How to Survive Freshman Week

Welcome to Harvard, where you’re special. So special that you get to reside in historic dormitories that haven’t been renovated in decades, spend time in 70s-era failed experiments in anti-riot architecture, or if you’re really lucky, be exiled to fringe locations in the nether regions of our beautiful campus. Our condolences, Pennypacker residents.

But by now, you’ve encountered the immutable Cambridge weather pattern that always makes freshman move-in day the hottest day of the school year. Don’t fret; you’ll be freezing your butt off soon enough. And surprise! You won’t be issued a pillow or a land-line phone as in past years, but don’t worry—your iPhone can be used for either purpose.

In any case, you’ve no doubt already Facebook-friended your famous classmates and Googled your roommate, but you might consider searching for them on YouTube as well. You’ll probably need to blackmail them at some point during your Harvard career or when you’re both competing for that cushy job at Goldman Sachs six years down the line. In fact, you should probably just log onto Facebook right now and download one embarrassing photo of everyone in your class, because at least eight of them will make a run for president at some point. And when they do, guess whose farm will be subsidized on that next congressional pork bill!

Many of you will be busy this week trying to procure alcohol, but you don’t have to be 25 like McLovin to get yourself on the fast train to Drunk-town. In fact, tickets to D-town are readily available if you know where to look. Budding chemists might want to head to the alleyway behind the Delphic and try to separate residual ethanol from the various yellow liquids you will encounter there. Otherwise just clump together with every other first-year you see and follow the mob. A sure-fire way to score a drop of Finlandia!

Don’t forget you have a boat load of activities to go to this week. Rest assured you can skip Sex Signals. We’ll tell you right now, if sex signals anything, it’s that you really don’t go to Harvard.

You may be accustomed to rating potential mates on a one through 10 scale, but at Harvard we operate in binary: They’re either a one or a zero, so it’s either yes or never. But trust us; this will make justifying things to your friends the next morning a whole lot easier; I mean come on, he was definitely a one.

But when you do need good service, try the Queen’s Head, and don’t forget Brain Break for late night satisfaction. Unfortunately getting a Fly-By during the day won’t be an option until you’re a little bit older.

Also, it appears that the higher-ups have digitized and buffed up the advising system for you. You’re the first freshman class to enjoy the online advising portal—too bad what’s on the other side of that portal is still, more often than not, completely useless.

That’s unfortunate, since the freshman class seems to be slightly less intelligent than in years past. Recent polls have shown a fifth of Harvard freshmen can’t locate Annenberg on a University map.

We personally believe that Harvard-Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our college don’t have maps, and we believe that our education, like such as South Yale and the Princeton, everywhere like, such as and we believe that they should.

Our education over here in the Harvard should help the Harvard, or should help South Yale and should help the Princeton, and the Big Ten schools, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Best of luck, Class of 2011.