Shopping Week Identity Crisis

Its the same every term: a new semester means the chance to erase your past errors. As everyone scurries about campus in a frenzy this week, perhaps some are really persuaded they will find the class, the one academic experience that will make their lives complete. Others, especially in the early semesters of college life, simply wish to confirm that picking a concentration in Microbiology over History of Art was not a life-destroying mistake. The result is that everyone shops classes as if in four weeks we wont all be bemoaning our fate. In the process, we get a glimpse of everything that goes on behind closed doors on this campus the rest of the year.

Of all shopping week crises, mine are probably the most mundane. Like everyone, I usually start to suspect that maybe the last two years have been an utter mistake and find myself attending such gems as History of Art and Architecture 62: Painting and Sculpture in Italy or Economics 1010b: Intermediate Macroeconomics. But as I contemplate the crowds swelling in and out of lecture halls in Sever, Boylston, and Emerson Halls, my mind roams from philosophers, poems, and social phenomena to wondering why courses are such good predictors of physical appearance and style of dress.

In the Baroque class, I am entirely out of place in a sea of pastels and high ponytails. The population is almost exclusively female and everyone seems to have carefully preened for the Caravaggio slides. This leads to vivid freshman year recollections of a lecture by Stanley Cavell in which my inadequacy of style was all too obvious. The room was full of a kind of person I had never known before at Harvard: a bunch of 19-year-olds looking more fiercely European than any European ever could.

Nowadays, as I face the reality of having to fulfill all my history requirements before graduation, I sheepishly note the unsophisticated look of the historians around me. The boys who are here to do military history are still wearing the shorts their moms bought for them at 15. Their female counterparts are not far behind, despite the cheerleader in my sophomore tutorial who thought she could save our collective fate by wearing magenta heels to a discussion of Hobbes. My bitter consolation is that departments such as government and philosophy also boast a majority of drab concentrators. But as I contemplate the lack of exoticism in those I have elected as my kin, the fabled territory of Romance Languages returns to mind. Reputedly Harvards stylish females congregate there, although they have also been observed in enclaves such as Foreign Cultures 22: La critique sociale and English 10b: Major British Writers. In a similar anomaly, there are Core classes whose ratio of athletes to meager physiques is much more advantageous than usual. A casual visitor might be deluded into believing that Harvard students actually keep in shape. No one can explain why each semester Roman Games and Shakespearean Genres are so well-attended by varsity players, though whispers about team-writing term papers do abound.

What I know not, as I shuttle between Robinson and Sever Halls, is whether our brilliant physics and math concentrators are as outlandish as reputed. My acquaintances do not confirm the rule, leading to the suspicion that the true aliens are all at MITbut before I graduate, I will be sure to shop as many advanced theoretical math lectures as possible in order to confirm that hypothesis. At the very least, I hope to finally experience a shopping week that will make me feel better about the stylishness of my concentration instead of irremediably worse.

Although it is unclear why we break down into concentrations according to physical appearance, be warned: even if some imaginative course shopping has convinced you that you are in the wrong department, no concentration switch is a cure for frumpiness. As I ultimately realize every semester, even this shopping week will conclude with the wisdom that we are who we are, and that my past decisions, though perhaps unglamorous, were judicious. In a few weeks, I know the pile of useless syllabi in the corner of our desks will be the only reminder of the lives we might have led, the roads not taken.

Alexander Bevilacqua 07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Leverett House.