A Glimpse into a Harvard Undergraduate’s Life
11. Mar, 2010 
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Ever wonder what Harvard kids do in their stuffy ivory towers? A heck of a lot, it turns out. Harvard Magazine (biased?) just published an article highlighting the lives of their students. It’s worth a read.
Here are some of the highlights:
Groups of roommates are often so busy they only see each other once or twice during the semester:
Guzick rooms in a centrifugal Quincy House suite with four other driven young men who found themselves together (and awake) only twice during the fall term: once on Guzick’s birthday, and one night when they fortuitously encountered each other in the dining hall “and decided to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.”
Sometimes all the busyness in extracurricular activities actually kills creativity and debate:
“You don’t have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself—or to thoughts that you haven’t been taught to think.” Goldhill, educated at London’s venerable Westminster School, where discussion and debate are the warp and weft of the school day, marvels that, at Harvard, “there are so few intellectual discussions outside of classes.”
The unnecessary activities are designed to help the Harvard student get a leg up on the job market after college. Why are students putting such extreme pressures on themselves? Parents.
“Oftentimes, we get from parents a very definitive chart of where that student is going,” Dingman says. “We’ll hear, ‘So-and-so has always wanted to be a doctor and will be a pre-med at Harvard, use the summers to work in labs, go to med school, and begin a career in pediatric medicine.’ The parents’ letters are expressed with such certitude—it’s quite remarkable.”
Parents today plan each and every activity for their kids from the day they’re born. That continues into the college experience where parents track their kids on cell phones, facebook and skype making sure they’re busy all the time. The average Harvard undergraduate’s life is a string of never-ending “good things” designed to acheive a goal the student didn’t set for themselves.
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