Why is this month different from all other months? Our campus is currently overpopulated with organizations, clubs and networks. By the end of our four years, most of us will be trained to introduce ourselves by regurgitating our resumes and activities as the major forms of identification. The boy behind you in line for storage, rather than funny or cute, is the football player from the A.D. The girl on left spends her days with the International Relations Council and Kirkland HoCo. Sometimes we even forget peoples' given names and just refer to each other as "HRO boy" or "the CHANCE chair."

At Harvard we define ourselves by our communities more than anything else. We cling to the friends, structure and intimacy provided by smaller niches, islands of calm in the sea of Harvard life. For some reason, in the last month of each term, we sever these ties, dropping everything to revert back to primal, egoistic selves.

There is always an exception. The Harvard Living Wage Campaign did not let reading period narcissism hinder a successful rally that included various Cambridge speakers and Harvard faculty members.

But less vocal forms of activism have waned during the past month. Cambridge and Boston public schools students who participate in Harvard-sponsored community service programs are left hanging two months before their term ends while we attend review sessions, formals and study groups.

This month has allowed students to prioritize their own agendas, in the name of academic intensity. Soon, however, we will be rejoining collective groups and we will be forced to sacrifice our immediate needs for a common goal.

Over the next few weeks, Harvard students will travel all over the country and the world--working with NGOs in Bangladesh, creating economic policy in Panama and helping oust guerillas in South America. Some will surely don pumps or a tie and head over to Wall Street to try out their corporate selves. Other students will stay in Cambridge or Boston and continue where they left off at the end of the semester, staffing the numerous successful summer Phillips Brooks House Association programs. Whatever adventures await us this summer, they will almost always involve joining a community.

And whether in a classroom, an office, or a foreign country, collective communities come with certain obligations. We might have to sacrifice the personal agendas that seemed so precious during exam period. Even if we are at home, chilling with our buddies, Dad or Mom might ask for help setting the table before dinner

So, hopefully, this month of self-absorption will not leave permanent damage. These weeks of strange dining habits, work habits and the breakdown in manners must be short-lived. There will be very few times in our futures when we can be so self-centered and get away with it. Reconciling our own agendas with those of our future families, workplaces and other affiliations will be crucial. So, in the meantime, let's clean up the trash, say goodbye to our neighbors and ease back into the real world--where such behavior would be unaccepted.