Hi Helsinki students! This is Gianna, from your Her Campus sister chapter at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts (close to Boston). Although we’re both collegiettes, I’m certain our college lives are very different. To tell you a little bit about what it’s like being a college woman here at Harvard, here’s my overview of what Harvard life — and life at other American colleges — is like.
Harvard is, from what I gather, a little different than other colleges. We all live together, on campus, for all four years of college. We’re mostly a bit older than the typical American college student, because taking a gap year, a year off between high school and college, is unusually common. We do a lot of homework, because school is everyone’s first priority. And we party in a strange little social scene focused on small, male-dominated social organizations that are older than our country. It’s not the typical college experience, but I love it. I wouldn’t trade my time here for the opportunity to go anywhere else, because despite its weird, sometimes outdated, and sometimes incredibly forward differences, Harvard is a special place.
1. Coming Here
It’s generally said outside of the Harvard world — or the “Harvard Bubble” as we call it — that “the hardest part about Harvard is getting in”. While some people (me included) disagree with that statement, there’s no denying that Harvard is really hard to get into. This past year alone, 37,307 high school seniors applied, and only 2,080 were accepted — an acceptance rate of 5.9% (one of the highest we’ve had in years!). What this absurdly low acceptance rate means, however, is not that everyone here is incredible. I mean, there is definitely an above average number of incredible people — think students who found cures for cancer in high school, world-class musicians, math geniuses, students fighting world poverty, professional dancers and actors — but for the most part, students at Harvard are focused, driven people from all reaches of the country who just worked really hard in high school to get here. What’s cool, though, is that it’s impossible to tell the incredible and the incredibly hard-working apart, because in the end, we’re all doing the same things. You might never know that the girl who held your hair back while you threw up vodka in a bathroom at a party freshmen year is a math genius and future astronaut. You don’t learn until later that the kid next door keeping you up at night is actually practicing his world-class musical skills. You just don’t know. But by coming here, you get an opportunity to find all that out.
2. Everyone Does Four Years
Although most American colleges and universities are four-year Bachelor degree programs, a lot of people end up spending much more time in school than that, doing extra semesters or extra years to take necessary classes or switch their majors. At Harvard, however, you only typically do four years, or eight semesters. You can break them up however you want — a semester, then a year off, then a semester again — but you only get eight. That makes the time spent here a little more precious, and the decisions you make about classes a little more important: with only eight semesters (at four classes a semester, that’s thirty-two classes total) and over 8,000 classes to choose from, a Harvard education can become less of a thorough exploration of one topic and more of a quick dive into each of the things you love the most, but could probably keep studying forever if you had the time. In these eight semesters here, everyone has to take eight general education courses (broad overviews into eight main subjects, and generally considered terrible joke classes that students have to waste time on) and then a handful of classes in one main area, called a concentration (apparently we’re just too fancy for the word major, which is what an American student’s main field of study is usually called). Most students pick one concentration, but some pick two and pursue a joint degree. Others pick a second concentration as a minor, which we call a secondary.
3. Your major Concentration Doesn’t Actually Matter
Although every undergraduate picks a concentration before they graduate, your undergraduate concentration at Harvard doesn’t really matter. I know plenty of people who have studied one thing here, like “Folklore and Mythology”, and gone on to work in commercial real estate after graduation. Or “Social Studies” concentrators who went to med school. Since Harvard is a liberal arts school, the point of studying here isn’t so much what you study, but how you study it — in other words, it’s not the factual material that counts, but the process of learning how to think, write, research, or argue. There are some concentrations that are more career-specific, like “Mechanical Engineering”, but others, like “Economics”, leave you pretty open to do any job or schooling you like after graduation.
4. We Have Houses too! Sort of.
Students at University of Helsinki live in houses with other students, and Harvard students do too! Except, our houses are different. Instead of dorms, or off-campus apartments, every Harvard student lives in one of twelve “Residential Houses” on campus. The houses each have their own buildings, dining halls, gyms, libraries, study spaces, common rooms, social spaces, and sometimes “grilles”, cheap places to buy fried food late at night. Each house is led by two House Masters, usually an old couple who are affiliated with Harvard in some way and have been for a long time. You begin living in a house your sophomore year, after you move out of the “Yard”, which is the area where all the freshmen live. Each house has a lot of house spirit, and everyone tries to say their house is the best. Fortunately, my house (Adams) is actually the best. Overall, it’s kind of like the houses in Harry Potter, and my house is like Gryffindor.
5. Social Life
Harvard, like many other American colleges, has sororities and fraternities. However, they are much less prevalent here than they are on other campuses. Since all students live on campus, there aren’t large sorority houses, and “Greek” parties at their spaces (if they have them) are pretty small and infrequent. Instead, frats and sororities here are more for making friends, having dinners, and buying cool hats that have Greek letters on them. Instead, most large-scale partying happens at the infamous Final Clubs on campus.
While there are Women’s Final Clubs on campus who throw the occasional fun party, Men’s Final Clubs, or the really really old mostly-white mostly-male partially-wealthy stuck-up frats, are the groups that get the most attention. They are located in eleven different multi-million dollar mansions across campus. Each club has a different vibe, and a different place in the campus social scene.
Some have parties, and some are just networking groups for their members. Some of the clubs are full of great, goofy guys who are just looking to have fun — those are the ones I love. Some are a little more fancy, and are really, really exclusive; those I don’t love so much. There has historically been a lot of controversy on campus about Final Clubs, but overall I don’t think they’re worth the energy it takes to always talk about them. In the end, some people are in final clubs; some aren’t. There are HUNDREDS of other clubs, social groups, and student organizations that are doing better things than throwing drunken parties or sitting in fancy old rooms talking about how much money they have. Final Clubs are just places to have parties.
Harvard needs to learn to focus on the more important stuff on campus, and not them.