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Every week, various world-class speakers arrive on campus. Some travel from foreign countries, most fit time into packed schedules, and all should speak to more than an empty room.

Unfortunately, Harvard’s maze of institutes, programs, and offices is unnecessarily hard for students to navigate. Students often hear about events and opportunities through last-minute texts and word of mouth, rather than platforms administered by the College itself.

The results? Sparsely-attended events, missed opportunities, and programs that don’t reach their full potential.

While an important part of college is learning how to navigate bureaucracy, Harvard can — and should — improve how it guides students through the near-unlimited resources available to them. Though the College has a number of mechanisms for disseminating information, they’re limited by both reach and participation.

Even if they’re mentioned in passing, key databases listing academic and professional opportunities like Crimson Careers and the Centralized Application for Research and Travel aren’t well explained despite their importance.

For registered student organizations, Harvard provides a platform called Student Organization Center Online where clubs can connect with students and share events — but it isn’t always kept up to date. Instead, students often rely on an array of emails, text messaging, GroupMe, Instagram, Whatsapp, and even Sidechat to communicate about programs and clubs.

Further, open email lists — including the dozens administered by the College and its various entities — might notify their subscribers about job opportunities, speaker events, and club info sessions. But when each office runs different email lists with different sign-up methods, it’s near impossible to expect students to know where to go. After all, it’s easy to miss an email you never received.

Making Harvard’s resources easier to navigate is all the more important given financial pressure on the University in the wake of its fight with the White House. Perhaps in the past, the sheer number of opportunities at Harvard has acted as a sort of crutch for bureaucracy. But if Harvard is faced with cutting some of its offerings, they should make sure that the programs we do have are being fully utilized.

Improving accessibility to campus resources would likely benefit staff and faculty too. It’s impossible to guess how many qualified candidates didn’t interview for a research position or fellowship simply because they weren’t aware it existed. The current system rewards those who spend the most time searching for opportunities, not necessarily those who are most interested or most qualified — a particularly inefficient arrangement for a campus where students are frequently running from one event to another.

Of course, there are limits to what Harvard can do. But to provide as many opportunities to as many undergraduates as possible, it’s necessary that the College improves how information is disseminated.

Much of this work should be done by the administration itself. Freshman orientation (and the lengthy pre-orientation modules) could do a better job orienting students toward the vast opportunities available on campus. Even providing an effective index, or reducing the number of different webpages where opportunities and events are listed, would make a significant difference.

As the current SOCO app shows, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a site where every group will list all of their public events; however a common listing of Harvard’s own events is a reasonable ask. (While there is a Harvard College Events Calendar, it appears sparsely populated relative to the number of events that go on every day.)

Some of this work could also be done by students — an app or website that puts together Harvard’s grants, research programs, and club opportunities in one centralized platform would certainly gain traction.

Harvard brags about having more than enough opportunities. Let’s make sure students actually know about them.

Tejas S. Billa ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Pforzheimer House.