Most House Spirit: Audrey Kang
Just like her beloved Leverett House, green is Audrey N. Kang ’24’s signature color. Green proliferates in her room, from her Celtics poster (she became a fan from the influence of some friends in Leverett) to the plants lining her walls (“I keep telling myself I’m a plant girl and I really am not”). To top it off, she’s even using a green Godzilla mask to scare mice as part of her thesis research.
Coming to Harvard from Dublin, California (“an hour away from anything interesting”), Audrey might’ve thought she’d be trading in Dublin green for Harvard crimson. But once she was sorted into Leverett House, she put on the classic green light-up bunny ears and has been a Leverett staple ever since. “I feel like people sleep on Lev,” she says of her nomination in this category. “So I was really happy to have a house spirit moment.”
I’m meeting Audrey in her suite, high up in Leverett G-Tower. We pause to admire the view of Cambridge sprawling out before us. “You can literally feel the golden light pouring through the room,” she tells me. “I kind of stand here and photosynthesize.”
She also appreciates simply “waking up, opening the window, and seeing people you know walking into the courtyard.” She’s become close with these fellow Leverites as co-chair of the Leverett House Committee, a role she assumed “effectively two months into joining the House.”
“I actually don’t really remember House life before being the co-chair,” she says.
Audrey wears many hats at Harvard, from working for Consulting on Business and the Environment to event-planning with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Student Association. And yet, “HoCo is honestly the best thing that I’ve done,” she says, before diving into a description of her life as co-chair.
Every Sunday morning, Audrey buys snacks for the weekly 11 a.m. HoCo meeting, where the group convenes to plan events from formals to weekly steins with themes ranging from karaoke to April Fools. She coordinates it all with her co-chair Austin Ma ’24, whom she didn’t know before joining HoCo but is now “one of the people I’m closest to on campus,” she says.
Then on Thursdays, she helps set up for, run, and clean up Stein, wrapping up just in time for intramural volleyball B (“another highlight of my Lev experience”). When the weekend rolls back around, she does it all again: “It’s just rinse and repeat after that.”
I’m exhausted just hearing Audrey’s weekly routine, but somehow, she’s still bursting with energy as she tells it to me.
“In a school where people got here because they’re really really good, sometimes it’s really nice to have a community where you don't need to try to be a part of it,” she muses. “It’s not like I needed to prove my Leverett-ness or anything.”
Even so, she’s definitely proved it. She tells me of many long nights walking in and out of the tower courtyards or down into the HoCo closet, waving to security guard Mike A. Grant — “one of the staples of the Leverett community” — or even talking to the HoCo chairs from 20 years past about their old events and traditions.
“Most of my other time when I’m not doing a lot of these fun events is literally spent in a laboratory with mice,” she says about her thesis on dopamine signaling in different brain regions in mice (hence the Godzilla mask).
More precisely, she’s comparing how two centers of the brain interact when a mouse is put in a context where there’s both a reward and a threat. The Godzilla mask acts as the threat, popping out and roaring at mice as they try to drink water. Throughout the process, Audrey is recording the activity of the brain areas in order to see how the dopamine signaling is happening. In comparison with her Leverett duties, she notes, there’s “a lot less human contact in my research.”
While Audrey has spent her undergraduate years in labs as a Neuroscience concentrator, she’ll be returning to Cambridge soon enough to attend Harvard Law School. Up until this point in our conversation, I didn’t even know she was interested in law.
“I came to Harvard and was like, ‘You know what, why decide when I can join a consulting club and then be pre-law while being a neuro major?’ No decisions made at all,” she tells me with a smile.
Even though her time as HoCo co-chair and as an undergraduate in the House is coming to a close, Audrey will always be connected to Leverett. “I’d be so down to come back as a tutor and then be able to foster community in a different way,” she says eagerly. “So maybe not a permanent goodbye.”
— Associate Magazine Editor Kyle L. Mandell can be reached at kyle.mandell@thecrimson.com