Reflecting on her experiences, Hennessey says she admired how "the people in this community of volunteers, even a couple who had a child, sacrificed most things we take for granted," Hennessey adds that she now plans to give some time each week at a soup kitchen in Boston.

While the first half of her leave was more of a spiritual retooling, her work second semester as a paralegal for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the Law provided Hennessey with a better sense of what she intends to pursue at Harvard and do after graduation.

Because she was involved investigating matters of litigation on race discrimination in housing and employment for the Lawyers Committee--a national group that provides legal assistance to poor and minority groups living in urban centers--Hennessey is now focusing her academic studies on civil rights and the movement of the '60s.

Hennessey, who in college has been involved with the Committee on Central America and the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee, believes "student activism and protest on campus is really necessary." But she cautions, "It shouldn't stop once we've left school."

Dennis Crowley began college in 1971, but after a lackluster academic record freshman year was asked to leave and became involved with "things I had always been interested in."

Crowley remained in Cambridge where he worked as a freelance conductor, a music teacher (at a private school), and a staff librarian at MIT in the Humanities division, where students mostly do "free-time leisure reading."

Though Crowley says he "wasn't thinking about coming back" during his time away he eventually decided, "I had gone as far as I could on my own."

"I needed to get retooled intellectually under the discipline of an academic setting," he explains.

At age 30, Crowley says the transition from a working to a college lifestyle was difficult--his roommate last year called him "sir" for the first month--but it was well worth it.

Compared to the students of the '60s who appeared bent on "solving the problems of the world 24 hours a day," Crowley says, "the students today seem to be enjoying themselves more and experience a more traditional variety of social life."

"That's not to say that today's generation, although more profession oriented, is not involved politically," he adds.

"The frustration level in the '60s was very high as students worried about things like global starvation. Now they're doing things about problems o'hunger in East Cambridge."