Last night, Harvard celebrated its 375th “birthday” with a GIANT celebration in the Yard. 10,000 people attended, including alumni, students, and Harvard employees – it was completely packed! Harvard has been getting the student body excited for this for weeks, and one of the cool initiatives they started was a Harvard 375 Twitter account, which gets updated every day with historical fun facts about the school. Another super cool initiative involved putting speakers in trees in the Yard and playing famous graduation speeches that have been given at Harvard. On the way to class, you might hear Mother Theresa, Bill Gates, or FDR being projected from the trees. Admittedly, hearing Winston Churchill’s voice coming from the branches was a bit creepy the first time I noticed it, but it’s an awesome way of reminding students of Harvard’s incredible history.

The real “party” itself was in the Yard last night, and the campus has been buzzing with activity for the past week in preparation for the celebration (check out the picture below). The night kicked off with a giant parade through campus, and each upperclassmen House was responsible for coming up with decorations for the procession. Dunster rolled with the moose theme – we were all given antlers AND we had made a giant wooden moose on wheels to bring with us to the Yard. It was crazy! We kept having to stop traffic because the moose couldn’t make it over curbs, and we generally just walked it down the middle of the street as we were walking up. We were quite a sight!

The Moose!

The other crazy feature of last night’s celebration was an 18′ x 15′ birthday cake that Harvard ordered from a local bakery. IT was red velvet (in honor of Harvard’s colors) and frosted in vanilla frosting – so tasty. I was completely shocked walking through the Yard yesterday to see that the giant “H” cake had been assembled and was being frosted by about 8 cake decorators! They were literally dumping buckets of frosting on the cake, and I’m pretty sure it took them all day to finish. It was super cool to watch.

Frosting the giant cake!

Unfortunately it ended up raining like CRAZY last night, which meant that this whole celebration took place in a downpour. Luckily, Harvard had some tents and a whole bunch of ponchos, so the party went on as expected…only, perhaps a bit wetter than everyone had imagined.

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