Word: stressful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That's what we tell ourselves anyway. While one of America's greatest cities rages just across the river, we Harvard types have insulated ourselves within our own culture of stress. And at the risk of sounding like a woozy social studies concentrator, here's how it happens...
...whom Freshman Week is but a distant folly: "You're a first-year? Lucky. [Sigh.] Don't ever become a senior." You're probably too shaken to ask how anything at Harvard could be worse than Freshman Week; if you do ask, you'll get the litany of stress--fellowships, thesis, job search, and social life. But from the start you've got a sense of what's in store for you, and you start to expect the worst...
Your house dining hall. Here the culture of stress finds its greatest expression. You meet your friends twice a day to bare your most intimate souls. But your soul turns out to be not very intimate at all. You talk about your day, your reading, your TFs, your prospective thesis topics. You feel like you're partying, so you go upstairs to get back to work...
Everything after that. Everything after that starts to get on your nerves, too. Even your school's newspaper turns life into a stress case. The governor of the state isn't Bill Weld. He's William F. Weld '66. Whenever you turn around there's someone above you who lived in your house when he was here, who ran the organization you've devoted your life to while she was an undergraduate. It's unnerving...
None of the SPAH members polled had suffered any major breakdowns or taken any late-night trips to UHS as a result of stress. But Janice Tsai '97 found her first hourly in the infamous Chem 10 to be a "fairly traumatic" experience, so much so that she decided to switch into Chem 5 after she took it. Otherwise, she said, her courseload was not too overwhelming...