For Johanna N. Paretzky ’03, Harvard has been about new directions.

After playing sports since the age of five, she laid aside athletics and found herself drawn to a singing career instead.

After attending a Jewish Day School in suburban Maryland for twelve years, she rose to become president of Kuumba, the 90-member choir famous for its soulful expressions of black creativity and spirituality.

“The scales are tipped in the opposite way,” she says, looking back on how she has grown in college.

In a way, even attending Harvard was a new direction. The school was not on her radar screen at the beginning of her college search, and it took repeated encouragement from friends who visited the campus and told her that it was “the perfect fit” for her that led Paretzky to look at the course catalog—she found herself instantly taken.

“I had to admit to my mom that it seemed like the perfect fit,” she recalls.

A native of Potomac, Md., Paretzky grew up attending the small Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School—her father is Jewish and her mother, who is black, converted to Judiasm before she was born.

She wrote her application essay on how growing up in a Jewish community without much consciousness of race left her without the resources to explore her black heritage.

A thick envelope arrived from Byerly Hall and after an overnight visit dispelled her lingering fears of the school’s “snob factor,” Paretzky was off to Cambridge.

While in high school she was a standout soccer and basketball player, the star forward arrived on campus knowing that athletics would not continue to define her in college—she felt that the commitment necssary for collegiate athletics just wasn’t in her.

“The interest in playing at a D1 school, at such a level, wasn’t as high as I knew it should be,” she explains.

The eminently friendly and disarming Paretzky spent her first fall exploring, taking Core classes as she searched for a concentration and joining several student groups, including the Mission Hill After School Program and the Jewish a cappella group Mizmor Shir.

It wasn’t, however, until the Kuumba Christmas concert that winter that she discovered what would come to be her “family” at Harvard. The concert in Memorial Church marked a turning point in her life.

There to support a friend, she says she found herself captivated by the music and the passion of the group’s singers.

“The sheer power was amazing,” she recalls. “I’ve been hooked ever since.”