Life in the Academic Factory

"The Harvard educational experience is like nothing you've ever known before." You might recall reading something like that in an admissions brochure--the kind of statement cynical, confident proto-freshmen are bound to laugh off. Yet the line, ironically, is more apt than even those who penned it might believe.

Your high school, be it a rural public high school or Exeter, may have filled your brain with the kind of knowledge Harvard values, but nothing can really prepare you adequately for the impersonality of academics here. The occasional freshman seminar or informal meeting with a professor can't mitigate the simple fact that you are one of over 6000 students.

That fact will affect every facet of your academic life here, from the courses you take to the grades you get to the amount you actually end up learning from it all. For starters, if you are the type who learns best in small groups--if you function most easily in the give-and-take of the classroom--you're out of luck. The bulk of Harvard education is of the mass-production, assembly-line variety. Oh, there are tutorials and House seminars and colloquia and conference courses and independent studies. But by their nature--and Harvard's unwillingness to support them in large quantities--they benefit only a lucky few. The multitudes sit in large, generally uncomfortable lecture halls, stare at the professor (or out the window), mechanically take notes they will stow away until right before an exam, and wait impatiently for the hour to end.

Harvard's faculty structure promotes the factory-like atmosphere, since it's much easier for professors to fulfill their contractual duties by teaching a lecture course than by offering seminars or tutorials. There are faculty members here who have presented the same series of lectures, year after year, with little or no change and no contact at all with their students, since graduate students mark all their papers and exams. Well, at least maybe they have time for "ground-breaking research."

Then there are sections, an institution Harvard developed to make up for the impersonality of its mass-market courses. Most big courses you take will split into groups of 20-or-so people under the tutelage of a graduate student, who will most likely bore you for an hour a week. There are good section eaders, and if you're lucky enough to get one it could best the best experience of your Harvard education. But don't expect to find one easily or frequently.

Your work in humanities and social science courses will consist almost entirely of reading books, which can't be too bad, and writing papers, which can be good or bad depending on how intriguing the topic is and how constructive the comments you receive are. But in most cases your grade will be based on you performance on a three-hour final exam. In other words, many of the students who do well in these courses pull it off by doing nothing all semester and then spending the two-week Reading Period doing just that to prepare themselves for the exam. You can guess that this is not the ideal way to learn a subject so that you'll remember it.

Science students live on another planet. Their courses are incredibly rigorous; if you don't keep up with the work every week, you'll fall behind your classmates. And since the courses are graded with fancy scientific Gaussian bell curves--which rate your work not only on how good it is, but on how well others are doing--those classmates may be glad to see you falter.

How you approach your academic life here depends on what priority you give your schoolwork in the rest of your life. There are plenty of students at Harvard who spend most of their days preparing for classes, in classes, or recovering from classes. Some are happy, others are not, but the rest of the world generally doesn't hear about them, either way. Then there are those who devote themselves heart and soul to some extracurricular activity

How you approach your academic life here depends on what priority you give your schoolwork in the rest of your life. There are plenty of students at Harvard who spend most of their days preparing for classes, in classes, or recovering from classes. Some are happy, others are not, but the rest of the world generally doesn't hear about them, either way. Then there are those who devote themselves heart and soul to some extracurricular activity for four years and pay only lip service to their work, cruising by with late papers, bullshit, and all-nighters before exams.

Most students fall in the middle of these extremes, however, placing academics in a central and important place in their lives but not letting them edge out the other things that make Harvard an attractive place. And there are good professors and good departments here, if you're persistent enough to find them. But you're much more likely to remember the people you knew and the things you did for yourself than the hours spent learning things you probably soon forgot