Robert Cochran '79, a Harvard big brother, said this week his reasons for becoming a big brother were not simply altruistic.
"It's not something you should do just for the kid. You have as much as he does. It's given me an incentive to get out and do things I might not have done," Cochran said.
Cochran added, however, he felt "satisfied" with himself as a person when he saw the "terrible conditions my little brother lived in."
"With a big brother, he gets to see a side of the world he has never seen," Cochran said. "And he has someone to talk to, to care about him. Sometimes he calls me up. He doesn't have anything to say really. But it just makes him happy to know somebody is out there."
But whatever motivates students to become big brothers, the results are the same--happy kids, staff workers for the associations said.
"Harvard has a way of increasing your social guilt," Puopolo said. "I guess this is my way of mollifying it.