that office hours are a treat and doors are always open. But most undergrads are too busy--or intimidated--to even bother.
Most courses taught by superstars are huge Core classes, some regularly enroll about a thousand students. A Core course is like watching a lecture on T.V., but with uncomfortable seats and lousy audio. In these classes, the real teaching is done by teaching fellows (T.F.s), who range from the superb to the non-English-speaking. Shop around.
Other times you'll find yourself in seminars with only a handful of other students. These can be excellent, unless you haven't cracked the binding on your overpriced books from the Coop. Believe it or not, students can be notoriously unprepared for class, choosing one more slice at Tommy's House of Pizza rather than reading those last hundred pages of Bleak House.
Across the board, advising is a crap shoot. Some lucky souls land the jackpot, scoring an assistant dean with time on her hands, but don't count on anything more than a confused graduate student. Research the labyrinthine academic bureaucracy for yourself and start thinking soon. At the end of your first year, you'll have to choose a concentration ("majors" are just too plebian).
Harvard is best known for its largest departments, economics and government, popular with the Adidas set (they don't call `em gov jocks for nothing). These departments are vast and impersonal but have blessedly lax requirements. An alternate route is the make-Mom-cry concentration--Folklore and Mythology, anyone?
Science concentrators are among the hardest workers here--and aren't shy about sharing how much time they spend in the library or the lab (beware of intro courses that pit you against the Westinghouse Finalist in the grade curve wars). Interdisciplinary choices like History and Literature and Social Studies win praise for their freedom, but with you-can't-hide tutorials, be sure you looove Lamont Library.
The Active Life
Of course, it's not as important what you study as what you do. The lifeblood of Harvard is its extracurricular universe; with more than 250 independent student groups, everyone gets to be president.
There are those students who plunge their very souls into their extracurriculars. (We at The Crimson wouldn't know anything about that.) One minute you have perfectly normal roommates, and the next they've vanished to produce the Hasty Pudding Show (Harvard's annual drag extravaganza), plan cultural fairs for the Asian American Association (the largest group on campus) or dress up as stags for midnight rituals of the Science Fiction Association (if they're into that sort of thing.)
Some of the oldest, most time-consuming activities generate their own characteristic "types": the smooth-talking future senators of the Institute of Politics, the do-gooders at Phillips Brooks House Association, Harvard's umbrella community service agency, and the oft-maligned windbags of the Undergraduate Council.
Publications range from liberal (Perspective) to conservative (the Salient) and useful (the Let's Go travel guide series) to pointless (the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine).
However, even though Harvard has a $13 billion endowment salted away, most student groups are forced to make do with pennies. Many students were outraged when the administration announced plans earlier this year to rebuild a historic ornamental tower on Memorial Hall rather than a desperately needed student center.
Sports teams have little trouble getting money, though. Surprisingly, Harvard even has a few good teams. The women's hockey team won a national championship this year, and men's tennis includes the best player in the country. But only a few of the rest of us actually make it to games--if you want to join a large and enthusiastic bleacher crowd, try the Big Ten. Athletes' facilities across the river are fantastic, but here in Cambridge, pungent crowds and dated equipment fill gyms used by students and the ubiquitous "Harvard affiliates," the MAC and the QRAC.
Harvard devotes its money to collecting not brand-new treadmills but timeworn treasures. There are lots of benefits to Harvard you may never get around to using (the Gutenberg Bible?), but you'll feel vaguely good just knowing they're there. Go see a former dictator speak at the Kennedy School of Government. So many world leaders come you simply won't have time for any who lead countries smaller than France.
The Social Life
