Day In The Life of a Harvard Mouse

Hi, I’m a Harvard mouse. You may have seen me scurrying around Kirkland dining hall or following you down the sidewalk last night. I thought I’d give you a day in my life as one of Harvard’s most well-known community members. I may not have millions of subscribers, but I consider myself just as influential as a Youtuber. I mean, people scream and rush to take pictures every time they see me, and I even have my own profile in The Crimson. Talk about a celebrity!

But like many Harvard influencers, some people hate me and my friends for no reason. I truly don’t understand why. We’re upstanding, decent, gray-furred creatures, far from cockroaches or ants.

In fact, I’m more similar to you than you might think. I’m mostly nocturnal, so I’m on a similar schedule to most Harvard students (and some vampires). I usually wake up around 7 p.m. after a nice nap in the servery. I call the beautiful Kirkland House home, and my favorite thing about the house is its rich history — it was one of the original seven houses! Unlike the renovated dorms, it has an old-timey charm to it. Who wouldn’t love its rusted and chipped white walls?

Aside from Kirkland, my friends and I also scurry around Eliot, Quincy, Canaday Hall, the alley behind Pinocchio’s, and in The Crimson late at night. (In fact, we often clock in more night hours than most Crimson execs!) Our preferred location depends on the night. We don’t usually feel like making the trek to the quad, though I’ve heard they often lament my absence in their Housing Day videos. Sometimes I feel bad that they’re missing out, but I’ve been advised not to walk through Cambridge Common at night.

I start my morning with my daily read of the Harvard University Dining Services menu, hoping that it’s not grape pizza day. If it is, I immediately head to Jefe’s. Some of my friends prefer Felipe’s, but we don’t speak of them (and don’t get me started on the mice who prefer Joe’s over Pinnochio’s).

At 10 p.m., I go for my morning run around the dining hall. You know those four-legged tables? We LOVE to make our way underneath them — our gray bodies camouflage quite well!

At 11 p.m., I eat lunch, which usually consists of floor cereal. My favorite kind is Marshmallow Mateys. They’re not as good as Lucky Charms, but I guess I’ll settle for what the dining hall has to offer.

At 12 a.m., it’s usually uneventful. But once a week, the Kirklanders do this weird thing called The Choosening, where the students choose their house theme of the week. You may not know it, but we mice also participate in the Choosening. For milk week, while the students had milk in cups, we carried around creamer packets. For pot week, we found the best flower pots in the courtyard to hide under. But squash week was tragic for us: one of my dear mouse neighbors got squashed.

Similar to the 1 p.m. Lowell bells, we have our own tradition: the 1 a.m. Kirkland vermin heist. My fellow mice and I enter random dorms, hoping to nibble at crumbs, leftovers, and unwrapped food. My favorite snacks are hot pockets — they bring back fond memories of the winter of 2004. Some kid named Mark Zuckerberg was coding some app, and he used to go through dozens of hot pockets in his dorm each day. Talk about mouse heaven. I miss the days when Harvard was the prime spot for CS nerds, before Stanford took over. It was truly a blissful time for us mice: cheap convenience store food spilling off of desks, students glued to their computer screens unaware of their surroundings, laundry piling up, creating lots of hiding spots. It made for an ideal, hassle-free dinner.

At 2 a.m., I move from the dorms to the basement. I start my evening meditation session in the Kirkland meditation room, where I reflect on effective altruism, intellectual vitality, and the profound theories I’ve learned in “Justice,” my favorite Gen Ed.

As we continue through the basement, my friends and I love to enter odd crevices that could potentially electrocute us. Next to those big human weights in the gym, we try our best to lift cheese and cracker weights made from stolen brain break materials.

Usually my routine is quite peaceful, but lately, I’ve been concerned. Kirkland House is going to be renovated, and our habitat is now threatened. My friends and I have been frantically looking for a new home. The situation is so dire, we’re even considering transferring to Yale as a last resort.

The worrying often keeps me up at night, but at 5 a.m., I finally start to fall asleep, around the same time as most of my human classmates. I sleep in a crack in the wall, a.k.a n-1 housing.

So that’s a day in my life — don’t forget to hit that like and subscribe button! Next week, I’ll be doing a much-requested Harvard laundry room haul. Wondering why all of your socks have been disappearing? Stay tuned to find out!

— Magazine writer Mukta Dharmapurikar can be reached at mukta.dharmapurikar@thecrimson.com.