Coming Up Short

Freshman spring, while my friends from home compared rents, bought furniture, and signed leases, I narrowed my intimate social circle down to a five-woman clique and floated a paper boat across the Charles River. In retrospect, I can’t help but feel immature. The system of residential housing and dining is a fundamental part of the Harvard experience, but it comes at the expense of being forced to assume adult responsibilities.

People criticize the Core program for allowing Harvard students to graduate knowing the intimacies of Japanese pop music while remaining clueless on general American history. But equally troubling is that over a thousand Harvard grads who can recite Adam Smith but can’t use a dishwasher are unleashed into New York (and presumably, a few other places) every June. The exceptional situation that Harvard undergrads find themselves in—eating in dining halls, living in Houses, having their bathrooms cleaned by Dorm Crew—does little to encourage the development of self-sufficiency and independence necessitated by the “real world.”

Harvard’s residential housing and dining system is—for better or worse—the college’s way of coddling its undergraduates. Step outside the Harvard bubble, and students at other colleges are juggling fluctuating rent prices and housing shortages along with student loans, jobs and schoolwork.

Out of my four best friends from home, I am the only one currently living in college housing and using a meal plan. One of my friends, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lives in an apartment with three friends and cooks dinner with her boyfriend every night. For her, the experience of living and cooking for herself has not only instilled an admirable sense of independence, but has also allowed her to rest assured that her significant other is a willing (and capable) cook before committing further.

One of the most common questions I am asked at home is how high rent is in Cambridge. Fairly high, I think, is my normal answer, followed by: I don’t actually know, because most Harvard students live in dorms all four years. This is usually greeted with some mixture of horror and pity. The same goes for their reactions to my explanation that I pay a solid annual board fee and therefore am guaranteed three meals a day in my dining hall. My friends don a uniform expression of shock and issue a similar: “Doesn’t that suck?”

“Yes,” I lie, as visions of platters of red-spiced chicken and bottomless cones of Fro-Yo dance through my head. “It’s terrible.” But the truth is, as much as I feel spoiled by Harvard’s housing and dining system—and as unusual I recognize it to be in the greater scheme of college life—I also think that the onus is on students to take their own initiative in preparing themselves for life in the “real world,” without relying on Harvard’s impetus. And although at times I feel shamefully pampered by Harvard’s housing and dining systems, the House community has its charms and quirks that I would be reluctant to sacrifice in the name of full independence.

In another two and a half years, I am going to want my own place with privacy, a kitchen, and maybe even a significant other who likes to cook. But for now, I like having a tutor in my entryway who survived Social Studies 10 when he was an undergrad here. I like Winthrop’s subterranean dining experience. I even am growing to like the eight by eleven shoebox I share with another person and call a “bedroom”…even if we both can’t stand in there at the same time.


Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.