High salaries after graduation, famous professors, and well-trodden paths to being a mover and shaker: the ingredients for a popular academic concentration are fairly obvious. As of December 2020, 483 students were concentrating in Economics, 400 in Computer Science (including joint concentrators), and 245 in Applied Mathematics. At the other end of the spectrum, some students pursue much more niche courses of study. At Harvard, a place that lives and breathes community and networking, perhaps the most countercultural thing to do is to join one of the smallest concentrations.
“Applied Math, Gov, CS, even Sociology, those were always off the table, not just because I wasn’t interested but because they’re so big and very impersonal,” says CJ Passarella ’23. “I think size does matter, and I think that I wanted a community.” Both of the concentrations in Passarella’s joint, Comparative Study of Religion and South Asian Studies, are quite small: including joint concentrators, Religion had fifteen students in December 2020 and South Asian Studies, the smallest concentration at Harvard, had only three. Although he does concede that “maybe [size] should have mattered less, because you can find that same community elsewhere,” he happily confirms that he did indeed find a strong community in South Asian Studies.
Community does not have to be restricted to undergraduates alone. Rosalind DeLaura ’22 praises the Germanic Languages and Literatures concentration for being “small enough that people knew who I was [so that] I didn’t feel this overwhelming anonymity that you can at other places.” She ascribes her concentration’s sense of community to those higher up the academic ladder: “I’ve been able to take classes from the same professors throughout my time at Harvard and have been able to have good relationships with them… they know what I’m studying, they know what I’m interested in, they’ll send me things.” Peter Horowitz ’24, another German concentrator, agrees: “The professors are unbelievably involved in the academic development throughout the class, in the work that you’re doing; I’ve never been disappointed with feedback, or I was never concerned that the professor was more interested in their own research or in writing a book than in helping us perform well.” Both he and Rosalind mention having graduate students in their classes as well. For those looking to meet people, small concentrations may be the way to go.
There are obvious drawbacks. Horowitz mentions “the scale of the funding that the department can get,” and compares the German department’s portion of the third floor of the Barker Center to the Economics department’s much larger building. There can also be a lack of course diversity. Passarella describes South Asian Studies as “mostly just a language department.” The non-language courses in the department are often cross-listed through other departments, thus, according to Passarella, the only real benefit of concentrating is the tutorial system.
Getting access to those tutorials can be tough for those who are unwilling or unable to fully commit to the concentration. Larger departments have what Horowitz describes as “the power to say no” without jeopardizing their student base. Economics does not participate in joint concentrations, despite Horowitz and others’ efforts “to see if they can convince at least someone in the department to change the policy.” Smaller concentrations can demand significant commitment without providing the best resources – or assuaging Horowitz’s “existential fear” of “the inability to be hired after college only knowing German literature.”
However, Passarella points out that smaller concentrations may not be as niche as they appear. “South Asian Studies, East Asian Studies, Romance Languages, Germanic Languages… if you add up the number of people who are doing those things or are interested in area studies, it probably equals another social sciences or humanities concentration: not a ton of people, but in the 40s or 50s, maybe even 70s or 80s.” As of December 2020, the sum total of concentrators in subjects focused on subject areas outside of the United States was 62.
Horowitz notes that his passion is not for area studies specifically, but for German. He attributes this interest to a high-school junior year foreign exchange in Germany and a trip to New York with the German Club his first year at Harvard. DeLaura points out that “If you hadn’t had the opportunity to learn German or Russian before coming into Harvard, then there’s technically a way that you could still concentrate but it would be a bit difficult… you wouldn’t come in thinking that you were going to concentrate if you’d never taken the language before.” Horowitz acknowledges that his field of study is “very, very specific” and not the obvious choice for those with multiple interests: “If you’re interested in Romance Languages and Literatures and Germanic Languages and Literatures, you could do a joint in both, [but] it might be better to study some sort of comparative literature course, which has many more concentrators.” Comparative Literature has, as of December 2020, 20 concentrators.
One might therefore conceptualize area studies not as a group of concentrations, but as one larger concentration that attracts the amount of interest expected for a humanities department and allows undergraduates to sort themselves into clearly-defined tracks. Viewed in this way, declaring one of these concentrations is a truly countercultural act. At a college filled with GroupMes, socials, and events designed to help students with similar academic interests coalesce into large groups, the area-studies concentrators go the other way, making their interests increasingly niche to the point of three-person departments. For those who want close relationships with faculty and the ability to focus on their exact area of enthusiasm, a small concentration size is not a bug but a feature.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu), being a math concentrator, has been known to study area.