Because Maya kept the circumstances surrounding her departure very private, students speculated about the disappearance of the prominent classmate. "It let people imagine what they wanted," Michele says.

Three years later, Maya focuses on the positives. When asked, she says she left Harvard for personal reasons. During her semester off, she went to work for a Los Angeles architect, helping run the office and getting professional exposure to the industry she loved. She helped a woman plan a remodeled kitchen. She thought a lot about Harvard, and considered transferring. As it turns out, Maya got her special concentration approved the following fall. She moved into Straus with advanced standing, thanks to an arsenal of top advanced placement scores. She became president of the Freshman Black Table and joined the '01 Steppers. Maya was starting over.

She eventually ended up in Dunster House, where Michele--by then, herself a magazine star after a Playboy photo shoot--had landed randomly the previous year. "I'd never do anything like that," Maya laughs, who insists that Michele's flirtation with exhibitionism was completely out of character. "The thought wouldn't even cross my mind."

When Maya has fun, she unwinds with friends in the Square. Oftentimes conversation with her boyfriend revolves around coursework. She finds long meals in the Dunster dining hall the most efficient way of keeping in touch with friends. She doesn't drink. She says that social life at Harvard probably deserves a C-, but that was never her top priority.

Maya was busy. Sometimes she wondered if she was attending Harvard at all. Her academic regimen included regular trips via subway to Kendall Square for cross-registered courses. At MIT, she endured several 40-hour weeks at the drafting table. "I can't even recall how many times I've seen dawn from MIT--more times than I care to count," Maya chuckles.

As an undergraduate, she has designed contemporary dance theaters, outdoor education centers and houses. She even won a Harvard College Research Program grant to design a theoretical student center for the College. Her thesis took her to the Bahamas, where she researched a plan for low-income housing.

This spring, she eased back from the five-course load of last semester. "I took one less because I didn't have to take another one to graduate so I thought I'd give myself a break," she says.

All told, Maya took half of her concentration courses outside Harvard--four at MIT and four at the Graduate School of Design. She recognizes this as unusual but believes the schedule was "the best liberal arts and pre-professional architectural education I could have possibly received."