Amy D. Lu, 17, of South Pasadena, Calif., came to the SSP to see how she would handle being 3,000 miles away from home for an extended period of time. While she says she isn’t a fan of the East Coast’s muggy and unpredictable weather, she has found the independence of her new lifestyle appealing.
“I’m enjoying this so-called college life, actually being on my own, planning out my days,” she says. “There’s things to do, but when you go in the Yard at night it’s completely silent. Then you take two steps out and there’s bands playing.”
She’s learning how to balance the challenging workload of the class she is taking, Econ S-10ab, “Principles of Economics,” with the distractions that confront Harvard students, including music in the Square and canoeing on the Charles.
Academically, SSP provides more of a collegiate experience than most other institutions’ summer school programs—colleges, including Harvard College, will accept most of the courses for credit.
That, according to Holinger, is what sets Harvard off from the competition.
“All but one or two other programs create courses for students,” he says. “The real distinguishing characteristic is we let kids take real college courses.”
Drain says he finds the academic experience authentic enough.
“I’m doing work constantly. It’s pretty tough. It’s doable, but I think I had to buy seven or eight books for this one class,” he says. “I’m putting in a lot of time, but I can really feel the effects.”
The campus life SSP constructs also gives students a taste of college life, although the program also offers rules and checks—like a strictly enforced ban on underage drinking, curfews for rising juniors, and a network of proctors serving as resident tutors—to help students avoid sand traps sometimes encountered during freshman fall.
But the Harvard that SSP students are experiencing isn’t, in every way, the same as the one that assembles during move-in week each September. In the Yard, the trees always have leaves, and the ground is covered in grass—never snow, mud, or spray-on fluorescent green.
The story is similar in the classroom. What the Summer School terms a “distinguished Harvard faculty” includes only Harvard professors. Only 19 of the 241 Summer School instructors are tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and another four are associate professors.
Of the 241 instructors at Harvard, 149—just less than 62 percent—hold Ph.D.’s. Four more hold D.Phil. degrees, and 12 have advanced degrees in law or education.
A few other tenured Harvard professors are listed as Summer School professors, though they are teaching summer courses abroad.
Whether the Harvard experience is authentic or not, some high-school students have found their preconceptions about the College shattered.
“[Harvard] isn’t as big a deal as everybody makes it out to be,” Lu says. “Everybody thinks of it as a nerdy, preppy school where everybody doesn’t have fun.”
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