A Progress Report

The dust is finally starting to clear from that first whirlwind of papers and midterms. October and November are a mean couple of months at the College; no one's claiming they aren't. But no one seems to have talked to those Stupid First-years lately, either.

Yes, Stupid. They're Stupid People at Harvard (SPAH), the group of first-years who organized at the beginning of the year. Granted, we've all felt a little bit dumb at some point during our academic careers. But a whole group of people willing to admit dumbness? Are they somehow stupider than we are? How about now, November--no doubt they've been bombarded by horrendous problem sets and expos drafts. How's their self-esteem doing now? We were curious.

Some members of SPAH were quick to point out that while their organization's T-shirts may read 'stupid,' their minds still work like steel traps. Mike Takamura '97 unashamedly admitted that he had "gotten A's on everything so far," a feat that struck us as not particularly stupid. Maybe he should resign. But despite his scholarly success, Takamura was quick to point out that he still feels stupid. "It won't ever change. It's the mindset we have."

Kanaka Pattabiraman '97, another member of the group, was pleasantly surprised with the workload she had encountered thus far. "I thought it was all going to be harder," proclaimed the aspiring research chemist. (A career goal that seems rather unstupid, as occupations go.)

Some SPAHsies seemed more willing to conform to the theme of their group: stupidity. Takara Stanley '97 described her first bout with midterms in less than glowing terms as she talked about a recent math test. While she felt that the test itself wasn't that bad, on the whole "the work is pretty overwhelming."

Does she still feel stupid? "I do--sometimes I don't but most of the time I do."

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.

Surprisingly, Expos, the course everyone loves to hate, did not appear to be fazing the intrepid SPAHsies. Most of them simply found it tedious and too time-consuming. As Pattabiram put it, surviving in the writing class is a matter of "figuring out how to juggle things."

On the whole, the members of SPAH seem to be trudging through their first years as well as any of their classmates. In the face of October-November's cruelty, Tsai summed up the entire group's attitude: "everything's started to pull up."

"I never actually felt really stupid," Tsai said. Then she added, "I still [feel] stupider than other people but that's okay."