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{shortcode-be29865d8a9c7908fa05930b7f2d42574eaa573c}t’s midmorning on a regular day in April and I’m standing at a rural train station in Lithuania, frantically trying to purchase a ticket on an outdated, untranslatable app. All around me the hushed forest is stirred by the breeze. Relieved that my transaction was “patvirtino,” I plonk down on the train to watch the bucolic countryside morph into the city of Vilnius. Later that day, I find a cozy spot at a candlelit cafe to write an essay — it’s still the middle of the semester, after all.
There’s a side of Harvard that most people don’t see: all of the independent and fascinating experiences students embark on with support from Harvard funding. I have a friend who spent the winter studying nonprofits in Bulgaria, and another who conducted summer research on HIV in Botswana. I, for one, have made it my mission to soak up every opportunity I can possibly manage. More so than literally every other college or university on the planet, Harvard has the resources to make our dreams come true. And this need not be a big, lifelong dream. The privilege of Harvard is in the pursuit of any interest, no matter how small or esoteric.
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The summer after my sophomore year, I found myself in a library tucked into the hills above Florence, Italy, conducting art historical research at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti. The premise seemed like a dream: a historic building with jasmine clambering over its walls and acres of manicured gardens, spirited conversation with Renaissance scholars over lunches prepared by a Tuscan chef.
Here is my first confession: I am no Renaissance scholar. Prior to that summer, I had only taken one art history course. I hold neither concentration nor secondary in the field. Being undecided in my field of study meant that I could justify spending a summer to explore newfound interests. A graduate student does not have that luxury. I became an art history appreciator during and after that summer, and it was my willingness to try something new that opened the door to that experience.
My days were spent poring over photographs in the library’s renowned collection of hundreds of thousands of archival images. As I studied pictures and lived within an aesthete’s paradise, I began to understand why millennia of artists have expounded on natural beauty. A longtime devotee of the humanities, it wasn’t until my summer living, studying, and taking in the arts that they became embedded in my physical experience of the world. Back on campus, I found myself smelling the aroma of my tea more deeply, noticing a bud poking through a cracked sidewalk, appreciating the juxtaposition of red brick and blue sky.
I have another confession: in my final year at Harvard, I feel like I know less than ever. I chose to write my thesis about a topic close to home, the colonial history of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I quickly realized that I needed a lot more context. This past summer, I drove to the wheatfields of rural Quebec and pored over Canadian colonial documents (in French) in the national archives in Ottawa. I was trying to grasp the intricate relationships between English, French, and sovereign Native tribes that played out in the region over 300 years ago. I knew I didn’t have enough time, and I knew little of the research I conducted in Canada would make it into the final draft of my thesis, because the scope was too big and the materials too scattered and difficult to work with with so little time. That’s the privilege of the undergraduate — to be overwhelmed by how much you don’t know and to keep trying to learn anyway.
Even as I prepare to receive my college diploma, I am still drawn to the exploration of different fields. I went to Lithuania to study Jewish history on a grant from the Harvard College Research Program. I pursued the project independently of a course or thesis project, instead gaining faculty support to complete this project solely for my own edification and in the hopes that it might be generative for future academic or creative papers. The project became unexpectedly and intensely personal. My grandmother is suffering from dementia, and I can no longer ask her about her parents and grandparents — Latvian and Lithuanian Jews who fled Eastern Europe to build a new life in Michigan. Finding her family name on a Latvian Holocaust memorial, walking the ethnically cleansed streets of Lithuania and feeling the dissonance of storybook cities marred by genocidal history, I felt an ache to collect memories and stories and narrate them back to her. I hoped to capture a memory of a place that had erased them for a mind that could no longer hold them.
There seems to be a perception amongst undergraduates that emotionally-driven research is less valuable. But I let my emotion and passion guide me into my creative research. I found myself studying (inhabiting) emptiness in the Baltics, searching places where people and information had been expunged and papered over. While the texts I read were fascinating, I found myself most inspired and unsettled by the places themselves, the landscapes and the feelings that welled up inside me unbidden. I wanted to follow the people and the papers, to find the material missing from the lacunae I saw all around me.
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Enter: Argentina. This winter I received a grant from the Center for Jewish Studies to continue my study in Buenos Aires, where many refugees and cultural materials from Eastern European Jewish communities found new roots. I visited museums and cultural hubs, and read dusty trilingual newspapers (Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew) in a basement archive of a once-bombed building. But I confess, that far and away the most meaningful and generative experience that shaped my thinking was meeting twelve of my distant cousins, we who had been separated by war, diaspora, and language for two generations.
We sat before heaping plates of lovingly prepared food and etched our family tree over and over on a piece of paper. Gripping the pencil, my cousin offered corrections for a misnamed aunt, a recent birth. We swapped family lore and traded updates: a Kafkaesque effort to gain Polish citizenship, a son settled in Spain, a sister working for a D.C. consulting firm. Nothing could have prepared me for the politics of exile and assimilation I encountered around the dinner table at my family’s home.
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I have found my place at Harvard by leaving it, using Harvard resources to open my eyes to the broader world. In doing so, I have become the kind of person who conducts research in far-off places and thinks thoughts far beyond my narrow suburban upbringing. If I had one word of wisdom for anyone with time left as an undergraduate, it’s to make the most of this place — by using Harvard’s resources to make even the smallest, most personally meaningful dream a reality.
It seems unbelievable to get to travel and see the things I’ve seen without some kind of catch. It seems too good to be true. I’ve met family, connected with my ancestral past, enjoyed new flavors, sounds, and sights on five continents, and learned things I didn’t know I didn’t know. But that’s the dream Harvard offers. As those in power threaten to defund Harvard, opportunities like these might be on the chopping block. What we stand to lose is the chance to become more empathetic citizens of the world.
— Magazine writer Serena Jampel can be reached at serena.jampel@thecrimson.com.
