Mary C. Hennessey '84-5 spent her year dishing out food to the homeless on Los Angeles' Skid-Row. Pamela Leroy '82-4 spent 15 months sailing along Australia's Great Barrier Reef, picking potatoes in New Zealand, and hiking through Thailand, Hong Kong, China, and Japan. Dennis Crowley '75-'85 taught music, conducted and worked as an MIT staff librarian in his decade away from Harvard.
Hennessey, Leroy and Crowley are but three of the 300 students each year who decide that they cannot stomach four straight years of the Cambridge academic life.
Approximately one-quarter of each class takes time off before graduating, and the latest statistics show that this route is becoming more popular.
About half of the students who follow the advice of President Bok's welcoming speech to "consider" taking a leave of absence end up traveling or studying abroad, says Martha P. Leape, director of the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning (OCS-OCL).
She adds that many students leave to take advantage of academic or cultural opportunities they couldn't find atop the ivory tower. She also says that most students choose to interrupt their studies after their sophomore year, and the majority only spend a year away from Harvard.
Pamela Leroy's passion for travel turned what was supposed to be a four-week summer archaeological dig in Australia for the summer into a 15-month, 50,000 mile odyssey.
"I was having such a great time with my job and meeting people, that I decided to stay on, traveling with whatever I had on my back."
"In a few months," Leroy recalls, "I was dead broke, so I found employment doing odd jobs--working in warehouses, factories, waitressing." But it was during a stint cleaning hotels in the land down under that she landed her next ticket to travel.
"I met a woman who runs Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and got a scholarship to take the course and then travel to the Philippines as an instructor, then to Singapore."
Living on five dollars a day, Leroy then hopscotched around the South Hemisphere.
"It seems strange to be back at school." Leroy says. But she adds. "I can related much more now to courses dealing with the places I've lived in."
Hennessey, who returned this fall from a year away, says of her decision to leave. "Things here were going too fast. I felt I was on a treadmill rushing around to classes and meetings but with an uneasy feeling I wasn't taking advantage of things in the best way." At first, she says, she was a bit overwhelmed by the options thrown at her by OCS-OCL. Hennessey then focused on finding something that would be "personally meaningful, and perhaps give [her] a clearer direction in life."
In the fall of 1982, Hennessey moved to Skid Row where she spent part of her leave working as a full-time unpaid volunteer in a soup kitchen and hospitality house for the homeless.
The program, run by a Christian pacifist group which advocates communal living, provided 1000 meals a day and took in about 20 homeless individuals, Hennessey explains.
"I was raised in liberal Catholic tradition at home, but it was important that I experience these things. Unemployment, health care, the homeless, can become political words and make you forget about real people you're trying to help," she adds.
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."
