Word: harvards
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...whole time I’ve been at Harvard, I’ve never heard anyone else recall this experience, much less associate with it any sort of unease or irony. Many will note, however, that the stereotypical Harvard experience rests in coping with the transition from being incredibly special in high school to being indistinct among so many special others in college...
...photocopying and memorizing past students’ answers. But even more than a custom’s ridiculousness, the outside perspective allows one to synthesize the way in which an insider glimpses such ridiculousness and yet works within the rules nonetheless. Most of us know we are at Harvard in part because of high scores on a test—the SAT—that can so obviously be “gamed” that it has renounced a previous claim to measure “aptitude” and claims only to measure the “achievement?...
...upshot, however, is that the fundamental status contest is the same in each place, and the game’s conventions are arbitrary. The options at Harvard for charting a future path, choosing a field of study, or even balancing extra-curricular activities with unstructured time present themselves within certain constraints—rules of the game—that would not always make sense to those viewing from an outside frame of reference. Take, for instance, the incredulity outside the “Harvard bubble” at attempts to explain that going into finance is viewed here...
...Many Harvard students speak of going abroad as an item they wish they’d gotten to on their list of things to do in college. The percentage who actually spend a full term abroad, though, barely pushes double digits. It may often have left me feeling like nothing beyond a more invasive tourist, but studying elsewhere taught me to take that tourist’s eye to my own surroundings in a way that no stack of books on deconstructing social norms can compel...
...time you graduate from Harvard, you have heard these words at least a dozen times. As the litany of rules are read—from bathroom breaks to going “incommunicado” to University Health Services—we never pay attention...