What’s Your Sense of the Place?

I have been a student at Harvard for exactly 72 days, which some might say is enough time for me to “get a sense of the place.” Friends and family often ask me, “What’s it like? What’s your sense of the place?” I know they ask this partially out of concern for me, and partially because what Harvard is actually like is a perennial object of intrigue for people. Harvard’s outsized reputation makes it, in the eye of the public, more a name than a collection of faces. My friends and family are eager for any account I can give of the institution’s human underbelly.

Yet after 72 days here, Harvard still sometimes feels distant, formidable, and inaccessible to me.

To be clear, I have made friends here, and they have buoyed me through long nights in Lamont, bouts of homesickness, and the periodic realization that I have no idea what I want to concentrate in. They are funny, wonderfully nerdy, and reassuringly down to earth. There’s the guy I met on the steps of Weld during orientation week who knocks on my door after midnight just to chat, the girl who enthusiastically agreed to go on brisk walks by the Charles with me at 8 a.m., and my best friend from high school, who by the grace of God ended up at Harvard with me, and who I often say knows me better than I know myself.

It is true that I have rarely felt lonely in my two months at Harvard, and, as I frequently remind myself, just being here is something I should not take for granted. Yet, probably like most other students in the class of 2030, I often feel that despite my hard work and ambition in high school, Harvard is a place for people far smarter and more accomplished than myself. This feeling of inadequacy, which upperclassmen assure me will gradually subside, is a double-edged sword: I stand both in awe of my peers and what they can teach me, and in reproach of myself and how I might fall short. 

I cannot help but think that institutions like Harvard thrive on insecurities like mine. My sense of needing to achieve more is precisely what got me here, after all, and what motivates me to spend that extra hour in Lamont before an exam. It’s no secret that this university is chock full of people with something to prove. 

I am not the first to claim that the very competitiveness Harvard selects for and encourages in its students is antithetical to the formation of community on campus, especially among first-years. But I will say it again. 

When I admit that Harvard feels distant, formidable, and inaccessible, I am not thinking of the friends I have made, but rather of the clubs I have been unable to join, the conversations about grades that I am sick of overhearing, and the huge lecture halls in which I am all but anonymous. 

My friend, a sophomore at the college, informed me that the first time I got my “dreams crushed” would be the worst. She meant getting rejected from a club, and it is a mark of this moment’s inevitability in the experience of Harvard freshmen that she had not even asked me which, if any, clubs I was applying to. (In fact, I had just been rejected from the Outing Club’s leadership team.) 

It was also clear from my friend’s statement how much she glorified admission to clubs, which did not surprise me—I have been told that they are the locus of undergraduate social life. The idea of using clubs to make friends with mutual interests is a good one. Unfortunately, after two weeks on campus, I realized that the old adage “the hardest part of Harvard is getting in” should be revised to include “to a club.” 

Between their odd pseudo-hazing rituals and months-long comping processes, clubs at the college are unnecessarily and regrettably sealed off from unsuspecting first-years. At initial comp meetings for “The Lampoon” and “The Advocate,” prospective members received less information about the publications than they did members’ secondhand smoke. As November draws near, both comps remain ongoing. 

The unwelcoming atmosphere perpetuated by many clubs at Harvard is mirrored in its academic settings. With the college transitioning toward a grade-cap system, which would make it much harder for students to get straight As, some of my classes have become barbed with competitive rhetoric. “I am going to make it impossible for you to get an A in this class,” one of my professors announced at the beginning of our first lecture. 

Over meals at Annenberg, I often hear students quibbling over Bs and A minuses, grades that objectively indicate proficiency in a subject. I am sure that many of my classmates are not used to receiving imperfect scores on their assignments, and that to some extent, these conversations are the growing pains of transitioning to a rigorous college. Still, between club rejections and grade caps, the dog-eat-dog mindset is hard to unlearn. 

There is also the fact that many of the classes freshmen take, far from being intimate and conducive to personal learning, have hundreds of students in them. In this model, the lecturing professor is hardly aware of the individual learner, and unless that student has the guts to take on office hours, she will depend on the instruction of her Teaching Fellow, a position now uncertain in light of the Graduate Students Union’s current strike. 

Should I have known what I was signing up for in choosing to attend Harvard? I think I did know, as well as anyone who can only observe an environment without placing themselves in it, that it would be cutthroat. What else could I expect of a school composed of 7,000 of the nation’s brightest? But competition is easier envisioned than experienced.

Perhaps I simply do not have the chops to grind it out for the next four years at one of the best universities in the world. Big whoop. There are thousands of 18-year-olds who would gladly take my place, and might enjoy it more. 

But I do not think my sensitivity to the wear and tear of the Harvard hamster wheel makes me less worthy of my place here. I enjoy learning, and the college claims—with all its rhetoric about “intellectual vitality”—to value the instrumental good of seeking knowledge. It is true that I am somewhat inept at networking, but this is not a particularly fatal trait, in my eyes, compared with the joy I feel at participating in a lively discussion section. 

My realization that even at Harvard, there is always another Harvard—another on-ramp to accomplishment—will seem obvious to more jaded members of our community. But I do not think that Harvard needs to be as inaccessible as I have found it. I believe in a version of our school that is more approachable and, frankly, more humane. 

Sadie Tribe ’30 (sadietribe@college.harvard.edu) is comping the “Harvard Independent.”