Freedom of First Year Is Fun But Daunting

The first month at Harvard is a heady intoxication of freedom. That feeling isn’t simply the delicious sensation of waking up to an entire day under your own jurisdiction. Eventually you come to realize that your classmates are no longer your companions from the diaper crowd. Your classes are no longer cemented to a daily, regimented schedule that starts at seven and ends at two. You are finally free from those defining middle school years that eternally labeled you as the quiet girl, an “orch(estra) dork,” or that kid who wore jumpers every day in seventh grade. Tabula rasa. The slate is clean.

It was because of this newfound freedom that I only started missing home when I first got sick. As I morosely slopped away the goop oozing from my nose, all I wanted was for my mom to get me some chicken noodle soup while my neighborhood pals brought me my homework assignments.

I was soon up and about, but it was a long time before I was cured of my homesickness. The solution, I eventually found, was simple: get involved in life at Harvard.

If one does the math, there is a lot of time left each day once classes are said and done. I went from an eight-hour school day in high school to a daily two or three hours of class at Harvard. Factor in a few hours of z’s and meals, and there still remained about 12 hours of the day for me to fill.

That is half of the day that could have easily been spent lamenting over the lost splendors of home. But there were always meetings and rehearsals to attend and articles to write. On weekends, there were parties, strolls in the North End, or movie marathons with my hallway. Often weeks went by before my preoccupied brain had breath to register homesickness.

Whenever people ask me what it’s like to attend Harvard, classes are never the first thing that come to mind. I launch into passionate propaganda about The Crimson and The Independent. I babble about “Pirates of the Boston Seas,” The Storytime Players’ production last year. I enthuse over how the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter is completely student-run. And I warble about all the amazing people that I have met.

Don’t get me wrong. The classes are great, but academics are 50 percent—at most—of the Harvard experience. I learned a lot listening to professors; but I learned as much listening to the guest speakers that come through various organizations, such as the Institute of Politics, the Radcliffe Institute and The Crimson. The most memorable lecture of my freshman year came not from a professor, but from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eileen McNamara, who spoke at a Radcliffe Institute dinner.

But while abundant activities are a critical part of settling in at Harvard, it’s also important to create a home-away-from-home in your dorm.

Once the day was done—after I’d kicked the academic dust from my heels and trotted the rounds of activities—I liked to retreat into the privacy and comfort of my room, Thayer 414. But it was a shock to realize that this home, unlike my last, no longer promised privacy.

Thayer, I shared with a couple hundred other people. 414, I shared in close proximity with a girl who studied at the desk next to mine, slept in the bunk below mine, and even inhaled parts of the same spider when we slept.

No longer could I prance around the hall in a bra and panties with all the confidence of an alpha male wolf who had marked his territory; two dozen people now shared the floor. No longer could I croon Mariah Carey at the top of my lungs in the shower at four o’clock in the morning; I might disturb other slumbering or studying Thayer residents. Early on, my proctor gently drew me aside and explained the dorm etiquette of using “indoor voices when we’re indoors”; he had gotten complaints from a proctor one floor up.

For the first few weeks, my roommate and I were fastidiously polite with one another. “Good morning, Roxanne.” “Good morning, April.” “Is my alarm clock too loud for you?” “I’m sorry, but would you mind doing your laundry? It’s starting to spill over onto the floor.”

By October, the script had been edited: “If your alarm clock wakes me up one more time, I’ll break your arm.” “Do your laundry or Febreeze it, because it’s starting to smell.”

The veneer of good breeding had disappeared, but it was certainly a whole lot easier to breathe.

Being completely honest with each other was the best thing that my roommate and I did for our relationship. We unhesitatingly complained when the other was doing something that bothered us. It didn’t just make living together easier, it made college seem more like home. It meant that, while my room might not have all the privacy of my cubbyhole back home, it was a place where I could utterly be myself. And after a hard day of Harvard, that’s a real relief.

—Staff writer April B. Wang can be reached at abwang@fas.harvard.edu.