The Harvard career of Jeffrey E. Pierce ’04, a goatee-wearing Adamsian with an impish smile, can be divided into two distinct phases.

For his first two years, he was known as a jokester and a drinker—and a sender of copious drunken e-mails to unwitting friends and blockmates.

Sophomore year was his “drinking year,” Pierce says, to such an extent that he pre-programmed a list of friends’ e-mail addresses into his computer so that when he typed in “drunk” he could instantaneously send them all his intoxicated ruminations.

Once—only once, he says—he woke up naked on a couch after a particularly wild night.

But after a junior year spent abroad, working in a Moroccan orphanage and backpacking through Europe, an entirely different persona emerged—one passionate about teaching the less fortunate.

He cut back on drinking, wrestled with some long-standing concerns about his religion and made teaching his top priority.

Friends distinguish between Pierce’s two college personas by referring to his party-animal alter-ego of freshman and sophomore years as “Pre-Moroccan Jeff”—or “PMJ” for short.

But whether in his “before” or “after” stage, Pierce’s passion in college has always been working with kids.

Even during “PMJ,” he participated in BRYE, a mentoring program for Boston-area refugees in which he’d spend every Saturday hanging out with his mentee (“They’re wonderful kids, just the sweetest,” Pierce says).

Pierce was also a member of UTEP, Harvard’s teacher training program, spending this past semester waking up at 5 a.m. each day to make it to South Boston in time to teach high school history classes.

While his international experience left him with a more sober outlook on life, Pierce’s zeal for helping children is the tie that binds his pre- and post-Moroccan selves.

‘PRE-MOROCCAN JEFF’

A native of Columbus, Ohio, Pierce jokes that he was the “token legacy” in his blocking group because his father is the alumni interview chair for central Ohio.

But Pierce claims he had it far from easy—he says he had a very difficult transition into college.

“I was dating a girl back home, and I pulled out of being more social,” he says. “It took me a long time to get out of home.”