Currier House Junior Authors New Guide to College Life

Most of the information in Harvard's freshman handbook centers around traditional but boring subjects such as discipline policies and academic resources. Sure, we all need to know where the library is, but what about removing that pesky chocolate stain? What about advice on filling out roommate forms, so as not to end up living with Mike "Smokin' Chimney" Jones?

Jennifer Hanson '97 has the answers in her new book called The Real Freshman Handbook: An Irreverent and Totally Honest Guide to Life on Campus. Hanson covers everything from first meeting roommates to buying a computer to decorating your dorm room.

Hanson, a 21-year-old junior living in Currier House, asked some of her friends from high school in Edina, Minnesota for stories and advice that might stop incoming first-years from repeating their mistakes.

Though she draws heavily on the combined wisdom of her friends, Hanson sometimes speaks from personal experience. For instance, when she found out the names of her three future Pennypacker roommates, she wrote them a humorous letter in which she said she would be "bringing an uncaged, 'outgoing' pet frog with [her]. At the time it seemed like a delightful display of wit, but as the weeks passed and no reply arrived, it began to seem more like a proclamation of lunacy." Hanson concludes, "First impressions count for a lot."

It's the little problems students face in the sometimes indimidating first year of college that fill the bulk of The Real Freshman Handbook. "It's not that I made a huge number of bloopers freshman year," Hanson told The Crimson, "but it actually would have helped me a lot if I had a stain list."

Hanson also addresses academic concerns. Worried about that 15-page paper due tomorrow that you haven't started? Hanson's advice: "All-nighters work best, and are most enjoyable, when you approach them with a sense of adventure.... Dinner table statements like, 'Christ, I think it's going to be a long one,' or 'I've got a 30-page paper due tomorrow!' will serve the triplicate function of attracting sympathy, justifying your having fifths on congo bars, and giving you delusions of safaridom."

The Handbook also has some suggestions on the all-important subject of food, both in dining halls and out. For instance, now that reading period is here, and some of us are spending every waking hour in Lamont or Cabot, what about meals? Hanson has the answers.

"With these ingenious pieces of trickery you may not be able to get buffalo wings delivered to the library door, but nourishment can be yours: Slip a pizza into one of those artist type portfolios. Lennon specs + black wig + tie-dyed undershirt = no worries." Or "propose a toast with your coffee as you sashay in. Psyched, the checker will reach for his brewskie, but before he can say 'Bottoms up' you've disappeared into the stacks with your java."

Hanson's friends, though all from Minnesota, attend a variety of schools around the country, ensuring that the book is not too Harvard-oriented for its intended audience. Some elements of college life, after all, are universal. What student has not wanted a handy list of pickup lines for the laundry room? Hanson provides a few: "Hey, baby, what's your setting?" Or perhaps: "Are you feeling dizzy? 'Cause you been tumbling through my head all day."

Much of The Real Freshman Handbook is filled with this kind of whimsical humor, intended to make all the details of leaving home less intimidating. Hopefully, by the time they have made it through their first year, students have learned these essentials of college life, so Hanson's book is intended primarily as a graduation present for a high-schooler.

Hanson told the Crimson that wrote the book this past summer in her family's cabin in the woods of Michigan. Lest she give the impression of a Thoreauvian romp in the woods, however, she warns, "I wouldn't say it was the most pleasant experience.... I wish I had other work to do." She adds that the life of a writer sometimes got to her because "it was very solitary."

Because Hanson has to couch what is mostly common-sense information in entertaining terms, sometimes the scattered asides and pop-culture references that give the book its hip, witty tone can seem contrived.

At the beginning of her chapter on health and emergencies, for example, Hanson writes, "Few things suck more than being sick at college, unless you count Dracula." And a bit later, in the section on athlete's foot: "Like us in so many things, fungi, too, prefer intimate attachments with the buff. But don't rush for the barbells--you too, inactive one, may be blessed by union with some microbes whose biological clocks are telling them to settle down."

But while a college student can afford to groan at such attempts at humor, The Real Freshman Handbook provides an entertaining guide for the future first-year. It just might make the transition from home to dorm a bit easier.