Not So Classy

Prefrosh, welcome to Harvard. You have been blessed with the opportunity to join our great tradition of scholarship here in Cambridge. Now please stay out of our hair until September. You don’t go to Harvard yet.

I know I sound harsh, but the frustration is warranted. Just the other day, a guy from the Harvard Class of 2010 “friended” me on Facebook. I scoured his profile to find any connection we might have. Same hometown? No, he’s from someplace in New Jersey; I’m from Phoenix. Same academic interest? Not that either—he’s a physics concentrator. I’m a literature and arts kind of girl.

I further investigated his profile for kicks. Surprise, surprise, he is a member of “The Class of 2010” group. And surprise, surprise, the group’s description is “Because we’re obviously the best class EVER.” That’s a curious declaration, isn’t it, considering that most of the prefrosh have yet to meet the rest of us—I, for one, think my class is pretty nifty.

But perhaps I’m being hypocritical. When I was able to log onto Facebook last summer—that fateful day of June the sixth!—I too went crazy. My fellow prefrosh and I frantically wrote on each others walls, making plans to “definitely meet up” come September. Within a month or so, I had amassed a Harvard friends list in the hundreds.

Then by some fluke, I found myself in a string of Facebook message conversations with one upperclassman. He warned me against having a thousand Facebook friends before even arriving at college and directed me to the Facebook group “Holy Shit, the Class of 2009 Should Perform a David Koresh-style Mass Suicide.”

These upperclassmen were right, of course. Why did I need to have 300 cyber friends whom I had yet to meet? Really, I was sort of creepy.

After that, I reformed. I trimmed down my Facebook friends list and dumped Facebook groups like “whoever said Harvard social life sucked forgot about the c/o 2009”—another curious declaration, since we hadn’t descended on Cambridge yet—and “Holy Shit, How did I get into the Harvard C/O 2009?” Even now in April, my current Facebook friend list is shorter than it was at its height last summer.

But arriving in Cambridge, expectations loomed that various friendships and relationships would take shape. For the most part, they didn’t. Save a few online friends with whom I clicked, most of my online friendships fizzled out (and I realized that enduring bonds cannot begin via instant messenger).

Our summer Facebooking madness was born of our pre-college anxiety. We faced the departure from everything that was familiar and the plunge into the unknowns of Harvard. The urge to collect friends was an effect of the desire for community, so as to belong, and not face Harvard alone.

Prefrosh, don’t make the mistake I made. There’ll be plenty of time for face-to-face contact during Freshman Week—a period in which you will meet hundreds of amazing people—and too much summer chitchat is likely to result in awkward meetings or passings in the Yard. You’ll be left wondering if that person in front of you in the waffle line is indeed the person to whom you related your entire life story that late night in July, or worse, if that person even remembers.



Lucy M. Caldwell ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.