Fostering Community

At the end of reading period, nearly 40 undergraduates in red onesie pajamas assembled at a themed party to celebrate senior members of the group. The fete—“Pyrites of the Caribbean: At Semester’s End,” a geological play on the Disney movie franchise—was not an extracurricular event but rather the final meeting of the Geological Society, a club formed by concentrators in the earth and planetary sciences.

With just about 40 students, EPS is one of the College’s smaller concentrations and prides itself on its active community, said “Geo Society Empress” Alex S. Morgan ’14. But its approach to camaraderie is just one of many possible routes. From student-faculty dinners to common physical spaces to group problem solving sessions, each of Harvard’s 48 undergraduate concentrations has its own strategies to build community around shared academic interests.

Still, some students feel more affinity with fellow concentrators than others. And on a campus that is brimming with extracurriculars, social organizations, and the residential House system, concentration community is just one element of the student experience. While Harvard is known for its academics, factors such as concentration size, assignment type, and student and faculty initiative seem to have a large impact on whether a student feels a social connection to his or her concentration.

SIZING IT UP

Although concentration size does not necessarily correlate with concentration satisfaction—in 2012 senior exit surveys, small concentrations had both the highest and lowest ratings—students in smaller concentrations said they tend to be closer because they interact more often.

“You get to interact and work with a lot of the same kids and that definitely fosters relationships,” said Nicholas W. Galat ’13, one of just under 100 concentrators in statistics.

“I guess I feel like the department doesn’t actually do a ton, but I think it’s nice because it’s such a small department that you get to know the people really well,” said William D. Horton ’15, a music concentrator.

Music, with only 19 concentrators, had the lowest concentration satisfaction in 2012 surveys.

Conversely, for students in larger concentrations, their academic field tended to play a smaller role in their daily experience.

“Because Psychology is one of the larger concentrations, it can be challenging to create a more intimate community,” said Melissa A. Yetman, an undergraduate program coordinator in psychology. While the department holds several events, including Sophomore Welcome gatherings and student-faculty dinners, Yetman said they are not always well-attended because coordinating the schedules of so many students can be challenging.

Kevin L. Huang ’13, who concentrated in government and statistics, served as a government peer concentration counselor as part of the department’s efforts to improve advising. But given the varied specialties of concentrators and the vast size of the concentration, he said it was almost impossible to get to know many of his fellow concentrators.

“There are just too many people in the department, to the point where you inevitably end up with people who just don’t know each other,” Huang said.

FORMULAS FOR COMMUNITY

Still, sometimes even larger concentrations are able to develop a tight-knit community thanks to the nature of assignments—problem sets, group projects, and laboratory or research settings often bring students together.

Physics, for example, has a number of traditional events, from a weekly problem set solving night in Leverett Dining Hall that sees students scribbling solutions until late in the night to an annual picnic. The Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students serves as a network for students of physics from inside and outside the concentration.

“It’s interesting working with [classmates] on harder physics problems so you know how they think and how they tackle problems,” said Farzan Vafa ’15, a physics and math concentrator.

When he was a sophomore, human developmental and regenerative biology concentrator Theodore A. Peng ’13 and some of his peers formed an email group, the HDRB Study Buddies, to discuss the assigned problem sets in their tutorial. The email list quickly grew into more than just a study group, and this year, some of the Study Buddies as well as other HDRB concentrators coordinated seeing the midnight premiere of The Hunger Games together.

“Having p-sets has definitely contributed to us getting to know each other,” Peng said.

While science and other quantitative concentrators are vocal about the strength of their communities, HDRB professor and Eliot House Master Douglas A. Melton said that it is not just classes with problem sets that can bring students together.

“Almost all subjects must have some sort of projects, be they p-sets or outings or work projects,” Melton said. “If learning occurs better in a group environment, then we should try more ways of doing that.”

History and Literature exemplifies this model with one mandatory, concentration-wide book assigned each semester. Because the concentration is split into specialty regions, such as modern Europe and Latin America, the assignment lets concentrators engage with students of other geographical and historical areas whose paths might not otherwise cross. In the new sophomore tutorials for History of Science, students often work in groups and present to one another.

In Romance Languages and Literatures, students choose a language as the centerpiece of their curriculum, and concentrators said they feel less camaraderie because each student studies a different language and begins at a different level.

“There’s kind of a different bond since a lot more people who do those concentrations travel, and then they can compare study abroad stories,” said Erik T. Olsen ’15, who focuses in Italian.

COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS

Not every student looks to his or her concentration as a primary community. Some even find little need to branch out from their House communities.

“You have a very deep connection to your House, which takes away from something, and one of those things is your connection to your concentration,” said Mahzarin R. Banaji,a professor of social psychology.

While House community has become a staple of the undergraduate experience, department heads are still trying to develop academic community without treading on the extracurricular commitments and social lives of students.

“We want to strike the right balance between providing events or activities that students are excited about and want to attend and not organizing too many events where students feel spread too thin to attend or feel that they will not gain anything from them,” Yetman said of community-building efforts in psychology.

In some cases, professors find that capitalizing on the strength of the House system can actually enhance concentration-specific activities.

“[Physics Night] grew up by accident 14 years ago because I started teaching Physics 16 at the same time I became Leverett House Master and at the same time that our dining hall opened up 24 hours a day,” said Leverett House Master, Physics professor, and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Physics and ‘Chemistry and Physics’ Howard M. Georgi ’68 in an email to The Crimson. “The combination was magical.”

Melton said he envisions spreading the model established by Georgi to more houses and fields, and led his own evening sessions on biotechnology in Eliot last year.

“Almost any job or activity you have will involve working as part of a team or as part of a community,” Melton said of the importance of developing camaraderie. “The more we can prepare people to think about that—how they interact with other members, bosses, subordinates, equals—the better off we are.”

—Staff writer Jessica A. Barzilay can be reached at jessicabarzilay@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @jessicabarzilay.