Best Feeling in the World

Daniel A. Cousin '00, the founder the Harvard Juggling Club, remembers his group's first "juggling jam" during his first year at Harvard.

Letting everyone on his floor know that he want to form a new club, Cousin invited them to juggle with him one day outside of Lamont Library. Nobody came except his roommate, Christopher A. Amar '00.

Now, the group has an e-mail list with over 500 recipients, including many from other parts of the world, and it has expanded its focus to include juggling for community service. Juggling jams, which have been moved to the steps of Memorial Church in warm weather, are much busier too.

"I walk there Sundays and maybe I'm 10 minutes late and there are already tons of people there," Cousin says. "I come around the corner and I see all these props flying in the air. It's really the best feeling in the world."

It was only recently that Cousin stopped to congratulate himself on the likelihood that the group he has nurtured from its infancy will be around for some time. Like many other founders, he was not initially looking to leave a lasting legacy at Harvard. He just wanted to juggle.

But if founders such as Cousin were not necessarily motivated by the chance to change Harvard forever, they still were trying to impact Harvard and its surrounding community in the short term.

Jeannie V. Lang '00 says that when she decided to start a group as a junior, she was simply trying to apply what she was learning in the classroom to the real world.