Harvard University Top Questions

Challenging, mostly from peer pressure, in the sense that most students work hard, but people also work together well. Most classes form study groups and review groups.

The level of intensity and amount of work varies greatly between students .

Are the academics geared toward getting a job? Well, thats what recruiting is all about - if you want to work for somebody. The education provides the tools, and its up to the individual to learn how to use them to build something.

Professors are awesome here. Student are very competitive and that is simply they are somewhat insecure. Education at Harvard is geared torward succeeding in every aspects of life. I love Harvard!!

Competitive! But also a great way to develop intellectual skills. Students engage actively in class discussions, and the class I most enjoy this term is my Expos 20 class: Modern Art and Its Philosophy taught by Marlon Kuzmick. Intellectual conversations are often brought outside of class, too, where, in dining halls it is not uncommon to strike up a conversation with anyone about anything. Though most of the time students here are too busy to sit through a deep conversation except at the most random times; the night before a final, 7am breakfasts.

Some of the professors know my name. They are all quite nice.

The initial impression of classes as a Freshman is that you are isolated from the professors. However, as you become more specialized in your concentration, you get more involved with them. There is a lot of freedom. How much you get out of your education is proportional to how much you put into it. You can get by really easily by taking easy classes, but most people don't. There is vast territory to challenge and explore, and I would recommend exploring. You must be proactive in approaching professors whose research interests you, etc, but once you do, many many doors are opened.

The professors are very nice and helpful; even the most famous of professors take the time to hold office hours. There are unlimited resources available to help students understand the material taught. Large classes are often split up into smaller sections to help students get an even better learning experience.

If you're not careful, classes at Harvard can be extremely intense and competitive. The pre-med and pre-investment banking courses (economics, statistics, etc) can be cutthroat, so be prepared to invest a lot of time in these courses. Take a balanced courseload and don't discount the importance of humanities courses in making up a well-rounded tutorial. As an economics and pre-med concentrator, I've sometimes given the humanities courses short shrift, much to my intellectual development's dismay. I think that education at Harvard is geared toward learning, usually, but it's very much up to the student what they want to make of their college education. You can go through Harvard never having read Socrates or heard of Mahler, but Harvard's requirements make it harder to do so. The most unique class I've taken is my Economics tutorial - which consists of five students and an economics graduate student as the teacher. Meeting biweekly, classes consist of discussion of 3-4 economics papers that cover a variety of topics, from health to psychology to history to the philosophy of science. The major project is writing, basically, an economics paper, and it's been one of the most difficult things I've had to do academically thus far.

Being a freshman, I find that intro classes suck, especially Life Sci. Generally, other classes are good and professors are willing to be available. I find the students study at the last minute a lot because they are used to doing that in high school. Intellectual conversations tend to happen more outside of the class than inside of the class because many students have diverse interests that are not completely covered by the classes that they take. I find that there are a lot of people at Harvard who just want a job, but there are also more people here than at other schools who want to learn for its own sake. I've actually asked my friends at other schools about this and I feel as though I have more intellectual conversations here that they do at their schools.