The Harvard Crimson: Q Guide Will No Longer Display Difficulty Score, Harris Says

A straight news piece, the Crimson article is noteworthy for including several quotes from professors defending the change:

Richard F. Thomas (Prof. Classics)

"[Difficulty ratings] could create an impulse in the instructor to make the course easier in order to attract students."

Mark C. Elliott (Prof. Chinese History)

"[Difficulty rating] is not really the most important thing about a class."

"One hopes that after everything that our students have done up to the time they get admitted to Harvard ... they recognize the value in a challenging curriculum and in taking courses that may not be an easy A, but will add in some way to their intellectual enrichment or development."

Ore Babarinsa '15 (comment on the Crimson article)

For once, sense is spoken in the comments section of the Crimson; my friend and classmate Ore speaks to a student perspective on the necessity of difficulty ratings:

I'm sorry, but the stated rationale given is completely disconnected from any understanding of how, or why many students desperately need that difficulty rating for courses on the Q quide. I've been in the hospital because of having too much academic work on my plate at Harvard, and I think the administrators need to understand that students need to be able to adequately balance the difficulty of

I've decided to move my blog from the Blogger platform to Ghost, hosted here, where I can control more of the fiddly bits. I've copied over all content from the old Blogspot site, but future posts will only be made here.

Welcome, and cheers!

A year ago, the school (and the city) was just getting off lockdown after the manhunt for the marathon bombing suspect(s). And looking backward, there's a few things I remember quite clearly:

• the spreadsheet of students offering couch space, spare beds, and sleeping bags to 'stranded' students unsure if it was safe to be crossing campus
• the Dining Services workers who crossed a city on lockdown (by bike, as I recall) to come in to work, and the students who volunteered to work the dining hall with them
• the pre-frosh who came to Visitas Weekend despite its cancellation (including mine!), and the hosts who did everything they could to make their stay worth its while (in the fall, the school would announce record yield numbers...)
• the sudden, temporary freedom from work -- afterward, a friend would recall "I've never felt so free as that day we were trapped inside!" I'm not sure what this says about Harvard.
  But there's one thing in particular about what whole bizarre half-week that I'm unlikely to forget, probably ever:

The day that the freshman dining hall, Annenberg, was reopened, someone proposed an idea which caught on pretty much immediately -- at 6pm, in Annenberg, we'd gather as a community to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. It was one of those things, I think, that a lot of us needed, and it just seemed like the right thing to do on that Tuesday night.

There's a scene in Casablanca where the a cafe of Frechmen rise together in La Marseillaise to drown out a handful of rowdy Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein.

It's a tearjerking moment, and the first (and second, and

Today, the Against Malaria Foundation announced that it's solidified plans to distribute 676,00 insecticide-treated bednets in central Africa! From AMF's blog:

"AMF has agreed to fund 676,000 LLINs for distribution in the province of Kasaï Occidental. The nets will be distributed from July to October 2014 to protect approximately 1.2 million people.

"The distribution is a partnership between AMF which will be funding all nets, the UK's Department of International Development (DFID) which will be funding all non-net costs through the ASSP (Access to Primary Health Care) project and IMA World Health which will be responsible for carrying out the distribution and post-distribution follow-up.

"DRC is one of the two most affected malaria countries in the world. Large scale net distributions therefore have the potential to make a significant improvement to the health of the communities protected."

What does "a significant improvement to the health of the communities protected" mean? And why is Ross so excited?

Okay, storytime. GiveWell is a research group investigating the effectiveness of various charities around the world (using metrics much more insightful than overhead-spending-ratio, which has been called "The worst way to pick a charity" by GiveWell, GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and others...). In short, they try to answer the question "If I donate $X to charity Y, what (good/bad) things will happen in the world?" with holistic, in-depth research resting on solid data. In short, they're pretty awesome.

AMF aims to fight malaria worldwide, with a primary goal of saving as many lives as possible (this is a little simplified, but approximately true) with the money available. The most effective option,

So, I recently found myself typing up a longish email in response to a high school junior trying to figure out this whole college thing. In particular, the full story looks something like:

• I post a Quora answer in response to a question about majoring in mathematics.
• A user comments, asking if I would field some additional questions by email. (I've since deleted the comment, to protect the privacy of the requester.)
• I spend the better part of an hour typing responses about what it's like to be at Harvard, what it's like to joint-concentrate CS/Math, and some advice on applying to colleges.

In the end, it seemed like there are some other people I know who might want to hear such off-the-top-of-my-head insights. But then again, if you're not a high school student, the rest of this post is going to be pretty useless for you; be forewarned.

In any case, I've reproduced (most of) the email exchange below.

Hi Ross,

My questions are as follows:

1. From your profile I learnt that you major in both CS and Math; what is majoring in two subjects like? Barely have no time to do anything related to social life (not to mention you are in Harvard)? I also want to double-major in CS and Math when I study in university.
2. Did you spare any effort to prepare for applying universities before you were admitted by Harvard? In other words, did you put a lot of time in extracurricular activities (and sports)?
3. Scoring high on SAT requires a huge amount of vocabulary, could you tell me how you memorized words?

Best wishes,
AAAA BBBB

AAAA,

(1)

Regarding my experiences in the

Harry Lewis once said to me "Flip through the course catalog, write down the 32 courses you most want to take, and then figure out which concentration requires the fewest changes to what you've written down. Then pick that one."

As it turns out, I had many CS courses, several math courses, and was planning to write a thesis (most likely on the math-y edge of CS theory). So CS/Math was a perfect fit. (Math/CS is strictly more required courses, and requires approximately the same writing commitments.) But basically, it feels like I've turned in a piece of paper that convinced the admin that the thing that I was going to do anyway, is well-aligned with their expectations for academic rigor. It's no big deal.The real question, I suppose, is then: "What is it like to study Math and CS at Harvard?"

In general, and in a word, exhausting. Your fellow students are excellent, and if you have a day when you feel like you're not, it can get pretty miserable. It gets better when you realize that everyone is best at some subset of fields, and if you're lucky, you'll find the particular subset that you do well at, and

In a word: no. In three words: haha, really no.

I've taken CS50 -- which is the hardest CS course most Harvard students will take -- and CS161 -- which is the hardest CS course at Harvard, full stop. 161 (Operating Systems) more or less ate my life (it didn't help that I was taking five courses that semester), and still I found time for my friends. When I was going into my third 20-hour coding day (you learn, eventually, that all-nighters are just inefficient), I would still take time to eat dinner with my friends -- and they were the ones that helped me get through that hell.

More than a few of my closest friends are people that I've met while working on some CS project (CS@Harvard is almost compulsively partner-oriented), but even so, it's not like I've only got a circle of CS friends; I'm one of two CS concentrators in my eight-person blocking group.

At the end of the day, CS might eat your life, but it won't eat your friends. They'll be there for breakfast after your all-nighter, and they'll be there to drag you to a party the weekend after your project is due. And, if my experience is any guide, you'll find people in