Making the Most of Pre-Frosh Weekend

You were one of the 19,009 applicants to Harvard this year, and somehow, you beat the greatest odds ever-only 10.7 percent of applicants made it into the ivory tower.

Nearly 80 percent of you will be back here in September, but if your Crimson Key tour memories are a bit fuzzy, here is a side of Harvard that your Crimson folders and glossy brochures will never tell you.

Armed for the Weekend?

First thing first-ditch the folder. Harvard Yard’s easy enough to figure out, especially with the signs posted by every extracurricular activity at Harvard pointing you in the direction of various buildings.

Your hosts will hopefully have good intentions, pointing you in the right direction so you can find other pre-frosh to entertain you. But beware upperclassmen. While freshman party goers are often dubbed “freshmeat,” pre-frosh are prime-rib.

Your schedule may promise panels that inform and intrigue, but you’ll have four years to slowly fall asleep to these professors. However, don’t miss the President’s Welcome. This may be the only time you ever get a chance to meet Harvard’s outgoing president, Neil L. Rudenstine who will soon be replaced by the man who signed your dollar bills, Lawrence H. Summers.

You are a member of a diverse and talented class. Now make some use of that-the people you meet pre-frosh weekend may be your best friends or people you never see again, but chances are, you’ll be spending the next four years with them. After four years, graduating seniors often report that their best teachers were other Harvard students. If you’ve ever wanted to learn the proper pronunciation of “y’all” or hear a true Bronx accent, this is the weekend.

After the Weekend: Academics

Tackling pre-frosh weekend can be intimidating, but you might be wondering what it’s like to actually go to school here. Famous professors from Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. of the Af-Am department to English superstar Jamaica Kinkaid to trickle-down Economic guru Martin S. Feldstein teach gargantuan classes and small seminars.

Harvard’s academic world promises other gems, but you may have to do some digging, especially when it comes to the Core. With nine areas, ranging from Quantitive Reasoning to three variations on English, these overwhelmingly large classes with strange syllabi also promise cryptic grading standards and generally ill-prepared graduate students posing as teaching fellows. There are some stars in the Core, from famous poetry critic Helen H. Vendler to Shakespeare expert Marjorie Garber, Kenan professor of English.

Harvard students often find their homes in academic departments. While Harvard is known for Economics and Government departments, popular with the white-hat, DHA (Department of Harvard Athletics) wearing posse, its science offerings are also stellar.

You may hear some students speak of oddly named concentrations, such as History and Literature, Social Studies and Folklore and Mythology. These programs offer interdisciplinary study, individual attention and excellent advising in exchange for grueling tutorials and endless piles of papers.

Personal contact with professors can be tricky. You might be too scared to visit the professor whose new book is on display at the Coop, but an appointment during office hours can often be worthwhile, even if it’s just to introduce yourself.

Advising is also a shot in the dark. Some incredibly lucky first-years receive deans or professors as academic advisors, but for most, your academic advisor is also your proctor, the graduate student who will live in your first-year dorm, feed you pizza and keep a box of well-stocked condoms near the door.

Students themselves are an incredibly varied lot. This is not your father’s Harvard-while prep school alums are common, they no longer exclusively run the show. Harvard undergrads come from every state and increasingly from abroad, with the range of students further bolstered with a newly improved financial aid program.

Virtually every student has some form of ambition, be it in academics, extracurriculars, and social life (“We have to go party, now!”)

Harvard’s libraries are often a respite for the academically attention-challenged. Lamont Library’s cushy chairs are often invitations to a good dream while the Cabot Science Library is a sterile and work-oriented spot. Widener Library’s endless stacks were once dark and quiet-conditions that helped make “sex in the stacks” a Harvard tradition. Newly installed motion detectors are forcing students to exercise their brains instead. Another study related tradition is primal scream, a naked run that ritually occurs on the last night before finals begin. Don’t ask.

After School

High school extracurricular activities had regular hours. But here, you may find yourself awake at 5:30 a.m. rowing on the Charles River or burning the midnight oil doling soup to Cambridge homeless or putting the finishing touches on a campus publication. With 250 independent student organizations, your identity at Harvard is often intermeshed with how you spend your time away from your books.

Varsity Athletes at Harvard are under-appreciated, but remarkably successful. Club teams from Rugby to Ultimate Frisbee to Tae Kwon Do often demand nearly the same commitment as a varsity sport. Intramural teams, which allow students to battle their classmates in such sports as crew and fencing, often rival the enthusiasm of gung-ho varsity athletes.

Athletic facilities across the river are fantastic, but here in Cambridge, pungent crowds and dated equipment fill the student gyms, the crowded MAC and its quad counterpart, the QRAC.

Politically motivated students get their fill of hobnobbing at the Institute of Politics while Harvard politicians on the Undergraduate Council seek to improve the lives of Harvard students. With motivated leadership, the council helped bring the Roots and Black Eyed Peas to Sanders Theatre earlier this year. Future goals include online concentration guides and extended party hours (from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m.).

Phillips Brooks House Association serves as the overseer to a variety of community service organizations. The people protesting right now are part of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), a group dedicated to raising the wages Harvard pays to its employees.

Entrepreneurs can find a home at Harvard Student Agencies, home to the Let’s Go travel guide series, or on the business staff of one of Harvard’s many publications.

Speaking of publications, they range from the liberal (Perspective) to the conservative (the Salient) to the pointless (The Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.)

Harvard’s theater community is active and wacky, with the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club running shows nearly every weekend of the year and the Hasty Pudding Theatrical’s all-male, humor filled drag fest each spring. Improvisational comedy, led by the Instant Gratification Players and On Thin Ice are good for a pre-party weekend activity.

Individual musicians often form student bands or indulge their passions at the Quad Sound Studio or WHBR, Harvard’s under-appreciated student-run broadcast radio station.

The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra is the most visible student music organization, but many smaller groups mean that an instrument doesn’t have to be stowed away in the closet. A cappella abounds.

Despite a $19 billion endowment, most students groups are scrounging for money. Loker Commons has pool tables but not many students. The only “late-night socializing” you’ll do there is this weekend.

Social Life

You might be wondering how students actually get around to having fun. While some students do stay home on weekend nights to be students, Harvard has its share of debauchery.

Social life begins at home, first in randomly assigned entryways freshmen year and Annenberg, where all first-years eat. Blocking is a term to describe the horrendous and socially stressful process whereby students must select a maximum of eight students with whom they are randomly assigned to one of the upperclass Houses.

Each weekend features some sort of club-organized dance or House activity. Among the more famous are the Adams House Masquerade on Halloween and Winthrop House’s Debauchery, where students can use fake money in exchange for sexual favors.

Harvard is also home to more formals than most schools. With 12 separate spring and fall House formals, benefit functions and opening night for student theater, don’t leave the short black dress or tux at home. The Eliot House Fete, with its swing dancing and chocolate-covered strawberries, offers a taste of Harvard’s elite pretensions.

Room parties can be fun or loud and sweaty, but with 1 a.m. cop shutdowns the norm, the quest for inebriation moves elsewhere. A recent crackdown on fake IDs at the Crimson Sports Grille has left first-years wandering. And Grafton Street’s closure last weekend is limiting bar social life.

Not so hidden away are the single-sex social organizations. Final clubs, Harvard’s elite take on fraternities, tend to dominate the after-hours scene. But Greek life is slowly growing, with three fraternities and two sororities becoming a more visible presence. The Seneca, an all-female organization, has made strides toward creating a more gender balanced social scene.

Staying in on a weekend night happens to every Harvard student, but there’s no need to make a habit of it.

The Great Outdoors

Harvard Square is a magnet for young people in boring suburbs. The Pit people are only the most colorful example-they’re the flock of pierced, dyed, leather-clad youths next to the T stop.

The Square is actually a hub of Boston’s cool factor, rivaling only downtown Newbury Street in terms of shopping, record stores and cheap eats like Au Bon Pain and The Wrap. Two convenience stores, Store 24 and 7-11, along with pizza joints Tommy’s and Pinocchio’s keep Harvard students caffeinated and fed through at least most of the night.

The Square is also pricey and corporate, with an Abercrombie & Fitch, a Gap and Urban Outfitters, a HMV and a Tower Records.

But if this weekend stays sunny, you will see Harvard at its best. Charles River’s is the most beautiful vista on warm days. Though this isn’t Stanford, with spastic Cambridge weather, if it isn’t the parties, the academics, or your fellow students that convince you to come here, let it be a sparkling pre-frosh weekend.