Dear brother,

Congratulations on making it through three years of that purgatory called high school! Soon you'll be getting up close and personal with that great Millenial coming-of-age ritual: the one where you and a few dozen people you've never met conspire to decide what sort of weather and dining hall food you'll be enjoying (or cursing) for four years of your life.

You're going to get a lot of advice on how to navigate the next year or so. Unfortunately, not all of it will be good. One day, I'll try to organize my own thoughts on the matter, but today, I feel compelled to rebut a refrain I've heard echoed far too often recently.

The fundamental complaint is that "elite" education (for some definition) leaves students with empty credentials at the expense of true learning, and that graduating high school students have better options for learning to become citizens of the twenty-first century. I contend that this is mostly stereotype and sensationalism -- at least, my own experience at the elitest of elite schools has been overwhelmingly positive.

I fear you are already familiar with the charges that William Deresiewicz, writing for the New Republic, recently leveled (seemingly indiscriminately) against the whole of the elite-education-industrial-complex:

• that the preparations required for an "elite college" are, on the whole, soul-destroying;
• that the admissions process is completely, hopelessly rigged;
• that the student body is firstly, invariably "entitled little shits", and secondly, enslaved to some abstract myth of excellence;
• that the same students are four

Much has already been said about the choice to hide important course evaluation data from students (Crimson article), and I won't try to rehash in full what others have said so eloquently. Instead, I'll try to bring to the surface some of the most salient points, and add a few of my own.

First, it's been said (and satirized by Satire V) that Dean Harris did a fine job of (trying to) bury the lede on the whole matter. After all, the change to the Q was announced in sentence 16 of 21 in an email titled "Pre-Term Planning for Fall 2014":

Now, unless the the Dean was attempting to imply that we should be planning for Fall 2014 by scoping out courses now, before difficulty ratings go away forever, one has to question the reason behind revealing a crucial change in student resources (which, as the Crimson reports, has been decided since last September) in the middle of an email about a weeks-away optional survey to a group of students who have already left campus for the summer.

Or perhaps, one need not. I'm not sure that anyone except University spokespeople would be willing to argue that Dean Harris just happened to send

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

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

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,

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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

Monday, Harvard saw an unfounded bomb threat from a student who tried to postpone an exam in American Government. Four buildings in Harvard Yard were evacuated and that day's morning exams were, indeed, postponed. Students were given options to take them later that afternoon, in February, or not at all, either electing to be graded on the remainder of the course's assigned work, or on a Pass/Fail scale. But Eldo Kim '16 confessed to sending the emails, and will appear in US District Court tomorrow.

(1)

A headline like "Harvard Student, 20, Arrested in Connection with Campus Bomb Scare" (from a local paper) feels strangely alien. Of course, I've seen several "XYZ College senior charged with ABC" headlines, and it always felt distant, not like it was real life. In the Harvard Crimson, I'm used to seeing headlines like "Early Action Acceptance Rises to 21 Percent" and "Donning Hats, Capes, and Little Else, Harvard Students Celebrate Primal Scream".

This is, of course, not the first time Harvard has had negative press recently. But stories like "Cheating Scandal at Harvard" and "Harvard Grade Inflation Rampant" and even "Harvard Stripped of Quiz Bowl Titles" seem perversely Harvardian in their accusations: "Cheating Scandal at Harvard -- Even the Best Do It!"; "Harvard Grade Inflation Rampant -- Getting in is the Hardest Part, After All!", and so on. After all, I've complained to more than one friend that "this wouldn't be news if we weren't Harvard".

But "Student Arrested for Bomb Threat"? Today, the