“It’s an advantage from our perspective when students take their foundation courses and math and physics courses earlier in their career,” Stewart-Mukhopadhyay said. “When someone joins our concentration a little later, they can’t take courses in the right sequence because they’re every-other-year courses, for instance. And we don’t want seniors sitting in our intro courses, because it’s not a good match.”
According to Lewis, this sequencing issue makes early declarations in the sciences, particularly engineering fields, much easier on students.
“If you decided you want to be a computer scientist in your junior year, it’s very hard to take four computer science courses your first term and get them all in that way, whereas if you decide to be an English major, you probably can decide to do it starting from ground zero in your junior year,” he says.
Though many humanities classes have fewer prerequisites, a few students in these fields still make the choice to declare early each year. Professor Stephen L. Burt, the director of undergraduate studies in the English department, wrote in an email, “English concentrators declare before the deadline all the time; sometimes freshman year.”
EAGER BEAVERS
The number of students who declare early is small, and students and professors alike acknowledge that this choice is not for everyone.
Although Felts, who is a Peer Advising Fellow, says she has talked to a few of her advisees about declaring a concentration early, she maintains that a student who is ready to declare must have several distinct characteristics.
“They have to be very self-aware and very proactive with regards to their academics,” Felts said. “They have to have shown that they’ve deeply considered their options and that they know for certain themselves that’s what their interests lie in.”
That certainty may be what keeps more students from declaring early. Though Freedman, for instance, has decided on computer science, he said that none of his friends are completely set on a concentration.
In Lewis’ view, that indecision is not necessarily intrinsic to the process of declaring but rather a result of the declaration deadline’s current placement during sophomore fall.
“There is a piece of me that thinks that Harvard students will make a decision when they have to make a decision, whether that’s freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, or senior year,” Lewis says.
—Staff writer Petey E. Menz can be reached at menz@college.harvard.edu.