A prospective Harvard student wrote the other day asking for advice about CS+Math at Harvard, and (among other questions) asked if I'd share the courses I took to help them compare with their own plans. As always, I was happy to help. I figured it might also be useful to someone else to have an (admittedly idiosyncratic) sample of a Harvard CS+Math schedule on the Internet, so I'm posting it here, too.

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It should be obvious, but no one should take this as a prescription -- not everything was the right choice for me in hindsight, so it's definitely not exactly right for you. At best, it's a data point for people exactly like me, and at worst you should consider reversing the major takeaways.

I also feel compelled to pass along the best advice I received about picking a major, which came from Harry Lewis:

• Pick the 32 courses you most want to take.
• See if any major will give you a degree for exactly those.
• If so, then you're done.
• If not, find the one that will give you a degree with the fewest changes. Pick that one.

Don't take extra courses to get extra pieces of paper. As Harry would say, "Don't let getting your degree get in the way of getting your education!"

But, without any further caveats, here we go...

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First, I'll list just the course numbers. Below that, I've listed the course titles, professors, and some light thoughts on the professors and/or the

I've got an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson today, expressing my concern that an important narrative is missing from the discussions of the AAU sexual assault climate survey. Excerpt:

When male survivors are invisible, they face stigma against seeking help. Though male and female survivors of sexual assault seek out institutional resources at roughly the same (low) rates, male survivors are 60 percent more likely than female survivors to speak to no one—not even a friend—after an assault. (31.2% versus 19.3% for assault by force; 38.1% versus 23.3% for assault by incapacitation.) And so male students make up more than a quarter of silent survivors, in large part because we so rarely acknowledge that they exist at all. (...)

Those numbers, by the way, come from tables 3.1a,c and 3.5a,b in the full report. Below, I've got few thoughts that didn't make it into the published version.

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(1)

I've heard (and more or less believed) "one in three women" for longer than I can remember. And so the fact that the report basically confirms that number doesn't mean all that much to me. I suppose if you doubted that number but believe it now, then the report is big news, but otherwise, this isn't a new crisis because we already knew that it was a crisis, and hopefully, were already acting accordingly. Waiting until the evidence is undeniable before updating

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(1)

Stanford's in the news today for: Stanford just made tuition free for families earning less than $125,000 per year. The news is usually accompanied by pictures of smiling students and balloons:

...and it usually takes the article in question a few paragraphs to get around to noting that:

The announcement is an expansion of Stanford's old financial aid policy, which previously applied to students from families making less than $100,000 per year. (...)

...which raises the question: Just how many students at Stanford come from families with incomes greater than $100k and less than $125k? ...and just how desperately did those families need to have their tuition costs reduced from \(\leq\)$13.5k^[1] to $5k^[2]?

(EDIT | A bird in my ear mentions that $100k/yr puts you in the 80%tile of American families, which seems at least approximately-correct.)

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(2)

About a year ago, Ken Griffin donated $125 million in support of Harvard's financial aid program, funding 539 full scholarships to Harvard. Kim Soffen, writing in the Harvard Political Review, wrote:

An important first note is that the recipients of this new pool of money will not be the poorest students at Harvard; even before this donation, Harvard already guaranteed full scholarships to any family making under $65,000 per year, and that families making up to $150,000 would not have to pay more than ten percent of their income. Consequently, these additional scholarships would be going towards students from families who are already safely

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The Upshot, when they're not putting out awesome data features, apparently publishes things like Obama's Community-College Plan: A Reading List, which is a useful read on (1) what is actually being proposed (2) how it compares to other similar proposals and programs (3) why any of this matters.

The odds of a Republican Congress passing an Obama proposal on any issue aren't very high... [But i]f nothing else, the Obama proposal seems likely to increase the profile of the universal-college movement. That movement echoes the universal-high-school movement of the early 20th century, as I mentioned in an article Thursday. (...)

And a short bit of opinion on the necessity of "universal college":

Yet we never stop to ask why 13 years of universal education has become the magic number -- and why it should permanently be so, given how much more complex our society and economy have become in the ensuing century. If nine years of free education was the sensible norm for the masses in the 19th century and 13 years was the sensible norm in the early 20th century, what is the right number in the 21st century?

Anyway, after spending a plane flight from SLC to Baltimore discussing universal-community-college with my mother, I've come around to the belief that this is by no means as simple as "just throw money at it" -- there are going to be lots of secondary market effects and unintended consequences -- but I think it's time we're having the conversation, at least. Maybe I'll try to write a thing later.

2

Also in politics: If you're familiar with the Net Neutrality debate, this headline will mean

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First, meta of metas, if you like my takes on (some subset of) the week, maybe also check out other people's linkwraps that have come out in the last day or so:

• Unequally Yoked | 7 Quick Takes: Costuming, Conspiracy, and Counterfeiting (Leah Libresco is a one-time atheist blogger, now a Catholic blogger, and remains a devout rationalist. Unequally Yoked's 7QT's get the credit for convincing me to to BoL's.)
• My Biased Coin | Weekend Links (November 1 Edition) (Michael Mitzenmacher is currently my professor for Complexity and Algorithms, and often has insightful things to say on the inner workings of the ivory tower, being a research professor of theoretical computer science.)
• Slate Star Codex | Links for November 2014 (Scott S. Alexander, who also writes as Yvain, writes on his own blog and on LessWrong about...well...lots of things. But I appreciate his thoughts.)

1

Vigrin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo [exploded in midair on Friday](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29861259), killing one of two test pilots. In [a press statement](http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/statement-from-virgin-galactic/), CEO George Whitesides says:

"Space is hard and today was a tough day. We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what

This week, MIT released Survey Results: 2014 Community Attitudes on Sexual Assault, making them one of the first schools to release such broad survey data on sex crimes. These are the results of a survey emailed to MIT undergraduate and graduate students last April, which had a response rate of 35% from 10,831--3,844 total responses.

Now, MIT is clear that the document they've published should be taken as initial, not final, results:

"This document is a summary of the most pertinent results corresponding to questions asked in the survey; it is intended to be an initial summary of survey results. Throughout the upcoming academic year we will work with the community to use the
survey data to answer additional important questions. New findings will be posted to web.mit.edu/surveys/health/, where the full text of the survey questions and other related information can also be found."

They are also upfront about acknowledging the inevitability of response bias:

"Response bias is expected in virtually any voluntary survey, particularly one focused on a narrow topic. While we invited all enrolled graduate and undergraduate students to take this survey, and more than one-third responded, it is not possible to know if students self-selected in or out of the survey in a way that would bias our results. For example, it is difficult

First, to wrap up our interlude of other people's insights, a zinger from one of my favorite professors ever, Dr. Margo Seltzer:

If I had as much disdain for my students as Deresiewicz appears to have for his, I'd get a new job. Seriously -- I view my students so differently from the way he does that it's hard to imagine we teach at similar institutions, and yet we do.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled...

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Dear brother,

I haven't said much about my actual experience here, have I? Most of it's been the sort of broad descriptions you could have gleaned by just looking in from the outside; what's it like to actually live there, you ask? I'm glad you did.

Let's start with the people. Here are a few snapshots of my friends, in no particular order:

One helped me run a FIRST Lego League team at a Boston middle school last fall. Next year, she's looking at volunteering as a math team coach.	One is a brilliant cook, musician, artist, and software developer. She recently illustrated a children's book.
One is quitting an editorship and exec board position with the Crimson to pursue her real passion: the college radio station.	One is always there for me if I need someone to help me edit a blog post or a poem. Always. (And she's the glue that keeps our blocking group together.)
One quit the Harvard debate team to join the cheerleading squad, since that's what she likes doing better.	One is working her second summer at