How Not to Look Like a Freshman

Picture this: I’m moving into Mather House sophomore year, just as excited as I was the year prior. Maybe more — because now I know what I’m doing!

I know which days I should spend my Board Plus and which days I should head back to the dining hall, I know at least 20 of the gazillion esoteric acronyms people here use, and I know to trust any shuttle’s timing as far as I could throw it.

As I struggle to lug the first of many densely packed suitcases up three flights of stairs that sweltering summer day, I hear a set of words I will never forget: “Are you a freshman?”

The statement seemed absurd. I was very clearly moving into an upperclassman house. We both were!

Not understanding her train of thought at all, I respond with a questioning “No?”

Seeing the incomprehension in my face, she gestures vaguely to my neck.

Ah, right. My lanyard.

The lanyard everyone gets on the first day of freshman year.

I manage a quick “oh, it’s just convenient” before continuing on my journey. As soon as she’s out of sight, I take it off and stick it in my pocket.

So, my first piece of advice for not looking like a first-year?

1. Ditch the lanyard

If you’ve got your keys around your neck, people will know that you’re a new arrival (the horror!). Never mind that it’s genuinely convenient, making an essential item hard to forget, thereby ensuring that you don’t suffer the greater embarrassment of being locked out of your room. But at least it’s not just freshmen who find themselves dialing Securitas for a key at 2 a.m.

Instead, put your key in that weird little pocket in the back of your phone case that’s also your wallet. Surely you won’t develop a constant, gnawing concern that it’ll fall out of its increasingly smooth container.

At the very least, put your key on a more tasteful (and forgettable) keychain. No one will notice you patting your pockets like you’re trying to remember how to do the Macarena in the middle of a lecture. They will notice a lanyard.

That being said, both the Swiss Army phone case and the keychain I mentioned should have something in common:

2. No Harvard branding

We go to a school in Boston. Well, a little outside of Boston. You get the picture.

Wearing (or even owning) Harvard merch is often considered to be a tad… gauche. We don’t want to seem elitist, do we?

That’s why you must avoid displaying anything that’s clearly Harvard-related on your person. In fact, try not to mention Harvard, even when it would be natural. People will think much better of you if you make a big deal out of being “humble” instead of just treating the topic like it’s a regular one.

The advice above mostly applies to when you’re off campus.

On campus, you have a far more important reason to avoid the branding — you might get mistaken for a tourist!

3. Don’t ask for help

Everyone wonders what the “holistic admissions process” actually selects for. Since you’ve joined the club, you finally get the truth: we can all smell weakness.

To survive here, you have to do it all on your own. After all, it’s not like your various advisors, teachers, and miscellaneous mentors are here because they care about you and want to see you succeed. It’s not like our university’s greatest strength is its dedicated, passionate, and supportive community. And it’s certainly not as if every major contribution someone has made to society was done standing on the shoulders of giants!

“It’s not impostor syndrome if I’m actually an impostor.” — a thought only you have had in the entire time the human species has existed.

4. Enjoy yourself.

The primary thing that distinguishes freshmen from upperclassmen is their collective preoccupation with being freshmen. And we get it—we really do! We were all freshmen once, as impossible as that may seem.

We know what it’s like to worry about having already wasted the opportunities that Harvard offers before we’ve even been here for a month.

We also have the privilege of hindsight and know how silly that kind of thinking is, and how hard it is to convince you otherwise. So I’ll leave you with a quote, a fridge-magnet standard often misattributed to Mark Twain:

“Worry is like paying interest on a debt you don’t owe.”

And frankly, as undergraduates, we all have real debt to worry about.