Word: melendez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Melendez regrets that for all his success at Harvard, he has not been able to overcome his own insecurities. "I'm very uncomfortable at parties; I'm very awkward at dealing with people; I can't ask women out on dates for the most part--although I can ask people for votes and I can try to persuade people to think like I do," he says. "I'm not afraid of crowds and speaking to people. I'm afraid of small groups where I have to be myself rather than be an officer of the Undergraduate Council or a public...
...small groups that Melendez sheds some of his business-like exterior, exposing a side rarely seen in public...
...Behind the parliamentary exterior, he's kind of a romantic," says Richard Bennett '85-'86, Melendez's best friend and secretary of the council when Brian was chairman. "He has dreams and fears and feelings like everybody else...
...long way toward explaining the Melendez persona by looking at how he arrived at Harvard. His route to Cambridge brought him a long way from the fundamentalist, born-again Christian community in Ocala, Florida to which he moved at age six. His family, he says, "is really into the Pentacostal, fundamentalists Bible-thumping revivalist tradition of born-again Christianity" associated with the Moral Majority. For much of his childhood, his family also was quite poor, living "in a mobile home in a dingy little trailer park in the outskirts of town." He says, however, that his family has become more...
...Harvard culture shock caused Melendez to re-evaluate a whole series of beliefs and values that had become intuitive in the almost homogeneous world of his childhood. "By the time I came to college I thought I was pretty secure in what my religion was about," Melendez says. "But since I've been at Harvard I've just been hit with the most wonderful challenges to what I believe...