Sink or Swim

This fall, in the midst of my coursework, social stresses, and PAFing duties, I suddenly realized the irony of my situation: I’m a Peer Advising Fellow who desperately needs advising himself. So far, my sophomore year is turning out to be much more difficult than the dreaded freshman year.

Why?

Sophomore fall is the semester when, whether you’re ready or not, you have to make significant academic, social, and emotional decisions that have profound implications for the rest of your time at Harvard. And with PAFs out of the picture, and sophomore advisors who don’t necessarily attend Harvard or share your interests in the first place, the going gets tough.

First, your concentration. Guidance on concentration choice is one of the more egregious failures of sophomore advising. If you didn’t find the “advising fortnight” particularly helpful during your freshman spring, then you are almost completely dependent on either upperclassman advice or guidance from a sophomore advisor who, again, may or may not share your academic interests or have the appropriate knowledge to help you.

Seeking out advice from the departments themselves is a remarkable challenge in and of itself. My experiences trying to track down non-resident tutors and concentration advisors involved endless redirection to different people who each swore that someone else was responsible for assisting me.

Sophomores confront a similar lack of support when it comes to House life. The ruling philosophy about how to transition sophomores into the twelve Houses goes something like this: If we throw sophomores into these House communities and treat them like juniors and seniors, then by the time they get to junior or senior year they’ll probably have it figured it out.

And entryways don’t help. They are, in my experience, mostly a joke. Study breaks and other entryway gatherings have, for me, been non-existent. I personally couldn’t tell you the name of anyone in my entryway besides my blockmates, and that is not a result of poor study break attendance. It is the nature of how Houses treat sophomores: Sink or swim.

There are also some crucial and transformative social and emotional challenges that arise sophomore fall. Chief among them is the infamous punch process. Even if you decide to forego joining one of Harvard’s final clubs, you will still experience their spillover effects. Every sophomore invariably knows someone punching. More likely, as was my case, you know many people participating in the process—including close friends.

This punch process, I think, is one of the most significant examples of the hard questions sophomores have to answer: How do we reconcile some of our selfish desires to join an elite, exclusive community with our feeling that final clubs do not promote a positive and inclusive social atmosphere on campus? What are the values that justify joining final clubs and do these values align with our own?

If you decide to abstain from the punch process, then how do you understand and accept the opposite decision from the people you thought had values similar to your own? On a less philosophical level, how do you deal with the fact that you may no longer see close friends who are punching all that much, since the process is such a time-sink?

And punch isn’t the only difficult social decision sophomores must make. With whom do you decide to remain close even after punch season? How do you see old friends when you are no longer next to them in the Yard? Which clubs do you stick with, and which do you ditch? The list goes on.

You’re asked in your sophomore fall to do a whole lot of deciding without a whole lot of support. The endless procession of sophomore fall decisions all seem to need resolution just when the proverbial rug of support has been pulled out from under us.

I’m not foolish or naive enough to believe that all of these problems would be solved if the college offered more support; some of these are struggles that we need to solve on our own. Will better advising make our punch decisions for us? Probably not.

I do think, however, that the lack of support offered to sophomores is symbolic of a more systemic issue at the college: a tendency to be distant, insensitive, and deeply unresponsive to the needs of students. The idea that Harvard students are smart and resourceful enough to get into Harvard, and so they must be smart enough to figure it out on their own, seems to pervade the college at many levels. Why does a prestigious college like ours lack the kind of support systems that most of our peer institutions take for granted? How is it that Harvard’s support vacuum has persisted for so many generations of students?

There is no easy solution to the pervasive feeling of anomie that accompanies sophomore fall. But the semester is an obvious illustration of the sorry state of support infrastructure here, and that’s something Harvard can and should strive to fix.

Nick F. Barber ’17 is a Crimson editorial writer living in Mather House.