Eliot House Senior Tutor Margaret Bruzelius '74 was knitting on the floor of her New York City apartment in 1985 when she decided she was ready to go to graduate school.

She had been working for several years as a professional knitter and designer in New York's fashion industry--an enjoyable career, she says, though it forced her to think mostly in visual terms.

But for the woman who graduated from Harvard with a degree in English, the one hour each day on the subway spent reading Proust didn't quite quench her still-burning love for literature.

So at her husband Peter's gentle urging, Bruzelius took the plunge. She requested her college transcripts and tracked down copies of old Harvard course catalogs in the annex of the New York Public library to fill in the long since forgotten course titles by hand.

When her top choice Yale accepted her, she and her family moved to Connecticut. And when Harvard offered her a teaching position several years later, Bruzelius recalls, her friends "thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard" that she was returning to an alma mater that she remembered less than fondly.

A Stand-Out

But as she tells her life story from an armchair in front of the fireplace in her Eliot House office, her legs casually tucked underneath her, Bruzelius admits that she's never really done what's been expected of her.

Her clothing is not that of a typical Harvard administrator. Dressed in an orange blouse, a miniskirt and neon tights with orange and purple accents, Bruzelius is notorious for her bright outfits.

Conforming to the Harvard mold was never Bruzelius' style.

Indeed, instead of going directly to college after high school, Bruzelius took a year off to move to Denmark, where she apprenticed under her aunt, a famous Danish weaver.

That experience, she says, allowed her an opportunity to recoup from what she describes as an "unpleasant" high school experience in Redding, Conn.

"I spoke Danish, I ate all sorts of good pastry and I mellowed out," she says.

Even the decision to come to Harvard was never clear-cut--despite having a mother who was a Radcliffe alum.

Bruzelius recalls applying to four colleges: Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Harvard and Yale. At her interview for Yale, the female interviewer tried to impress upon the young Bruzelius how lucky she was to have a shot at being among the first women accepted to the college.

"My feeling was that the shoe was entirely on the other foot," Bruzelius jokes.