Geek-Chic

The Otherside Café on Newbury Street teems with flannel-wearing, skateboard-riding,     scruffy-bearded hipsters. It’s the perfect place to fit in with people who avoid fitting in and to get away from the “conventional” Harvard polo and seersucker set.

I discovered The Otherside when I turned 21 last February, after hearing that it was a destination for other beer connoisseurs (read: snobs). Since then, I’ve frequented the café for another reason: no place makes me happier to be a pencil-headed chemistry major (though those $10 beers are quite good, as well). It is a great place to watch people trying really hard to be something they aren’t.

Consider the scene at The Otherside one recent Friday night: the restaurant’s usual throng burst into a roar when two of the scruffiest, hipster-iest men in the establishment began flinging small objects off a balcony into the crowd below. The objects, it turned out, were decks of cards and miniature palm-sized helmets—just large enough for a hipster to keep a finger or two safe while zooming around Boston on a bike without breaks.

When they tossed my group our own set of helmets and cards, we realized that the tchotchkes, appropriately labeled “free shit,” came to us courtesy of Vans Shoes. I suspected that these trend-setters were in fact the world’s most intentionally unkempt marketing reps.    It would be an understatement to say that the “free shit” was a hit, as was the ensuing screening of a snowboarding highlight reel accompanied by rap and European-sounding techno. All in all, it was an evening filled with plenty of advertising and mainstream music.

The experience was akin to what you might find in a bar or nightclub anywhere, even Harvard Square—well, except for the flannel. The crowd basked in the excesses of America’s particular brand of pervasive consumerism; the scene involved everything hipster culture seemed to reject. My friends and I, however, enjoyed the extravaganza without putting on airs that we didn’t.

Each time I visit The Otherside, I am reminded that fitting into hipster culture, and into many other social groups, requires a very specific set of affectations. By contrast, at Harvard you can almost always fit into a community as you are. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reflecting on whether and how my life would have been different if I had traded in my hours in lab and long nights perfecting problem sets to fit in with any given social set. Now, as a senior, I realize that it certainly would be different, but probably not for the better.

When I came to college, my priorities were to learn a lot, and to have fun—in that order. I learned quickly that the two are not mutually exclusive; learning something that truly excites me proved to be quite a bit of fun in its own right and I learned that, with a bit of planning, work need not preclude play.

The key was taking ownership of my actions and reminding myself that, just because my lab work or homework kept me in on a Thursday night, I wasn’t a martyr for science, deserving of sympathy.     To me, not having to pretend to dislike things that I actually appreciate is the most liberating aspect of my experience at Harvard.

Almost no one fits into only one niche at Harvard; there are physicists in finals clubs, bookworms on sports teams, and future politicians sprinkled across the academic spectrum. These odd combinations fly in the face of expectation and significantly enrich and interlink the different strands of life on campus.

All of this is enabled by the willingness of students to love their many passions unapologetically and by the willingness of their peers to appreciate the diversity of skills and interests on campus—and even to put up with the occassional periodic table joke every once in a while.   We are at Harvard, after all. Everyone else thinks we’re nerdy anyway, so why not enjoy it?

—Jonathan B. Steinman ’10 is a Chemistry concentrator living in Winthrop House. He still occasionally enjoys $10 beer, techno music, and miniature helmets.