I rushed over to Widener to find out more about this distant land called Cabot House. I looked it up in the Harvard handbook. It said "see South House." So I looked up South House. It said "now known as Cabot House." Then I looked up gullible. Next to the definition was a picture of me. Then I looked up Boston suburbs. I glanced past Waltham, Peabody, Danvers, and Swampscott until I came across Cabot House. I learned that shuttles leave for Cabot House every time there is an eclipse of the sun. So I ran over to Crimson Travel and booked two tickets on the next flight to the Quad.

I did not want to go to Cabot House. Neither did anybody else. Even the free beer they gave me and the t-shirt that said something like "better luck next time" did not raise my spirits. But three years later, I do not want to leave Cabot House; that is, except to run over to Thayer every now and then to get some more toilet paper.

By junior year, I had accumulated enough miles on the Quad shuttle to qualify for a free trip to Mexico. Junior year was also the first time I had been to a Harvard Hockey game, and the first time I had been called a fascist. I have never been to another Harvard hockey game since then either, but I have been called a fascist lots of times. I'm not sure how I got the reputation for being a fascist, but I think it has something to do with a Crimson editorial I once wrote calling for the reinstitution of the feudal system.

In many ways, senior year has been the best time of my four-year Harvard experience. I have been through almost everything Harvard has to offer, except broccoli-cheese pasta. I have friends of all ages, and I have taken courses in almost every field. I have learned how to get to Wellesley on the Mass. Pike without paying the 65 cents in tolls. I have learned that the Quad is not in New Hampshire, nor is it that far from the Square. And I have learned that you should never eat at the Hong Kong, no matter how hungry you are.

I am glad I did not go to Stanford. After all, who would want to sit in the sun with a beer in one hand and the sports pages in the other while beautiful tanned California girls are walking by in bikinis when he could be in Cambridge, waiting in nine inches of snow and slush for a shuttle bus ride? Who wants to see Division I football in his own backyard when he could be at Harvard watching the national championship chess team quash lesser rivals? Who wants to go to a school whose most famous alumnus is Herbert Hoover?

Harvard has indeed been a fun experience, and a learning experience. It is one that I will always thank myself for accepting, and one that I will never forget. Most of all, it is one that I am reluctant to have finished.