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A Taste of the Arts at Harvard

November 1, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

This weekend I was lucky enough to go see friends perform in two great shows: “Execution,” put on by the Expressions Dance Company; and “Othello,” performed by Harvard’s Hyperion Shakespeare Company. Now is the time of year that student groups put on their fall semester exhibitions and performances, having had some time to practice for the past two months. I was excited to get a chance to support my friends and the groups they’re a part of!

First up on Saturday was the Expressions show: “Execution” is the title of their fall dance performance. Expressions is a student-run company that focuses on hip-hop, though they sometimes bring in tastes of other styles. Being someone who is TERRIBLE at dancing, I’m always so impressed by Expressions dancers – they all look so sassy (in the best way possible)! This performance was also great because it incorporated a piece by City Step, a group on campus that volunteers with middle schoolers in Cambridge and teaches them how to dance. Their oldest class, made up of 7th graders, got a chance to partake in the Expressions show and I know they kids were all ridiculously excited about it.

Photo Credit: Gordon Bae

 

Saturday night I went to see another friend as Iago in a rendition of Shakespeare’s “Othello” done by the Harvard Hyperion Shakespeare Company. Personally, I was completely unfamiliar with the storyline until seeing the play this weekend, and it was kind of nice to be able to watch without comparing their performance to any established opinions or biases. The blurbs advertising “Othello” described it as highly stylized, and it definitely was – all of the characters, aside from Othello himself, were wearing white to symbolize the racial divide defining the character relations. Their rendition was mind-blowing! It’s so exciting to see successful student performances on campus.

Othello Poster

I was particularly glad to have an excuse to stay inside on Saturday night because Boston experienced a surprise October snowstorm! While it’s not terribly unusual to get snow this time of year, it definitely caught everyone off guard. I, for one, don’t have any of my winter jackets on campus and spent the weekend exercising some serious layering strategy. Below is a picture of the lone snowman I found in Harvard Yard the next day – as is very characteristic of New England weather, we went from having near blizzard conditions on Saturday night to a sunny 50 degree day on Sunday. Sometimes I can’t keep up!

The Lonely Snowman

Happy 375th, Harvard!

October 15, 2011 by Caroline Burke | 2 comments

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.

The “Grucket” List

October 6, 2011 by Caroline Burke | 2 comments

Most of you have probably heard of a “bucket list” – it’s like a wish list of things you want to before you die. Well, based off of that idea, my roommates and I recently decided to start a “Grucket List”, or a graduation bucket list. In fact, the chalkboard in our room has now been converted into a grucket list so that we can share ideas. I’m going to share a bit of my personal “grucket” list here! (if something’s crossed off, it means I’ve already gotten around to doing it!)

1. Invite a professor to faculty dinner.

2. Go see my blockmate and her improv comedy troupe perform.

3.  Eat at Mike’s Pastries in the North End.

4. Go sailing on the Charles River.

5. Spend a summer in Cambridge.

6. Go visit Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, which is the oldest public arboretum in North America!

7. Go to a Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots game with friends.

8. Get together with my freshman year entryway at least once per semester. (so far, so good!)

9. Look at rare books in Harvard’s Houghton Library.

10. Write a senior thesis.

11. Row crew for Dunster Intramurals.

12. Ice skate at Frog Pond on Boston Common.

13. Attend more varsity sports games – and make sure I make it to the Harvard-Yale game every year!

14. Visit Walden Pond.

15. Attend morning prayer services at Memorial Church. It’s the longest running service in the country!

16. Learn to navigate the Harvard observatory by taking the introductory telescope class.

17. Take a class with fewer than five people.

18. Take a freshman seminar.

19. Visit the beautiful Mt. Auburn cemetery.

20. Visit four other Boston-area colleges. (I’m getting there – BU, Tufts, BC down)

21. See Yo-Yo Ma (’76) play in person. <– This should be happening next weekend, at Harvard’s 375th celebration!

22. Learn about the stained glass in Memorial Hall – each pane was donated by a graduating class and has its own story.

23. Jump off the Weeks Bridge.

24. Explore Harvard’s Natural History Museum and see the glass flowers exhibit.

25. Write for the Crimson. This half happened – I comped for a week and wrote this one spectacular article on an obscure indie band. That counts, right?

26. Attend Convocation each year. Admittedly, it’s for freshman, but it’s SUCH an exciting way to start a new school year. So much Harvard pride! Here’s the article from my freshman year – we were the first class to be officially welcomed to Harvard with Convocation.

27. Watch the sun rise from the Weeks Bridge.

28. Give a tour to a foreign dignitary. Already gave one to the Pakistani Foreign Minister last year!

29. Have a snowball fight in the Yard.

30. Graduate! Think this one’s pretty important.

Answering Some Tough Questions

September 30, 2011 by Caroline Burke | 1 comment

One exciting piece of news from the past week is that I found out I’m going to be an Admissions Office tour guide! I decided to apply at the start of the semester largely because I wanted an outlet to share my excitement for Harvard with students interested in applying, and I was lucky enough (after an application process that involved an interview and a filmed tour) to be selected as one of the newest additions to the tour guide pool.

We’ve spent the past week going to various trainings in order to learn how to personalize our tours and work with admissions officers to deliver effective information sessions. One of the most difficult parts of training, interestingly enough, has been thinking about personal responses to “tough questions”. The idea is that there are certain types of questions that virtually all prospective students are interested in, and we (as tour guides) should put some substantial thought into the types of answers we want to give. Some of the questions are really difficult to respond to, while others allow a great chance to reflect on how fun and challenging Harvard is as a school. I was so excited to think through some of them that I wanted to take the chance to share a few of my favorite questions with my own personal answers. Feel free to respond to this post with other questions you might have!

Q: Is Harvard a competitive place?

I was surprised when I got here to find that Harvard wasn’t competitive in the crazy, head-to-head race way that I had imagined it would be. Especially being a pre-med, I had pictured an environment where students were unwilling to help each other and would be stealing my lab equipment during class to sabotage a project. Luckily, that certainly wasn’t the case and I’ve found instead that students are more than willing to collaborate, form study groups, and help each other work through difficult concepts. Instead of defining Harvard as “competitive,” I would say it’s intense – students are very driven here and are extremely engaged in the classes they take, which means that everyone is willing to put in the extra time to succeed. It’s really an inspiring academic environment to be immersed in, though, because you constantly feel challenged to push yourself harder.

Q: What’s your favorite part about living in an upperclassmen House?

Definitely my favorite part of the House is the dining hall. It’s the most central space in the House, where everyone meets up to eat meals, grab a snack at “brain break” late at night (yes, the dining hall staff leaves us cookies!), or meet with classmates to go over a problem set that’s due. It’s also a great place to meet other people in the House, because with the long tables in Dunster, I always find myself sitting next to someone new that I’m excited to introduce myself to. The dining hall definitely embodies the sense of community that students come to love while living in a House.

Q: How do you choose your classes?

The process of choosing classes at Harvard is actually one of my favorite parts about our academic system in general. At the start of each semester, the first week of classes is known as “shopping week”. During this week, students are allowed to attend introductory lectures for as many classes as they want, and end up “shopping” about 6-8 potential courses. Rather than registering months ahead of time, Harvard students register for their classes at the end of this shopping week, which means we all have a really good idea about the syllabus, professor, class size, material, etc before we enroll. It ends up resulting in an academic community where students are truly engaged with and excited about the classes they’re taking, because they’ve been hand selected to fit their own specific interests.

Another cool part about course selection is the “Q guide” (which I recently learned was originally the CUE guide, for the “Curriculum for Undergraduate Education) – we use this system as a way of rating our classes and giving professors feedback. All students are allowed to go online and access the average rating (on a scale of 1-5) for the class overall, the professor, the workload, and the discussion section. Being able to read honest advice and feedback from other students makes course selection a lot easier.

Q: What’s your favorite story from your time at Harvard?

It’s difficult to narrow it down to just one story, but I do have a particular favorite from freshman year. I lived in Mower Hall (one of the dorms on the Yard), and Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore lived across the hall from each other in my entryway (yeah Mower B!) when they were freshmen. Around November of my freshman fall, Al Gore was in town for a book talk/signing and a whole bunch of us from my entryway decided to go get him to talk to us. We showed up at the event decked out in Mower t-shirts and face paint (as I remember it, we were coming back from an intramural ultimate Frisbee game) and stood in line to talk to him. When we approached the table, Al Gore saw our shirts and completely lit up, and talked to us for a few minutes about how much he’d loved living in Mower as a freshman. It was really incredible to hear how much his time in the dorm had impacted his time at Harvard. Such a cool moment!

Mower Intramurals

I hope some of these were of interest to those of you thinking about applying. I’d love to answer questions you’re specifically interested in, though, so feel free to reply with your own!

 

Porter Square Adventuring

September 20, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

This weekend I accomplished the impossible: I made the one mile journey up to Porter Square for the afternoon! I feel as though students around Harvard frequently will talk about how much they love going into Boston for dinner or a concert, but often forget that Cambridge is a pretty exciting city all on its own. It took me a few semesters to really get my bearings around campus, and it’s really only been within the past year or so that I’ve started to branch out and explore the rest of Cambridge. (A random, best-kept-secret suggestion? Get a membership at the Cambridge Public Library. They just built a new library building and it’s absolutely GORGEOUS – great place to study on the weekends! )

Harvard Square is one of a few “squares” in Cambridge, others being Kendall Square (by MIT), Central Square (about a mile east of Harvard, known for its small music venues), and Porter Square. This weekend I finally made the trek up to Porter for a haircut and a coffee date, and it was great!

For anyone who ends up looking for somewhere to get their hair cut once they get to campus, I definitely recommend Floyd’s Barber Shop. While I was definitely a bit afraid of going to a “barber shop” for the first time, I couldn’t have beat the deal I got: $30 for a great haircut. I was chatting with the stylist cutting my hair and she told me they’re a hot spot for high school and college students in Cambridge – guess this place is a secret I hadn’t quite caught up on yet.

I decided to spend a bit of time in Porter Square after I was done, and ended up going on a coffee date at this small, hole-in-the-wall café called Simon’s. They had a great iced coffee brew and homemade pastries, which definitely makes it my kind of place. I had to snap a picture of the sign they had outside: they definitely know who their patrons are!

 

Simon's Sandwich Board

The rest of the weekend was, admittedly, not as adventurous: I had a pretty painful problem set due for my physics class and a whole bunch of reading for my Social Studies tutorial. It was definitely nice to explore Cambridge a bit, though – great way to enjoy the beautiful fall weather!

Back in the Swing of Things!

September 9, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

The first couple of weeks back at school are always incredibly hectic, between registering for classes, moving in, and getting back into extracurriculars. As a FOP leader, a Peer Advising Fellow, and a member of Crimson Key (the organization that runs “Freshman Week”), though, I had a particularly busy – but exciting! – transition back into school.

My fall started back on August 8, when I moved back to Harvard to start planning for the First-Year Outdoor Program’s orientation trips. Leaders come back a few days early to plan routes, get to know their co-leader, and review their medical and technical skills during a week we like to call “pre-FOP”. Being a member of Steering Committee, though, I had to be here a week before the rest of the leaders, though, so we could pack food for the 300+ FOPpers going on our trips and make sure last minute details were sorted out. After all the planning, though, actually getting to lead my trip felt incredible – we had such a blast! My trip was in Maine, where we hiked on the Appalachian Trail and canoed on Flagstaff Lake.

 

FOP Trip 2!

Once back on campus, I moved into my room (which has a view of the Charles – so pretty this time of year!) and immediately transitioned into Freshman Week mode. Freshman Week is Harvard’s orientation week, when all first year students report to campus to move in, start thinking about courses, and meet the rest of their classmates. I had two roles to fill during this week, as both a Peer Advising Fellow (PAF) and a member of Crimson Key. This year I’m advising in Matthews Hall, one of the largest and oldest of the freshman dorms, and am working with seven freshman to help them pick classes and navigate Harvard’s extracurriculars and social scene. I’ve really loved getting to know my advisees so far – it’s great to get a reminder of how excited I was when I first got to Harvard.

As a member of Crimson Key, I also got to spend the week planning and staffing social events for freshmen, which is always a blast. We host movie nights, bake cookies, host a dance, and – my personal favorite – screen the movie Love Story on one of the last nights of orientation. Love Story was filmed in 1970 on Harvard’s campus, and portrays the romance of a Harvard man and a Radcliffe woman. By now, the movie is a bit…outdated. Crimson Key likes to liven it up by dressing up and turning it into a 1970s dance party. Check out the pictures!

 

Ready for Love Story

After orientation ended, I was able to focus a bit more on my own start to school. I ended up finding four classes I’m really excited about, including a Social Studies tutorial on globalization and a history course on social thought in America. My roommates and I have started to settle into our room, and were lucky enough to find a great futon on Craigslist – definitely a steal. Last weekend, we ended up biking to Walden Pond for the day to enjoy the beautiful weather!

 

About to leave for Walden Pond!

Now that classes are starting up I’ll have to start thinking about work, but the past couple weeks have been a really fun reminder of how excited I am to be a Harvard student. I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester!

Mid-Summer Updates!

July 27, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

This summer has absolutely flown by! I’m going to do my very best to summarize everything I’ve been up to for the past two months, so here it goes!

I started my summer with ten days of backpacking with the First-Year Outdoor Program, leading a training trip for this spring’s class of trainees. I had gone on a training trip myself last year, but leading one this year turned out to be a completely different experience, and I loved it. As a leader, we were responsible for guiding the trainees through the trip and making sure they learned all of the social, technical, and medical skills they need for the orientation trips this fall. The weather was also awful on the trip – probably upwards of four feet of snow at the top of some of the mountains!

 

Our training trip at the Zealand Falls Hut in NH!

After I got back from my backpacking trip, I started an internship working in the Superintendent’s Office at Boston Public Schools downtown. I got the placement through Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government – the Institute of Politics is an undergraduate organization focused on politics, and they run the “Director’s Internship” program for undergrads over the summer. I applied to the program back in February, when the IOP was accepting applications for its 60 placements all over the country. I have friends who got placed at organizations such as CNN, the MacArthur Foundation, Google, and the Department of Education in DC. It’s a really amazing program!

My internship’s turned out to be super interesting, and I’ve been really impressed with all of the people I’ve gotten to know in my office. I’m in a really lucky position, because despite being the only undergrad in the building, I get to sit in on meetings with executives from the district’s Central Office and research new initiatives for the Superintendent. I don’t really have a set schedule or assignment, and mostly work on whatever comes across my desk and sit in on meetings as they happen, but the spontaneity makes the work exciting.

As far as the rest of my summer goes, I’ve spent most of my weekends taking day trips and spending time with my family. I’m living in a big house at Tufts with some of my friends from high school, which has been a ton of fun. Harvard spoils us with the guaranteed on-campus housing, though – the house I’m staying in this summer is off-campus, so the girls we’re subletting from all have to deal with rent, utilities, and grocery shopping during the school year. Glad I don’t have to think about that while I’m studying or writing a paper!

 

Celebrating a birthday with friends at Tufts

I’m sort of shocked that the summer has flown by so quickly – I’ll be done with my internship next week! Once I’m done at Boston Public Schools, I’m moving right back to Harvard to start planning for the FOP trips that will be leaving at the end of August. I’m also looking forward to getting an email from the Advising Programs Office in the next few days, because I get to find out about my freshman advisees soon! Can’t believe school is only a month away!

From one of my weekend trips: dancing at my cousin's wedding!

The Art of the Housing Lottery

April 5, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

As a freshman at Harvard, stress about housing is largely concentrated in the few hours leading up to announcements on Housing Day. After having picked a blocking group, students wait anxiously to hear of their assignments and are usually so excited by their placement that any worry about rooming groups, square footage, or window placement for their future dorm falls away. Freshmen get the heavy lifting done for them: they receive a simple email in August with their room number and move into their new House a few weeks later.

I’ve found that things are not so simple for sophomores. To be honest, I wasn’t aware that the process was any different for rising upperclassmen; I figured that groups were somehow judiciously divided amongst the rooms and we would magically receive our assignments before heading off for the summer. This, as it turns out, is not the case. Instead, rising juniors and seniors must engage in the complicated, dramatic, and tense process known as the housing lottery.

The housing lottery is, as the name suggests, a drawing where each group is assigned a number and allowed the chance to handpick their room in the House. Rising seniors get the opportunity to choose first, and within each class groups are divided both by number of individuals in their group and the average lottery number assigned to its members. That is, seniors rooming in a group of 7 get first choice of housing, followed by senior groups of 6, and so on, all the way through junior groups of 2 individuals. For a lowly rising junior with only 3 girls in a rooming group, this means that I’m due up for one of the last picks in the entire lottery.

Dunster Floor Plan

How, then, does one prepare for this highly anticipated lottery? For the three of us, preparation involved hours of poring over House floor plans, comparing size, window placement, proximity to the stairwell, and views. In Dunster, views can range from the back wall of neighboring Mather House to a perfect view of the Charles River. You can be on the first floor facing the street or on the sixth stuck under slanted ceilings. Being placed in the same entryway as the dining hall becomes key during the cold winter months; having to walk around the outside of the building to get to dinner is less ideal. Needless to say, there are an enormous number of factors to consider.

A word those outside of the Harvard bubble may be unfamiliar with? “Walkthrough”. In many of the River Houses, bedrooms within a larger suite connect to each other through only a single door, which means roommates might have to walk through each other’s rooms in order to get to the bathroom. Admittedly, it’s a downside (and something that our classmates living in the Quad Houses frequently remind us of – “Quadlings” typically have great rooms), but it’s a reality of living in one of these old dorms.

When it came to the actual afternoon of the housing lottery, my poor roommate was forced to tough the selection out herself (I had class and our third roommate is still in Europe!). I was getting minute-by-minute text updates of which rooms had been selected, which ultimately made me just as stressed about it as she was. At the end of it, we wound up with one of our solid choices. Admittedly, most of the star triples had been snatched by the seniors the day before, but given our lottery number we would up with a great room: lots of windows, view of the Charles, and a big common room!

 

 

Housing Day and Spring Break!

March 24, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

The days leading up to Spring Break are a truly insane time for Harvard students. On top of our midterms and papers, many of us are struggling to work out summer plans and funding while simultaneously trying to balance the normal workload of club meetings and problem sets. Around mid-March, however, we get a light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel: the glorious 10 day vacation that is Housing Day and Spring Break.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Harvard housing system, students are sorted at their freshman year into one of twelve upperclassmen Houses, which then becomes their home for sophomore through senior year. While the freshman housing lottery is completely random, students are able to choose who they enter the House with – a 2-8 person group known as their “blocking group”. At Harvard, Housing Day, when freshman find out what House they are assigned to, is arguably the most exciting and spirited day of the year (tied with the Harvard-Yale Game, probably), and students are known to prepare and count down to the occasion for weeks.

Dunster's Swag: Moose Antlers and T-shirts!

Dunster's Welcome Committee

Housing Day is a truly indescribable experience. Starting at 7 am, each House sends a “Welcome Team” to the yard to start delivering letters to the freshmen. With each House sending anywhere from 50-100 people are part of the their welcoming committee, this amounts to a truly enormous crowd of rowdy upperclassmen gathered in the Yard in preparation for Housing assignment announcements. At 8:30, each House starts delivering letters to dorm rooms, welcoming freshmen with screams, noisemakers, and giant House mascots. Check out this video the Crimson posted of Pforzheimer House!

Houses Waiting in the Yard

As a sophomore, Housing Day takes on a very different level of excitement. Rather than spending the morning worrying about what House you’ll be placed in, you get to run around the Yard screaming your head off with your friends from the House. Enjoying the experience from the “other side” inspires a sense of appreciation for the community that you’ve become a part of. While as a freshman, I was definitely excited about Dunster, I’m not sure I realized what an enormous part of my life the House would become. What better way to celebrate this fact than by cheering for my House for 2 hours straight! I had a sore throat for days afterwards…

For all Harvard students, the excitement of Housing Day leads straight into Spring Break – in my case, I finished my welcome committee duties around 11, went to class until 3, and then immediately hopped on an airplane bound for Spain! Needless to say, I slept through the entire 9 hour flight. For those of you interested in study abroad at Harvard, I spent the week visiting my blockmate who is spending the semester in Alicante, Spain. I couldn’t possibly explain the entire experience, but here are a few snapshots to give you guys an idea.

 

Barcelona

Alicante

The Life of a Crimson Sports Fan

March 4, 2011 by Caroline Burke | Permalink

While Harvard admittedly is not the most school-spirited college in the country, there is one place this time of year that you can find endless Crimson pride: Harvard Men’s Basketball games. This year, our team’s doing really well, seeking our first Ivy Title for the program, now in its 100th year. Combine the energy of playoffs with the cozy, crowded, and boisterous environment of Lavietes Pavilion, and you’ve got a SERIOUS amount of Harvard spirit to play with.

One of my favorite things about the men’s basketball team is the “sixth man,” the student cheering section organized by members of the varsity football team. The sold out student section crowds into just one block of bleachers, and the group of football guys who lead the cheers stand at the front with a giant whiteboard. Whenever they want to start a particular chant, they’ll write it on the board and hold it up for the crowd to see. Here’s a link to the crowd favorite: “I Believe”. Usually this doesn’t get pulled out until the very end of the game, so energy is ridiculous high whenever we start it.

Another great feature of Lavietes Pavilion is that the student section and the Harvard University Band are right next to each other, which allows both groups to really play into the enthusiasm throughout the game. Crowd favorites include “I Want You Back” and, of course, Harvard’s fight song, “10,000 Men of Harvard”. There is really nothing more epic and exciting than hearing the Band play the fight song after a Harvard victory!

Of course, basketball games wouldn’t be complete without the cheerleaders and the dance team. I’m always so impressed by their splits and flips – definitely a talent!

Harvard ended up winning 79-64, which means they’ll go on tomorrow to play Princeton for the Ivy Title. So far they haven’t lost a home game, so the odds look pretty good!

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