Harvard University Top Questions

The school is overwhelmingly liberal. Being conservative makes you feel more alienated than being homosexual. People are fairly intolerant of political differences of opinion. For a school that promotes tolerance, it seems hypocritical that conservatives are almost entirely shut out. It does a disservice to the students to not provide them with good academic representatives from both sides of the aisle.

It is difficult for many freshmen to find a social network, or to really feel as though they belong.

The elitism.

There's a lot of pressure. Pressure to do well in classes, have lots of friends, go to lots of parties, get a great job, get into grad school, do impressive things over the summer, save the world with your extracurriculars. I'm embarassed to admit when I spend a weekend reading a book and catching up on classwork. I feel like a loser because I have a part-time job instead of being the president/treasurer/whatever or some high flying club. Everyone buys a suit during their freshman year.

The fact that you can never have a moment's rest. Whenever you have free time, you think, "I could/should be doing some work," and you just feel so much anxiety. It's horrible.

The number of pretentious people around and the stressful enviroment given to learning, something which shouldn't be so hard and tiring to do.

The administration dosn't care and so they don't focus on undergrad needs

Students get caught up in campus life so much that they have no lives outside of what goes on at campus. This makes being on campus significanly less interesting by making the students more petty and superficial and makes making close friends on campus more difficult since they leave campus so rarely.

Everybody here is miserable

Pressure to succeed academically and career wise, and pressure to enter certain fields post graduation (law, medicine, business particularly).