Brrr

Introduction
My freshman year I was sitting in my dorm room in Harvard yard and I think it was 23 below zero and the wind was shaking the windows and checked the weather in Santa Barbara where I’m from and it was something like 82 degrees. There are really long winters in Boston and you spend a lot of time in your room. It’s a little more conducive to studying as professors would say. A lot of kids get down because of that.
All the athletes on the team do their own thing on campus and that’s something that’s unique about Harvard and a smaller school for athletics. You got kids who are into languages or presidents of clubs or a society or into music or do drama. So that’s a unique thing about Harvard.

Campus Life and Social Life
School spirit on a scale of 0 to school spirit is a zero or a 4, it’s not good. We have a great football team, for example we went 10-0, and we only really show up to the Harvard vs. Yale game because there’s a huge party. I play volleyball and we get 100 people at the game. I wish there’d be 1000’s but that’s how it goes. In some ways that adds to the spirit here, which is not a school spirit in the sense of sports, but more of everyone doing their own thing. Too many people are into their own things here which is good and a bad thing. People have a meeting every night of the weeks so they can’t make it or they write for the school paper and they’re up all night editing something, that’s just the nature of the school. Academics
I write for a political review on campus, which is a quarterly magazine, that’s student run. And that’s something that happens a lot at Harvard. A lot of kids start their own stuff or students want to run their own things. And it actually works out because people put a lot of time into it. I know the Harvard Political Review, which I write, is pretty much like a class or two for those kids. So they’re taking 4 classes and doing that, up late at night editing for that. Some kids dedicate their whole career here to writing for the Crimson or something. That’s the nature of this place, a lot of kids tryout all kinds of things.

Student Body
There’s a lot of kids at this school, if you were ever to miss class, they would look at you like “where are you from you’re missing class” but my third year and lectures you don’t really have to go all the time. I’d say there’s a population that doesn’t go because they’re reading the books or they’re so good at economics that they don’t have to go. And there’s probably another half that just, they’re in their senior spring or junior spring like me and it’s just too nice of a day to roll to class.