Harvard University Top Questions

I am in a small department where even the administrators know who I am.

Favorite class - Music 93r and First Nights. Class participation is common. Harvard is the best place for intellectual convo, inside and outside class. Students are competitive in premed classes, but internally. No bitching or catfights. Just intensely competing against self and against the grade curve. Professors come eat at house dining halls sometimes, very accessible. Academic requirement - kinda hard, demanding, more than prepares you for med school. Education geared towards learning more than job, although there are a lot of advising at the OCS for career prep.

Yep. I love language classes. I hate those math classes where the professors just think we're all stupid. Some of them always, most of them before the midterms, all of them in reading period. Of course. Idem. One I'm taking with the "god" of the field. They're nice...sometimes...ok, most of the time. Kind of. They want us to die. Getting a job (I know, it's sad)

The two people who ask questions in lecture can really intimidate the other forty into thinking everyone else is smarter than them.

Classes at the College, in my opinion, are actually pretty bad. Even when you realize that Harvard is a medium-sized school where large classes and little face time with professors are inevitable, it’s hard to square off the expectation of what a Harvard education should be with what it actually is. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with classes here: the professors here are world-class, the material is interesting and the readings very good. Yet one still expects more out of a premier institution. I’m only on my fourth semester here, but for the most part, when it comes to the meat-and-bones-textbook-and-facts part of my education, I’ve learned little. The material taught (multiplied four or five times over depending on how many classes you’re taking) is thrown at you at a rigorous enough pace that a lot of it doesn’t actually sink in. Classes are not so much an academic pursuit as they are requirements to be checked off in the drive toward a Harvard degree, just as discussion of the material, i.e. in section, is less about reasoned debate than it is about racking up participation points. Furthermore, for people who made it past the most strenuous admissions game in the world, students don’t always possess the intellectual curiosity that marks thoughtfulness and makes for the sophisticated kind of world citizens you want to be surrounded by. The Harvard admissions brochure will tell you there’s a ridiculously high percentage of classes with fifteen students or less. Between seminars, tutorials, sections, language classes, etc., the number is probably true, but misleading. Between Cores and intro courses like Ec10, Justice, and Life Sciences 1b, there are a multitude of classes that enroll anywhere from a hundred to over a thousand students, which makes for a drudging sense of nonidentity and/or feeds an already competitive culture. I’ve seen friends turned off by the fields of study they came to Harvard to pursue because of overcrowded classes, impersonal professors, or competitive classmates—especially in the sciences or economics, where competition exists most. Solutions would include expanding the Core curriculum, offering more fun and popular classes, and giving students more options among intro courses, but Harvard is only beginning to get the ball rolling on this. I say a lot of this because I’ve taken one really good class here and know what a world-class education should be like. In the spring of my freshman year, two of my dormmates and I teamed up to enroll in a lab at the Kennedy School of Government, where our project for the semester involved developing our own non-profit. This was the class that made my Harvard experience, and transforming school from an interesting experience to a place I loved. The class was hands-on and practical, teaching us how to network; everyone there was incredibly inspiring in their personal mission to save the world, the professor and teaching staff truly cared about us and kept themselves updated on our project, and having a chance to work so closely with Harvard friends I respected led to some of my most memorable moments here. So again, there’s nothing actually wrong with academics at Harvard; one just expects it to be better, and it should be.

How close you get to your professors depend on the class size, what class you are taking, and who you are. If you like to talk to professors during their office hours, or if the class size is small, or the class requires that you go to their office hours for homework, then you'll probably know the profs. I don't hesitate in asking my professors to go to my concert. My favorite class this semester is Music 1b, introduction to western music from Beethoven to Present. The professor lectures well, and the material is interesting. Students are quite enthusiastic in general, but sometimes there are people who fall asleep (we do study quite late into the night) occasionally. I feel that Harvard's academic requirements are quite reasonable. I do wish that I can take more electives. I never feel that Harvard teaches the materials that we need to learn to use in jobs, but Harvard teaches (indirectly, sometimes) the way how we can be successful at work.

Professors generally don't know your name unless you frequent their office hours constantly, which most people don't. This is in contrast to Teaching Fellows and Section Leaders who almost always know your name (since sections are taught in 15-30 people groups). My favorite class was Statistics because 1) the material was very interesting and applicable to real-life and 2) the professor genuinely cared about helping his students and held many office hours. My least favorite class was an animation studio class. It required so many hours of mindless drawing and the professor was pretty mean, too. Class participation is common when it affects your grade. If not, it's not uncommon nor common. Students are competitive but they often work with each other because not only is it nice to have a study friend, but it can be very beneficial to your grade. I feel that many students could not get by well if they did not have a good study group. Harvard's academic requirements are not hard; in particular, the requirements for my concentration (Economics) are relatively lax. There are some concentrations, however, that are very, very tough (Physical and Chemical Biology, Physics, etc.). We do have core requirements which can be a bother, though. Nevertheless, the core requirements allow for a full "liberal arts" experience. Education at Harvard is geared toward learning for its own sake. However, after going through its tough curriculum, most jobs will be happy to take you.