECON 50: Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems, participating as a Course Assistant (CA) in the class taught by Raj Chetty for the last two years. With engaging and approachable subject matter, students learn to use R for data analysis and tackle topics of “social mobility—or lack thereof—in the United States,” said Alam.
For those who enjoy learning about science but are slightly less interested in taking a biology class, Professor Elizabeth Lunbeck’s course titled GENED 1179: Psychotherapy and the Modern Self is fantastic. The author proudly attended every single lecture during the spring of her first year (P.S. there are attendance slips) and thoroughly enjoyed watching clips from The Sopranos. Starting with Freud, the history of psychotherapy is laid out for you, and by the end of it, you will feel deeply invested in your own inner child.
All in all, you really can’t go that wrong. My personal advice is to pick four courses, two of which seem helpful, one of which seems interesting, and for the last, something you never would have thought of. It’s always good to have some notion of concentration and distribution requirements in mind; however, your first year is when you have the most time to explore, so use it.
You are about to be bombarded with more information and options than is ingestible in a lifetime, let alone a week. However, if you do anything at Harvard, it should be to COMP THE INDY, and after that, we promise everything will work out perfectly.
Maddy Tunnell ’26 (maddytunnell@college.harvard.edu)’s favorite freshman year class was Act Natural, taught by Professor David Levine.