Phylogeny and Party Supplies

What a semester this has been. By now all underclassmen have left campus, except for those who are unfortunate enough to have late exams or Crimson articles to finish up. Heck, even most of the faculty has fled to the Cape, or New York, or some other place that has the distinct characteristic of not being Harvard. The only ones left are the seniors and the unlucky. The past year has been quite a ride for us all, and it is certainly going out in style.

The past few weeks have seen their fair share of exciting developments. “24” has returned to our lives! Bauer’s power hour is back, which naturally means that no student who relies on Netflix or HBO GO will actually see any of the new episodes. I know this, you see, because I did some investigative journalism for this piece. I asked the random people sitting next to me in the dining hall who they were and how they felt about the return of “24.” “We’re your roommates, dude,” they responded, “and we’re busy studying for finals, so please put a cork in it.” They didn’t actually use the expression “put a cork in it,” because they’re not 60-year-old wine connoisseurs, but I changed the phrasing because my “editor” thought the original language did not live up to The Crimson’s very ambiguously defined “journalistic standards.”

Speaking of journalism, TIME seems to be in the business of reading college editorials these days, finally answering the long-running question of what the employees there actually do. (To the editors of TIME: if you’re looking for the next amazingly talented yet surprisingly humble writer to feature, I’m right here.) Congrats to Jenny Gathright ’16 for having her article about feminism picked up! And also Tal Fortgang, the freshman from Princeton who took on checking privilege! Boy, what a discussion that one started. I myself have been too busy checking over problem sets, and checking my email, and checking in and checking out. But mostly checking over many, many problem sets. If that’s what is meant by checking privilege, then I’ve signed up for a whole lot more checking privilege next year, but mostly because I’m a masochist.

The controversies hardly end there. Harvard has entered the phase of its relationship with current seniors in which the school does little except ask for money. “Honey, I just need $80 for a new tote bag!” This is euphemistically referred to as the “Senior Gift Campaign.” The conversations I’ve seen about this fundraising effort usually begin by one student asking another to donate for financial aid. The second student typically responds that money is fungible, to which the first student kind of scrunches his or her face and tries to remember if he or she ever knew what the word “fungible” means. (I haven’t double-checked this, but I’m reasonably sure it’s a species of toad.)

Now we can’t hold the folklore and mythology concentrators too accountable for not knowing their phylogeny. Some of them took psychology to meet their science requirement. Members of the graduating class, after all, were the ones who first taught me what classes to take and which ones to leave to the premed kids. Organic chemistry? No thank you; I’d rather write an article about privilege.

I can say this for sure: we will all miss the graduating seniors, even the ones who took psych. We’ll miss you for being our Peer Advising Fellows freshman year and giving us all the advice we needed, regardless of whether or not any of it made sense. We’ll miss you for making fun of our obsessive focus on GPAs and reminding us that sometimes the most important thing to do is nothing at all. We’ll miss you for storming our dorms during Housing Day and teaching us what it means to be drunk at 8:30 in the morning.

We’ll miss you for showing us what it means to run around in search of a summer internship before we had to do it ourselves. For picking up our “party supplies” when we were too young to buy them ourselves. For late nights at the Kong, and by the Charles River, and wherever else the winds blew us. For teaching us about Fulbright scholarships and Hoopes Prizes and nonchalance in the face of disappointment and rejection. For reminding us that theses can be written in the span of two weeks, but really good ones take months of dedication. For showing us what it means to be hardworking, selfless, dedicated, supportive, and all-around amazing.

I want to thank all the seniors for what you’ve done and wish you the best of luck in your endeavors for the next two years, before you come back for grad school. We’ll all miss you dearly, and campus just won’t be the same without you.

Except “24.” That’ll still be on TV, and we still won’t watch it.

Jacob R. Drucker ‘15, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Mather House.