They refused to lose an entire year to virtual education. They refused to relinquish precious college time to the whims of a microbe they could not control. And they refused to let go of their ambitions. So instead, they used the pandemic to pursue them.
Last year, many Harvard College students did the radical act of pausing their college education. More than 20 percent of students did not enroll in the fall of 2020, many of whom extended this leave of absence to the entire academic year. They filled their time by traveling, interning, or even building a company. Some students found such success that they are not returning to campus this fall.
Why did students choose to unenroll in classes? What did they do with this time? Most importantly, what have they learned?
Hear it from them in their own words.
(The responses have been lightly edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.)
Natalie Melas-Kyriazi ’24:
I was scared that if I did take classes I would not have learned as much as I could have if I waited a year. I did not feel in any rush to graduate, and I also felt that the friends I would make on campus in that year in person would be worth the wait. The second reason is that I was heavily considering taking a gap year in between high school and Harvard, so time off was already an appealing decision.
My brother and I are Greek citizens so we were able to travel to Europe and see our family during the year. In September 2020, we traveled to Germany and then to England. I stayed in London and lived with 6 other Harvard girls for all of the first semester. My uncle had known someone from his work who could set up an interview for me with Imperial College London’s Big Data Analytics Unit. I got COVID-19 during winter break, so during the second semester, I felt more comfortable traveling frequently. I lived in Boston and Hawaii, road-tripped around the west coast of the US, went back home to New York, and then returned to Europe.
Luke Bradley ’24:
The decision to take a gap year was tough but ultimately came down to a desire to get what I perceived to be the full value of the Harvard experience. I think I was in a fortunate position to make that choice, knowing that postponing my graduation date by a year was something my family and I could handle.
Once I became fully vaccinated, I was able to make up for a lot of the traveling I’d been missing out on. I was able to take a few trips at that point, culminating in a nearly two-month trip to Spain. I did this trip alone, partially to make up for two canceled summer abroad programs that I had signed up for with the College.
This travel experience and really the entire gap year have reinvigorated my academic interests. I’ve decided on a concentration change [from some combination of Psychology and Economics to Social Studies], and made a resolution to choose my courses based on interest and passion rather than convenience.
Aurelia Balkanski ’24:
As much as I would’ve loved to continue classes at Harvard as normal this past year, it would be a lie to admit I didn’t learn so much from this time off. I am so thankful to have had another year at home with my family, but beyond that I think my job experience showed me there are so many online opportunities I didn’t see. The irony is not lost on me that I took the year off from Zoom school only to work an online job, but this was so different from any class I could’ve taken at Harvard, I can’t help but feel I learned things school could never teach me.
If there’s one thing that I wish for myself going back it’s that I will take all the random classes I feared would be a “waste of my time” because they didn’t cater to what I think I want to concentrate in (Astrophysics). I have three years left and I intend to fill them to the brim.
Jake Laddis ’24:
I chose to enroll in classes for the fall 2020 semester, naively hoping that I would be captivated by online courses. I switched my concentration to computer science and took on a heavy course load.
Before heading back home for winter break, I found myself speaking with my neighbor in Allston, who floated the idea that I get my real estate license and work at his firm. I got my license, interviewed at a brokerage, and all of a sudden I was a licensed real estate agent in Boston.
One day, I saw a fellow Harvard student’s Snapchat story: “Tech Startup Looking for MA Licensed Real Estate Agents.” In my interview the next day, the CEO sold me on the idea of turning the real estate industry into a gig-economy (like Uber driver for real estate agents), while automating the apartment searching and leasing process for renters. All of a sudden, I found myself as a marketing intern working at a coworking space on Newbury Street for Nobee. My experience as a real estate agent and a Harvard computer science student allowed me to get more involved in building the actual website and operations software of the company. A month and a half after starting, I was promoted to Chief Product Manager. I am now responsible for leading a quickly growing team of 12+ engineers and designers in building our company’s different products.
I expect to return to classes in the spring semester… but you never know.
Now with the offer to continue working with this company after graduation, I now feel a new sense of academic freedom with my studies at Harvard. Unburdened by the pressures of resume padding and enlightened by my new career clarity, I look forward to returning to Harvard where I will engage with faculty, courses, and fellow students guided by my intellectual curiosity, rather than a preconceived notion of what one ought to do career-wise.
Moritz Pail ’24-25:
I am planning to extend my leave of absence this fall to continue working on my startup, Fizz, with my friend and co-founder, Carlo Köbe ’24. Fizz is a debit card for US college students that helps them save money on campus and builds credit in an easy, safe, and transparent way. We came up with it because getting a credit card, building a credit score, and saving money are all problems we encountered before.
I had been working on this startup idea with friends while doing an internship in the fall of 2020 and wanted to give it a shot. Harvard already announced that they would stay fully remote, and if the startup failed I could just go back to school in the fall—so my opportunity cost just seemed really low.
Deciding to take more time off this fall was really hard. Harvard is back in person again, so obviously the opportunity cost is a lot higher now for me. On the other hand, the startup is going well, I am really enjoying the work and learning a lot. So for me personally, I decided that it is a really exciting and great opportunity that I want to take, even if it means I can’t come back to Harvard in the fall.
Mia Johansson ’23:
I love the in-person experience at Harvard so much, I didn’t want to miss out an entire year of that. I also saw my website, TheTeenMagazine.com, as a huge opportunity so I thought that I would benefit so much more from that. It was just more of a question of whether I could support myself financially or not doing this, and I was able to earn money and make it work. I could be excited, then, growing this rather than just focusing on everything that I’ve lost.
Once the pandemic hit, student-journalists had so much more free time to write for the magazine. And I thought of that as an opportunity to grow it and also provide an extracurricular and community that didn’t need to be in the classroom. My background is in computer science, so when I came home and quarantined, I sat down and programmed this.
We have an editor team now of around 30 writers and our writer team is 650 or so. The majority of them are juniors and seniors in high school, and they’re from all over, like England, Australia, lots of places in Europe, and India. Before the pandemic, it was maybe a few articles per month that would be published. Now it’s around five articles per day.
I’m so much more organized after this year. I’ve needed to be able to figure out my own schedule because I had three internships now that have been completely remote, so I needed to create structure for myself. Coming back to school, I have a feeling I won’t leave things to the last minute so much as I used to.
Noah Evers ’24:
I’ve taken a year off, and ideally, I will just take one more year off to put my startup, Flow, in a position to scale.
At Flow, we optimize coffee to help people think better. I have a research background in cognitive science and had been conducting [research and development] for a year and a half before the pandemic began. At that point, I had created a prototype for myself—in my own Harvard dorm room, in fact!—where I could eliminate the side effects of coffee (i.e., no jitters, anxiety, or crash). My prototype was all I was drinking, and I had totally stopped consuming regular coffee, which I had once loved. I thought, “If I like this product so much and want to think better just like everyone else, maybe I should turn this into a business.”
I was also motivated to pursue this venture because I had just discovered research that would allow me to radically improve coffee’s psychological effects, such as doubling the absorption of the caffeine molecules by the body and enabling coffee to significantly stimulate neurogenesis. I brought my classmate, Catherine Beddingfield ’23 on as a co-founder, and we started working on it more and more when school went online. I probably wouldn’t have had enough time to develop the company if not for COVID-19.
What I learned during this time is that I will spend most of my life working, so always doing something that I love is essential. I’ve also learned that the world is not fixed in its offerings, and if you want something that doesn’t exist today, you can build it. I have realized that college is such a magical moment of life where I can just learn for learning’s sake.