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Our House!

March 12, 2011 in Alumni Blogs by Alissa D'Gama | 4 comments

Today, Harvard Yard is quiet as most students have gone home (or to a warmer place than Cambridge) for spring break, but on Thursday the campus was filled with yelling, cheering, laughter and tears. Thursday was Housing Day – the day when freshmen at Harvard find out which of the upperclass Houses they have been placed in for the next three years!!! Freshmen can form a blocking group of up to eight people that are guaranteed placement into the same House, and can link with one other blocking group that they are guaranteed to be placed into the same neighborhood with.

On the morning of Housing Day, students from all of the Houses gather early in the morning to deck themselves out in House apparel and deliver letters to students assigned to their House, followed by lots of shouting and cheering in front of Annenberg Dining Hall. Here, for example, is the Mather contingent (the best, in my biased opinion!) Of course, since Housing Day is right before Spring Break, students often have papers and midterms due that day (as I did freshman year), but generally the entire campus comes together for Housing Day, with professors laughing along as mascots from the Houses storm big freshman classes like Ec 10 and LS1b.

In honor of housing day, I went through my photos and found group shots of my roommates and I from freshman, sophomore, and junior year. Freshman year, my roommates and I were part of three different blocking groups, which were placed in Mather, Dunster, and Cabot. Every semester, we have a freshman roommate reunion at Nine Tastes, the restaurant where we went for our first roommate dinner together freshman year (which is where we were going when this photo was taken!)

Sophomore year! Here are my roommates and I right before winter break, sometime in the midst of reading period and finals, in the common room of our lowrise room in Mather.

Junior year! Here are my roommates (and our new roommate for senior year) right after the room lottery. We tend to have the worst luck, and got the lowest number in the lottery for junior year and for senior year. (Each house has a lottery to decide the order for picking rooms for the next year). We still ended up on the seventh floor of Mather tower this year though, so it was all good 🙂

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A Hard Day’s Night

January 26, 2011 in Alumni Blogs by Alissa D'Gama | 1 comment

Although most of Harvard College was off campus during JTerm, some of us were braving the blizzards for our senior theses. Whether that meant hours in Widener with a stack of books and a laptop or hours in a lab with a pipette and a PCR machine, seniors could be seen eating in Annenburg inbetween doing experiments or writing another chapter.

Not everyone at Harvard does a senior thesis – it depends a lot on your concentration and whether you are interested in research. Theses can also take very different forms—my thesis, for example, is a write-up of the experiments I have been doing for the past several years in my lab, while for two of my roommates, their theses in Government and History of Science are based on their ideas about a piece of literature, a period of history, or a political philosophy. For me, I was excited to do a thesis since I have been working in a neurobiology lab since freshman year and I think it will be good practice for my actual PhD. It is also useful to think critically through my results and the reasoning that went into my experiments and learn to write effectively to convey my story to my audience.

Right now, I am spending a lot of time in lab wrapping up my experiments and interpreting my results, and I will soon transition to writing and figure-making mode. Luckily, a lot of my friends work in the same building as me, so we can visit each other and take breaks from our bench or computer screen. Here, for example, is Jeremy ’11  analyzing monarch butterfly migration and in his lab!

It was also pretty nostalgic to eat lunch and dinner in Annenburg during January. The dining hall is perfect for freshman year because your whole class is together and you get to meet lots of people you otherwise might not see if you were already divided into house dining halls. I got to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen for a while who were all on campus for Jterm like me! I really enjoyed hearing people summarize their theses-which were in so many different fields-and hear how excited they were about their work.

P.S. Upperclassmen are also allowed to eat at Annenburg during reading period, and we can eat breakfast there anytime 🙂

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Freshmen + Faculty + Food = Dinner

November 9, 2010 in Kate's Blog by Kate Meakem | 1 comment

The tall, vaulted ceiling, the warm glow of the overhead chandeliers, the wood paneling, the largest secular collection of stained glass in the world, the “OMG! This looks exactly like the Great Hall at Hogwarts!!!!!!” – it was all old news.

I turned to my guest. “Welcome to Annenberg Dining Hall, where I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday.”

[This isn’t exactly true.  I never eat breakfast.  I simply cannot motivate myself out of bed in the morning to go grab the most important meal of the day when stuffing my face with a cereal bar as I run to class is an option.  I also sometimes take naps during lunch… you can see where my priorities lie.]

My guest looked impressed.  “You mean, you have white table cloths and flowers at every meal?”

“Um… no.  That’s a treat for the Freshman Faculty Dinner.

The Freshman Faculty Dinner is one of those special opportunities provided by Harvard to encourage students to really get to know their professors.  Oh sure, you can ask professors to dinner any time, you can go to their office hours, you can even approach them after class, but for we freshmen sometimes all of this can be intimidating.  So, the Freshman Dean’s Office, in an attempt to shove us out of the nest, organizes dinner for us.

Students and faculty gather in the Queen's Head Pub for a reception prior to the Freshman Faculty Dinner hosted in Annenberg Hall.

My guest, as it turns out, was Professor Simon Innes of the Celtic Languages and Literatures Department.  Why the Celtic Languages and Literatures Department, you ask?  Well, that is actually an interesting story.

So I arrived here on campus in August with zero idea of what I wanted to study.  I knew that I was interested in something to do with Government… or Economics… or Social Studies… or Sociology… or Anthropology… (need I continue, or do you get the gist?).  The sheer volume of fascinating-looking courses that Harvard had to offer overwhelmed me (there are over 3,500).  I decided on taking a few basics – I knew I was interested in Government, so why not enroll in an Intro to Comparative Politics class?  Economics 10 (the famous Greg Mankiw course) was next on my list.  Then for fear of losing all of the hard work I put into the Spanish Language during high school, I decided it would be best to take the placement exam and enroll in Spanish 40.  Great.  But I still had an extra class slot to fill… hmm…

And that’s when inspiration struck.  I thought, “Wait a minute… I love history… and I’m Irish… but I know nothing about Ireland… ” So I enrolled in Celtic 118: The Gaelic World from the 12th to the 17th Centuries.  It was the best decision of my life.

Here I am, one of the luckiest girls on the planet for having gotten into Harvard, and in my first semester I get to be in a class of two students (yes, TWO STUDENTS) sitting across from one of the most knowledgeable people in the world in the field of Celtic history!  HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!  I get to ask as many questions as I want, offer whatever opinions I may have, and engage in stimulating conversation on a topic that really interests me.

Since there are only two students in the class, my classmate Katherine and I decided to invite Professor Innes to the Freshman Faculty Dinner, as sort of a ‘thank you for being so awesome.’  And if we thought our classroom conversation was interesting, dinner did not disappoint.  We got to learn why Professor Innes decided to concentrate on Celtic studies as a profession, what life as a professor at Harvard was like, how his childhood was in Scotland, and what he was like as a person, beyond just our professor.

As I walked back to my dorm after dinner with a sea of other freshman, I couldn’t help but feel excited.  I had reached out and gotten to know one of my favorite teachers on a more personal level (plus, the food was amazing).  And I think based on the loud voices, the chorus of laughter, and fast-talking going on around me, the other freshmen felt the same way.

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