Work Hard, Play Hard

Hordes of chemistry TFs stagger by on JFK Street, laughing and dancing into the night. They aren t grading problem sets or torturing helpless students with orbitals, precipitation and thermochemical reactions. They are having fun. They ve shed the monogrammed lab coats and the protective plastic goggles in order to go out and spend the department s money...on beer.

Recently, the sciences at Harvard have gained an increasingly shoddy reputation as departments that don t care about the well-being of their overworked and over-stressed students. But maybe the departments do care after allain the form of party loot. >=We do have a fund that is dedicated to happiness in a broad sense,<= says Alan K. Long, director of the laboratories of the Department of Chemistry. >=It was set up in 1956 with a gift from the Irving Street Club, Inc. to aaid in the social and recreational life of...students specializing in chemistry, including undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. <=

The money contributes to almost everything mildly fun in the departmentaa softball team, occasional free dinners or brunches as well as money for club meetings. But perhaps the most renowned allocation of the money is toward the blow-out parties at local bars where a TF can get a little saucyaand the department picks up the check. The tab gets >=sometimes up to a couple of thousand dollars,<= says first-year graduate student Valerie A. Wagner after a recent bash at John Harvard s Brew House.

Long emphasizes that chemistry really can be fun, and that the department has >=a commitment to making life in the department as enjoyable as possible, given of course that people work very hard on their research and coursework here.<=

Work hard, play hard.