The Harvard Experience

Last weekend, Harvard College put itself on display for admitted students during its annual Visitas weekend. While the breadth of opportunities prospective students were able to consider was undoubtedly impressive, we believe it is not particularly reflective of what life is like at Harvard. As far as weekends at Harvard go, Visitas is far from typical, and students should know that at Harvard they will not typically shuttle between events starting every hour on the hour. Still, the most crucial takeaway for admitted students is that even a normal Harvard weekend is reason enough to spend four years of college here.

Even though Visitas is unlike any normal weekend here, its current structure is valuable. Visitas provides a necessary resource for admitted students as they make their college decisions, allowing them to get a feel for what life at Harvard could be like, and what activities and opportunities their Harvard experiences might include.

At their heart, however, weekends at Harvard are the best time for students to take advantage of Harvard’s greatest resource: fellow students. Weekends here are about spending time with incredibly thoughtful and interesting friends. To us, Harvard is where people get together and support their friends at plays and concerts before going out to social events with extracurricular groups on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s where you can win an all-expenses paid trip to Puerto Rico that leaves the next morning with a $10 raffle ticket at a party in Lowell House. Those of us not lucky enough to be relaxing by a Puerto Rican beach on Sunday spend three hours at brunch with friends, eating waffles with the Harvard crest on them.

Harvard is where Sunday night dinners meander well past their ostensible 7:30 end time, after which the true Harvard Sunday night experience begins in Lamont Library, where everybody ends up in the cafe together eating pastries, drinking coffee, and working on papers and problem sets. And of course, we all get together to watch Last Week Tonight or Game of Thrones on the free HBO streaming service available to all students.

Everything that makes Harvard special centers around the community of people who live here. As Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana told the Class of 2018 at their convocation last fall, the Harvard experience should be "transformational," not "transactional." The best way to have that transformational experience is to take advantage of the incredible professors, teaching fellows, Harvard employees, and classmates who care about us as people and foster our personal and intellectual growth.

While Visitas undoubtedly gave admitted students an introduction to some of the organizations to which we devote so much of our time , it is far from a typical weekend. We love Harvard because it has become our home. We hope you make the right decision and make it yours too.