"THE FRESHMAN DAYS"

One of the paramount purposes of introducing the series of lectures, receptions, and speeches scheduled for incoming students within the next three days was to acquaint them with the policies and mechanical routine of the College, and to let them orient themselves before a horde of dissolute upperclassmen bore down to disturb the pre-college peace. Towards accomplishing this purpose, the meetings have been an assistance.

The welcoming remarks of President Eliot in the Nineties based on admonitions against sleeping with one's windows shut, and his recommendations of bean soup as a nourishing food are of the past. Instead, the new student hears of the case of the undergraduate who made the startling discovery that he studied better when he exercised; of the cut-loose prep school boy who turned playboy when he found freedom as a Freshman, and of his fate at mid-years, and that of the four hundred others "in this very room that will never graduate from Harvard."

All of this is naturally edifying, and too much of it boringly true. But in spite of all these great truths, it is unlikely that there will be one man who will get to the point and say, "Your Freshman Adviser will do his best to help you, but he cannot give you all the information about courses that you need. You must talk to a man who has taken the course recently to determine whether it is the type you want to take, and whether the amount of work required will, with your other courses, add up to a reasonable total."

Such is the task that confronts the Freshman, to be accomplished in the preposterously short period of three days. And on the success of the enterprise will often depend the fate of those who find themselves burdened in the middle of the year with an impossible schedule. If the "Freshman Days" must offer a found of pleasant surprise parties, they should afford what is far more important--an opportunity for a spell of concentrated course research.