This Is Not Vo-Tech

WELCOME TO HARVARD.

For your $22,000, you and your parents have just purchased:

a) one year of quality education

small print #1: it's only what you make of it.

small print #2: you will learn more from your peers.

small print #3: and your extracurricular activities.

b)thousands of pre-paid meals in the dining halls

small print #4: you'll eat out anyway.

c)353 years of tradition

small print #5: whatever that means.

d)the Harvard name and reputation

small print #6: sorry, the Harvard name comes only in large print.

AS ORIENTATION WEEK progresses, first-year students usually catch on--as much as they are ever going to--to the first three benefits of a Harvard education.

You get hit over the head with a) during the opening speech. After one meal at the Union, b) is easy to understand. Tradition is a little harder to grasp, but that's the point. If you have to ask why about something at Harvard--like why there are no air conditioners, why you have to comp everything, why you watch Love Story, the answer will always be tradition.

Coming to terms with the Harvard name takes a little more practice. Only our grandparents can safely utter the name of our school at a reasonable decibel level. The rest of us have to mumble, fake a sneeze or hedge around geographical locations (Up North, New England, Massachusetts, Boston, Cambridge, Mass Ave) until we are finally pinned down.

Most people try to be nice about not embarrassing us with questions about our SAT scores, our IQ scores, our future plans or our study habits.

But when you do something stupid, all hell breaks loose.

"What school do you go to?"

IDON'T WANT to scare any first-years worried about the worth of their Harvard education by telling a story about my summer as a waitress in Atlantic City, but it's an editorial necessity. For the whole summer, the only contact the Class of '95 has had with this venerable institution has been through the Harvard admissions office and the national media.

It's time to learn what it really means to be a Harvard student.

When I started work this summer, my co-workers didn't really know what I was doing there. None of them had ever met anyone who went to Harvard. As a group, they knew few people who had gone to college outside New Jersey.

Needless to say, they were utterly surprised when I had trouble figuring out the tax on my checks, made spelling mistakes on my orders and mixed up left and right when giving directions to the bathroom.

I got a lot of "And she goes to Harvard!"

Of course, I may be slightly less competent than the normal Harvard student, but I'm not that far off.

I tried to convince them that my shortcomings were normal academic mental blocks, symptoms of only being able to concentrate on one thing at a time. That was always the explanation we would use in my family when we would find my father sitting at his computer while the water was running out of the sink and the mail was sitting in the freezer.

And he's a professor.

ONE NIGHT, the manager of my restaurant stopped me and said "Hey, you go to Harvard, could you put together this bookshelf?" Big mistake.

This may be a fine institution, but it lacks courses in practical knowledge. Harvard is no vo-tech school.

The last time I picked up a hammer was in seventh-grade workshop. I invented split-level knock hockey because I couldn't get my plywood to stay even. If my shop teacher hadn't sent me to the library to avoid any major accidents, I might never have ended up an English major at Harvard.

I might be able to read the directions to build bookshelves in multiple languages, but I certainly couldn't put them together better than any other person with two hands. A good portion of the students here can't hook up their own computers. Even more have compact disk players that baffle them. And if you can find a student who put together his or her own futon, get them on the bus to MIT.

The point of a liberal arts education, apparently, is that we come out of this place knowing how to analyze theories. Tuning our carburators is another story altogether.

The Harvard name offers plenty of benefits. But think for a minute before you cover yourself in Harvard insignia. Think before you get too caught up in the prestige of going to one of the most elite institutions in the world.

It doesn't stop you from being a bumbling idiot.

Beth L. Pinsker '93, the assistant editorial chair of The Crimson, considers herself differently mechanical.