Students Can Make Harvard Bigger

On the morning of August 23, 1993, I was running around my house, putting the finishing touches on the suitcases I was packing for college. Jogging up the stairs, I lost my balance and came crashing down to the landing below. That afternoon, just a week before leaving for Cambridge for my first year, I found myself in the hospital having major surgery on my ankle.

Determined that the fall was simply a minor setback, I arrived on move-in day ready to dive into my Harvard career. However, by the time my crutches and I made it to Tercentenary Theater for opening convocation, I was ready to turn around and give up. In every way, Harvard just seemed so big, a place where, at best, I would anonymously blend in the with the crowd and where, at worst, I would be the slowpoke on crutches who was left behind in every activity.

While the rest of you were watching Love Story or playing the name game at the ice cream bash, I was slowly learning to navigate the campus. Bit by bit, I tackled distances somewhat longer than the walk between my room in Greenough and the Union. Long after I traded in my crutches for winter boots, however, my initial feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer size of my new surroundings and by all of the possibilities the campus had to offer remained with me.

In the ensuing years, that preconception was continually challenged as I found Harvard nurturing me again and again. When I envisioned what my four years of college would hold, I had images of spending hours in the musty Widener stacks producing painstakingly-researched term papers. Certainly, I thought I would dabble in extracurriculars, but I never fathomed that I would have the opportunity to be a columnist for The Crimson or to be president of a student group. Similarly, when I chose Economics as my concentration, I knew I would be doing a lot of problem sets, but I did not expect that in four short years I would learn to create an original data set or write with authority about complex and pressing public policy issues.

When I was home over spring break this year, I pulled out my photo album filled with pictures from those first two semesters in Greenough and began to marvel at the number of different paths the members of my first-year proctor group have taken and at the people that Harvard-Radcliffe has helped us become. Looking back at each member of my proctor group--young students, nervous and excited, smiling in the pictures in my photo album--I reflected on the countless ways, academic and artistic, athletic and extracurricular, that each of them has made a very real and lasting impact on this campus.

What I have come to realize is that while none of us can dispute that Harvard is big, the joy of being an undergraduate is discovering that Harvard is big in all the right ways. The physical structure itself is breathtaking. I am daily awe-struck by the beauty of a sunny spring day in Radcliffe Yard, the majesty of the Eliot tower presiding over the Charles and the expanse of Cambridge viewed from the wide windows of the Mather high rise. The possibilities for learning are equally awesome, with a course for every interest and with endless seminars, colloquia and speeches to satisfy the deep and diverse curiosities that characterize Harvard students. Most important, each class provides the opportunity to further expand the intellectual breadth of Harvard as a whole and of each of us who reside here; rather than losing students in their enormity, Harvard's classes create new opportunities for discussion, debate and activism that expand our realms of possibility while forging smaller networks within the Harvard-Radcliffe family.

It has been the most incredible privilege not just to discover that Harvard's size and scope is a blessing rather than a burden but also to watch my roommates and friends in the Class of 1997 use these resources to their fullest. There is little that can compare to seeing men and women full of dreams and ambitions with whom I entered college four years ago blossom into almost-graduates who are driven and accomplished, but also humble and kind. The middle years of the 1990s have been a time of incredible change. Life was found on Mars, cloning proved successful for the first time and e-mail has gone from luxury to life-line. Along the way, Harvard-Radcliffe has inspired the class of 1997 to change and grow just as fast as the world around it.

As long as all goes well in the next few hours, my walk to Tercentenary Theater for closing exercises today will thankfully be far less painful than on convocation day in the fall of 1993. Still, just as I did four years ago, I will watch the program with my mind full of wonder about the challenges ahead. This time, though, I know that while the things to come are bound to be big, Harvard has taught us to embrace them to the fullest.

Corinne E. Funk '97 of Baltimore, Md. and Winthrop House was a columnist, a director of the Business Board in '96 and clerk of the 123rd Executive Board.