Any advice for a first-year Harvard man

August 11, 2006 5:45 PM

I have a nephew who will be attending Harvard this fall. Any advice for one who was raised on a farm in a small farm town to ease transition.

I would like him to have a good landing with an idea of what he may be in for. He was class valedictorian and also got accepted to Stanford, Berkeley.....SAT's were apparently off the chart and he has already completed college courses.

He was also raised in a small farm town in Central California on a dairy farm. I sense a huge culture and social shock will happen for him, similar to what I went through when I left to attend a major university. I plan on writing him a letter before he heads east with advice, topics including sex and drugs, peer pressure and competition, cambridge sensibility, not "fitting in." etc.

posted by goalyeehah to education (35 comments total)

He won't be the smartest person in the room any more. That can be...difficult.
posted by fuzzbean at 5:59 PM on August 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

If you have a bit of time before you need to send off the advice letter, you would do very well to read Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons." It addresses the exact kind of culture shock your nephew is about to experience.

Further explanation, lest ye and others doubt this book's relevance:

It is true that many reviewers panned the book for its supposedly unrealistic depictions of collegiate culture shock—"No one could be so naïve as Wolfe's Charlotte!" they cried. But see...those reviewers didn't come from the kind of background your nephew (and Wolfe's main character) comes from. (Charlotte comes from a tiny town in the mountains of West Virginia.) I don't think a lot of reviewers understood where the character was coming from because they didn't have the kind of experiences Charlotte and, well, I had upon reaching the university level.

I come from a middle-class suburban background myself, yet Wolfe's tale still resonated deeply with me. He did his research, and it shows.

Now, I fear that a lot of people may deride this comment later down in the thread, so I strongly urge you to look past that and consider reading the novel if you have the time in the next week or so. It will provide a lot of insight into the social sphere your nephew is hurtling into as he heads off to college.
posted by limeonaire at 6:05 PM on August 11, 2006

I personally escaped a small town / farm upbringing and moved to Hamburg, Germany with 70DM and 2 bags of clothing at the enlightened age of 19. obviously I survived that (somewhat) ill-advised move.

more background? has he spent any time in the city before?

most growing pains going to uni in a large town revolve around adapting to public transit, money issues and adjusting to freshman life in a dorm with roommates. typical college stuff. I can't imagine Harvard would be that different from any normal first year experience. my cousins went to (variously) Harvard, Stanford and Colgate and their experiences pretty much dovetailed with what I know of uni.

if he's as smart as indicated by his test scores, and reasonably socially adept, then he will be bright enough to make his own way.

not to snark, but this isn't 1890. farms aren't as isolated as you think. assuming he wasn't crazy sheltered by overprotective paranoid parenting tactics, then the advances in the WWW/internet have pretty much globalised kids and made them awfully 'worldly' these days.

a good 'so-you're-going-away-to-college' book along the lines of the ones recommended on this thread would be appropriate, I think.

unless you merely posted this to boast about your nephew's accomplishments, in which case, congrats! ;)
posted by lonefrontranger at 6:11 PM on August 11, 2006

Don't allow your hick roots to be an embarrassment, use them as a weapon.
posted by LarryC at 6:15 PM on August 11, 2006

And in case I didn't hint at it broadly enough—one of the biggest culture shocks I had upon coming to college was meeting kids who'd never wanted for anything a day in their lives. I'm still shocked by what a privileged upbringing can do to a person—I'm subletting my apartment right now, actually, to an undergraduate from a background of some wealth and privilege, and I'm daily amazed to watch her throw away good food, break her own possessions (and those of others), and generally lead a careless lifestyle because she's always had the money to do so. While it may be a bit different at Harvard than it was at Washington University (my very recent alma mater), considering that Harvard's admissions are need-blind, I know that a large proportion of Harvard's student body is still similarly encumbered by their privileged upbringing.

Then there's the rampant alcoholism and promiscuity...I saw so many poor decisions just in the first week I lived on campus my freshman year. Drunken hookups, pregnancy scares...you name it. I think a lot more freshman girls are raped on my campus than will ever report or admit it, if what I heard in the halls of my freshman dorm was any indication. (The official reports indicate essentially zero rapes on campus for the past several years. I don't believe that one bit.) Unfortunately, they're drunk on dates at the time, so they don't count it as rape. They're sexually liberated, I guess you could say—but they have seemingly no concept of what it means to make intelligent decisions about one's body. And one of the girls who lived next door to me made the brilliant decision to take some sort of pain medication along with her "birthday shots" that year and ended up in the hospital with a kidney failure. (Her doctor father subsequently sprung her from her hospital bed early, and when she arrived back on campus, one of the first things I heard her say was, I quote, "So yeah, I can't drink for a while, and that sucks. But when I can drink again it'll be, like, a party!"

Hmm. Another sensitive issue on my freshman floor: race. I came from a suburb where race was almost never an issue—my high school was half white, half black, and very peaceful. Then I came to Wash. U., and people brought along their preconceptions about race and what it means to be one race or another, and suddenly any number of innocuous observations about individuals became fodder for racially charged, angry conversations. I was, again, shocked by how strong emotions ran on these topics.

I don't tell you these things to scare you needlessly, but to inform you of the potential situations a new college freshman might encounter. A lot of similar situations are addressed by the book I recommended. Most of my friends at Wash. U. never encountered situations like the ones I did—but most of my friends also lived in a somewhat sheltered situation, since they all lived in completely substance-free dorms their first two years.

My comments are merely my own experience, and many other students may not have had these experiences. But these things did happen, and continue to happen, and I hope your nephew can adapt to what awaits.
posted by limeonaire at 6:28 PM on August 11, 2006 [2 favorites]

Backround.......

I have not been in close contact with my family for 16 years, so I'm doing a little guesswork here. He's 40 miles south of Sacramento and 80 miles east of San Francisco, so I am assuming he goes into city 3-4 times a year.

My family, I would now call fundamentalist Catholic as a whole. I have around 28 nieces and nephews, all of whom been homeschooled. My nephews mom laid down the gauntlet and said that she wants her kids going to high school, so they were sent to the Catholic high school that I attended. My brother fought it and openly admitted to me that he regrets his action thent and is very proud of them (My niece graduated the year before my nephew and was also class val and had free rides to any uni she wanted) While Catholic, my brother is also the most progressive one of my brothers and sisters, the most emotionally available, humorous and self enquiring.

If he is anything like me, he is also making the break to get out into the world.
posted by goalyeehah at 6:31 PM on August 11, 2006

He will be fine. There will be a lot of kids there just like him. I was a midwestern hick in an Ivy League school back in the days and the one thing that defines these schools is diversity, not just ethnic, but by every measure imaginable. There will be plenty of people there like him for comfort, but better, there will be plenty of people not at all like him from whom he will learn more than from his profs. It is the greatest experience. There is little to fear and much to look forward to. He will not be the smartest kid in the room anymore, most likely. That is how you learn. (Of course, Harvard sucks.)
posted by caddis at 6:33 PM on August 11, 2006

Don't worry quite so much. Amongst the jet setters and the painfully hip, every freshman class at Harvard positively stuffed with the profoundly sheltered and unsophisticated -- kids whose parents all but locked them indoors for the 17 1/2 years it took to win admission to Harvard. Any problems your nephew would have fitting in, he'd have far worse at the colleges most of his high school classmates are attending.

(And, seriously, if you want to see some threats to virtue, check out frat row at the colleges that Central California kids like to attend...)
posted by MattD at 6:34 PM on August 11, 2006

Mm. My parents (read: my overprotective father) homeschooled me for a year in sixth grade, not because of religious fundamentalism, but because he thought the school system was full of lies and bullshit. (It was and is, but that still didn't make me appreciate his decision.) I fought against it and found myself back in school the next year—wearing all the wrong clothes, clueless about early teenage hygiene, and completely out of the loop socially. So I've experienced something similar to what many of your nieces/nephews may be experiencing.

My father persisted in his overprotective behavior until I left for college, and then some—even three years into college, I wasn't allowed to stay out late or stay over at friends' houses or go out without telling him all the details of my venture out when I was home on winter break. As you might imagine, I took classes on campus every summer so I didn't have to go home.

Long story short, I know exactly what it means to make that break to get out into the world you speak of (I'm still learning to make good choices, not just ones that keep me independent enough to stay away from home) and I hope you can help ease the transition for your nephew.
posted by limeonaire at 6:42 PM on August 11, 2006

Sorry, but I have to disagree with the "I am Charlotte Simmons" recommendation. I am not going to comment on whether Wolfe accurately depicts the feelings a bright rural girl experiences upon entering a high-ranked university; although I suspect the critics are correct in saying that her naivette is overblown, I don't come from a rural area so, granted, I may not have the same view of college life.

That said, however, "college life" is exactly what Wolfe gets quite wrong. He claims to have conducted research prior to writing the book, but judging by the end result, his research may as well have simply consisted of watching hackneyed comedies about college. Wolfe insists that the student body is regimented into strict cliques, and miscegenation, as it were, between these groups is verboten.

The reality is that people do not behave like silly stereotypical cardboard cutouts. Their interests do not fit flatly into the definitions of "jock," "nerd," "party animal," "spoiled rich brat," and other groups Wolfe describes. 90% of people your nephew will meet in college will be open to interaction; the other 10% may just be introverted, antisocial, etc. Wolfe essentially implies that in order to feel a sense of acceptance in college, one has to strongly identify with a particular group, and that the identification has to be sufficiently strong to the point of permitting the group's identifying characteristics override your own. Again, that is ridiculous.

Speaking from personal experience, I knew a lot of people in college who did not grow up in urban or suburban areas, who never had a sip of alcohol before they got to college, who never smoked before they got to college, who had virtually none of the experiences their more world-weary peers may have had. No matter. They were never made to feel alienated by the vast majority of the student body. Some of them adopted some of the habits of their new peers and tried some things that they had not previously tried. That is fine. Some of them steadfastly hung on to whatever beliefs or practices had previously made them avoid those things. That is also fine. Point is, neither of these groups was considered weird, excluded from any activities, or rebuked socially.

This is what I can offer by way of advice to your nephew. Do not get intellectually complacent. In a lot of upper-tier universities, the hard part is getting in, and the rest of it is not as difficult. There will always be classes where you can get an A by putting in miniscule effort. Try to avoid these, and challenge yourself continously. It sounds trite and obvious, but it's the most difficult thing in the world to do (it was for me at least). Speak to your professors. You are fortunate enough to have an opportunity to be taught by some of the leaders in their field, and you cannot miss a chance to speak to them.

Network, network, network. The more people you get to know in college, the more fun you are going to have, and the more satisfying your college experience will be. Every universitiy has a plethora of student groups that cater to every possible interest, and there is really no better way to meet people that are interested in the same things you are.

Think long-term. Decide what you want to do after you graduate from Harvard (law school? grad school?) and begin planning for it during your second year at the latest. Again, this is where speaking to your professors and getting to know them outside of class is extremely beneficial. If you get started on this early, it will be much easier for you to get good advice on where to apply, to ask for letters of recommendation, etc.

Along the same lines, honestly evaluate whether what you are studying excites you enough that you will want to keep doing it for the rest of your life. Forget about what your parents want you to do, what others think you should do, and be honest with yourself. The courses you take should give you a sufficient preview of the type of work you will be doing with your degree; if you dread going to class every day, consider changing your career path - it's not set in stone.

That's probably a bit too lengthy, but that's the advice I would have given myself four years ago.
posted by Pontius Pilate at 6:47 PM on August 11, 2006

I moved from a town of 275 (in a good month) to Toronto to go to University. I had a year long stay in Brazil in between to teach me the real meaning of culture shock, but I was a lot less prepared to deal with how utterly bizarre it was to be back in Canada and have it be like nothing I was used to.

My dorm had about the same number of people in my home town. And actually, that was pretty useful because it was a community I could relate to on my terms. Universities have thousands of students but they're sub-divided into a million communities. And your nephew will find one or three or twelve communities at Harvard where he'll feel welcome and at home, even though he's nowhere near home.

It might be his residence hall. It might be the people in his major. It might be working on the student paper, or running for student office, or joining the beer drinking team, or intramural sports or any one of about a million student clubs. It might just be the group that always has coffee at the same time and in the same place every day at 3.

The sooner he finds these people (and he shouldn't be afraid to try a few on for size and move on if they're not as homey as he'd like) the sooner he'll feel comfortable.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:57 PM on August 11, 2006

Mm. See, I think Wolfe used those labels to help pin down the characters, but I don't think those labels defined the characters. I think the characters are a lot more realistic than the labels might seem. And here's my honest opinion, which I even told a reporter who interviewed me about my thoughts on the novel: I think many, many college students today make caricatures of themselves in much the same way Wolfe's characters do. Perhaps Wolfe watched "Animal House" or similar movies, and perhaps he didn't—but regardless of whether he did, college students do. My freshman floor was full of people trying to define themselves by their actions and by their killer 'tude—a number rushed fraternities/sororities, others got involved with their chosen activity and/or pre-med classes to the point of not sleeping, others only hung out with the artsy indie music DJs. I came to college expecting that people would be open-minded and interested in branching out from their "home" group—but I really didn't see a lot of evidence to support that hope/expectation.

I don't think your "90 percent" statistic has any basis in fact.
posted by limeonaire at 6:59 PM on August 11, 2006

Get/read Privilege - its one person's experience, and it definitely is someone who was in the aristocracy to begin with, so his experience will not be your nephew's, but this is (presumably, as I don't attend) a facet of Harvard culture.

Scary/depressing book. Depending on your nephew, you may or may not recommend it to him. Read it first.
posted by devilsbrigade at 6:59 PM on August 11, 2006

To add and address what Pontius Pilate mentioned - when I say communities, I specifically don't mean stereotypical breakdowns of classes and cultures who don't intersect. I just mean groups - people who hang around with each other because they have something in common. Meeting and networking with lots of people is good, but finding a good solid group of people he can surround himself with for the long haul is also good.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:01 PM on August 11, 2006

(And I do apologize if it seems like I'm trolling or attempting to derail the thread. I'm not. I just feel very strongly about my experiences in college, and I'd like the poster to know that a lot of the stereotypical "yeah, everyone gets along in college it's great I love it" messages they're hearing right now are just that—stereotypical. It's easy to say those things, but not so easy to look deeper into what's really going on in college social networks. Not that I'm accusing anyone of deliberately taking the easy way out when it comes to describing the "college experience," but that I doubt others' ability to accurately evaluate the sociological nuances of that experience.)
posted by limeonaire at 7:06 PM on August 11, 2006

Seconding MattD. I graduated from Harvard less than ten years ago. I always describe it to people as, "Take all the nerdiest, most socially awkward kids in your high school, and imagine 4,000 of them all cooped up together, and that's the freshman class."

The sex, drugs, and drinking were the exception freshman year. I ended up in a dorm room with five virgins (including me); we thought the one woman who had had sex was a little odd. Kids smoked pot, but it was unusual enough that we gossipped about them. There were certainly amazingly rich kids, and amazingly talented kids, but many of them were just as nerdy as the rest of us the first year.

The polish/arrogance/whatever that Ivy League students often have is not, for the most part, anywhere in existence during the first year at Harvard. It's 4,000 nerdy 18-year-olds who spend most of their time on campus, in the libraries. It was seen as extremely weird when I went into Boston -- no one does it (which I think is bad, but my point is that it's not like everyone's off in the "big city" every weekend). 98% of the students live on campus all four years. There are no real fraternaties or sororities; I never felt any pressure to drink, let alone do drugs or have sex, at any of the parties, and I didn't even start drinking until my junior year.

I eventually met students from other Boston-area schools, and my experience at Harvard, especially freshman year, was just simply not as raucous as theirs. You can find those parties and those groups if you want, but again, that behavior is the exception freshman year.

The one big piece of advice for him, though: Get involved in extracurriculars. That's where you'll find your friends and make your impact. That's where the social scene is, and where you'll do any networking, and where you'll have any fun. That's Harvard's social life.
posted by occhiblu at 7:11 PM on August 11, 2006

limeonaire - as I stated above, everything I've said is on the basis of my experience. Per my experience, the 90 percent figure is factually correct. Per your experience, it may not be.

Different experiences and schools will obviously yield different results; instead of arguing that my statement is invalid (which is difficult to do, since it's not a factual one but rather a statement of experience), it would probably be more hepful to the poster for you to explain why, in your experience, the 90 percent statistic has no basis in fact.

Here's my basic problem with your assessment. I am not debating that college students drink, smoke, do drugs, sleep around, etc. - no duh. Many of them, if not most, do these things with varying degrees of regularity. Many more engage in a lot of studying, student government, study groups, etc. However, what Wolfe says - and what you seem to agree with - is that they define themselves by these actions to the exclusion of everything else, and that is just not the case (again, at least not at my school). It's a bit insulting, I think, to say that this very limited set of actions and inclinations is sufficient to accurately describe a person. In this view, the groups are mutually exclusive - if one plays sports, he cannot study and get good grades; if does not drink, he cannot go to trivia night at the local pub; if he drinks and does drugs, he cannot participate in student government, etc. Wolfe's world works like that. The real world doesn't, and that is precisely why his book is so flawed. It's a simplistic portrayal of a complicated environment that does not even begin to approach accuracy.
posted by Pontius Pilate at 7:16 PM on August 11, 2006

limeonaire, I was interested to read your comment, as I'm a current student at WashU...your experiences seem to match mine in a lot of ways, especially with regards to suddenly being surrounded by people of privilege.

That, in my opinion, is the most significant point of adjustment. Most teenagers are aware, if on an abstract level, of the reckless things that people do when they're young and suddenly have a lot of barriers removed. Most of them are well-equiped to find friends and acquaintances amidst the sea of people that they'll meet during their first few months at college. Going to a private, selective university, however, will introduce them to a group of people for whom being "elite" is nothing new. College is a much smaller step up for those kids who went to private schools that had much of the same atmosphere, and your nephew will inevitably have to deal with people who are familiar with this environment and act as such.

I have no doubt that he'll find wonderful friends that he'll connect with, but the culture can make you feel like an outcast quickly and easily if it's not something you're used to. Emphasize to him that no matter how much some people swagger, college really is, for the most part, a meritocracy, and that his worth has nothing to do with extraneous information such as where or how he grew up.

On the other hand, country boys and girls are all the rage for any urban/suburbanite who's interested in something outside of what they're used to...tell him to milk that for all it's worth. ;) (I'm really only half kidding.)
posted by invitapriore at 7:21 PM on August 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

Seconding occhiblu. I also graduated from Harvard. There are about 1600 people in each class. Thats huge and the diversity is amazing: rich kids, poor kids, future investment bankers alongside future writers and artists and future physicists. Geeks and (a few) socialites. Arrogant jerks who talk big alongside kind and humble geniuses.

Stereotyping Harvard is such a lazy thing to do but I suppose its natural. Much of the same diversity is there as in everyday life except perhaps the average kid is a bit more bright and ambitious. There's no reason to let your classmates scare you unless thats how you've decided you should feel about it.

Books like that "Privilege" book describe a tiny tiny segment. As such they are worthless. The quality of education also varies strongly by subject so its also of little value to say Harvard is good or Harvard is bad. For me personally, it was Fantastic! As one of only a few astrophysics majors i got to hang out in the corridors of the CfA and chat with the likes of Margaret Geller and Geoff Marcy. They were too busy to do their own observing runs so they sent me, a lowly undergrad, off to Arizona and Chile to observe in their place! Some guy named Cliff Stoll was doing IT support for us and we all ignored him.

In retrospect it was an incredible experience and, although i did make many friends, my only regret is that I did not make even more. This is my advice to your nephew. He'll find his niche quickly enough - what he shouldnt do is simply stay within that niche but rather go out and explore.
posted by vacapinta at 7:30 PM on August 11, 2006

(Yes, sorry, 1600 not 4000. I was an English major, and it shows.)
posted by occhiblu at 7:32 PM on August 11, 2006

The students at Harvard are about 1/3 Jewish. It is likely there are no Jews in his small farm town, so I hope there is no major culture shock (e.g. for some Jews, asking how much your possessions cost you is a way of showing polite interest while some other cultures find such questions offensive).

Another culture he won't know is the boarding school set - they will seem so sophisticated because they have already had years of social experience living away from home.

And he should expect that many people there are better educated than he is. Not smarter, just that they went to really good schools and have a small leg up. e.g. if he is good in science, he may be intimidated by people in his classes who went to the Bronx HighSchool of Science.

Freshman year is the time to experience and try to accomodate these culture clashes. Some retreat may be necessary, but he shouldn't go into an isolated shell or seek a group of Catholic hayseeds to exclusively hang out with. He will learn the most from interacting with as diverse types as he can. I recall a saying:

"You spend Freshman year making friends. You spend the next 3 years deciding which ones to keep"

It is easier to make friends as a Freshman - if you can't as a Freshman then it will be extra hard the following years especially since you have no network to go through.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 7:40 PM on August 11, 2006 [2 favorites]

I grew up in a semi-isolated desert border town in far west Texas and went off to college at a top 20 school and I was not prepared for the culture shock. From the weather to the food to the fact that there were trees and grass everywhere was just a shock! Luckily the school set me up with a "big sister" who was a tuba player in the marching band so I was able to latch onto her for awhile which made the transition much easier.

I would tell your nephew to look at it like an adventure and keep an open mind. Now is the time for him to come into his own. It's an old cliche, but often the best education you get in college is outside the classroom. Tell him to try new things and become friends with different kinds of people.

One more thing, the weather, dear Jesus, the weather. I was not ready for that shit. That made me homesick real quick. Don't underestimate the effect of weeks upon weeks of cold crappy weather, especially when you've never dealt with it before.
posted by SoulOnIce at 7:42 PM on August 11, 2006

Having someone to call or write to (yourself, for instance) will help; I'd encourage his keeping a diary or sending e-mails to friends, and keeping in touch with what grounds him. Also, Harvard has mental health services for the many students who have trouble coping at one time or another; I'd encourage him to at least be aware of what they offer (he'll get info during orientation). I did okay there back in the 80s, but not without struggle (even from Austin it was a huge change). Ditto everyone who said to get out and meet others with similar interests; it can get very insular there, especially in winter...
posted by rleamon at 8:10 PM on August 11, 2006

I just left a position at Harvard's Widener Library, so I think I can speak fairly accurately about the culture of Harvard.

It's fact that most Harvard students do think rather highly of themselves. Just read the Crimson (Harvard's student-run newspaper) regularly and you'll see how often they refer to the fact that they're thought of as privileged or special, always with a well-rehearsed tone of self-effacement. And it's not just the students: the staff, too, suffer from an inflated sense of entitlement.

During my time there, I became friendly with the head of one of the College's big libraries, a woman who had recently transferred from another university (out of state) where she'd held a similar position. Here she was, a rather important figure on campus, yet she confided to me that she was having trouble finding her niche at Harvard. She felt that people were snobs, including her colleagues, and said that she was only sticking it out because she'd already sold her house back home.

Anyway, good luck to your nephew. Perhaps his experience will be different.
posted by Teevee's Bella at 8:46 PM on August 11, 2006

I haven't read it, but have heard many people rave about this book.
posted by lalex at 8:48 PM on August 11, 2006

It may not be all bad. I moved from a rural area/ Catholic school to the big city essentially unsupervised at the age of 15. It was awesome. Best time of my life in a lot of ways. I made tons of new friends, had a great social life, did all kinds of new stuff but never lost my head the way kids with a less sensible upbringing did.
posted by fshgrl at 9:29 PM on August 11, 2006

I grew up in an incredibly rural area and went to college in downtown Cleveland. Honestly, the biggest "culture shocks" were in the academics.
posted by dirigibleman at 9:36 PM on August 11, 2006

If he's not comfortable with the way his roommate(s) are acting, let them know directly using "I" messages.

My roommate for my first month freshman year was a cop's daughter who had a different guy in bed with her every night--and they had to go through my half of the room to get to hers. When I asked her not to have anyone in after 10 pm, she ignored it, but later she passed on scabies--which everyone thought was crabs ;-D.
posted by brujita at 10:43 PM on August 11, 2006

Some school-specific answers:

Unless he can claim membership in the 99% percentile of the 99% percentile he should avoid taking anything resembling an ambitious courseload in his first year -- it's really, really not within the reach of all but the preternaturally diligent few to do well in more than one of the classes for ambitious freshmen. He'll be better served with good grades in easy courses the first year than ok-ish grades in harder courses; (just be warned that this dynamic partially reverses with each successive year!).

Grade inflation is not rampant at Harvard when compared to most other schools, so doing well can be hard: the real classes are difficult; the core classes have hundreds of kids fitted on a curve, and thus can be competitive.

The culture gap to speak of is that for many goals one could bring to Harvard -- leaving with a career in consulting or I-banking lined up, leaving for medical or law school, leaving for graduate school, etc. -- you're going to have surprisingly large numbers of fellow freshmen already know the ropes (perhaps a grand total of 25%), so there's a 'sophistication gap' to be worried about. Most people are in the same boat but there's no real solution other than to ask questions relentlessly and take whatever good-sounding advice you're given.

With the above in mind, if he wants to excel in a particular academic field he'll have to set out for it pretty quickly.

There isn't going to be much of a culture gap to speak of other than between him and, say, the boarding school crowd, because the remaining subcultures only have minor differences. To the 1/3rd Jewish add another 1/5 Asian and perhaps 1/7th international (? on this, my sample is unrepresentative), which may also be something new, but neither is sufficiently different to warrant much worry.

I do recommend getting used to noise and congestion before arriving -- pretty much anywhere in the yard is going to be noisier than where he's coming from, and the lack of single bedrooms until junior-senior year is going to make things noisier + more congested even once he's off by the river or in the quad.

I also recommend getting used to being friendly with everyone, even if you hate them -- Harvard undergrad is a small school, everyone but a small minority live on campus, and you'll be living near the same small batch of people for three years (once you go into houses). Farm or small town life may be an advantage here, actually, but knowing how to keep your social life well-oiled is tremendously important.

And, finally, schmoozing is what Harvard's mostly about: the only irreplaceable part of the experience is the peers, and getting to network with them is too good an opportunity to throw away.

If it sets your own mind at ease I can inform you that Harvard is not State U (in fact, I believe a party by the same name got shut down as insensitive a few years back!) and even the wildest parties on campus would be embarassingly lame at a major state university...and most parties are not wild.

Minor hints:
* taking ec10 or justice gives almost 50% odds he'll have something to talk to the last 2 decades' alums about right off the bat; otherwise they're only lukewarm educational experiences
* if he is around for the summer he can obtain tremendous amounts of free furniture, etc, during the move-out weeks (usually late may and early june), because many seniors leave three years' stuff behind as they go off into the real world
* he can get, free of charge, a personal locker in the basement of cabot library (in the science center), which is a tremendously useful place to store books to study from and in a tremendously quiet place to study (cabot basement)
* if you have him covered under a health insurance plan keep him on iit as long as possible; UHS is in general adequate for minor things but understaffed (and, sometimes, of dubious competence) for anything beyond routine illnesses, so having the option too go see an off campus doctor can be valuable
posted by little miss manners at 11:01 PM on August 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

what he shouldnt do is simply stay within that niche but rather go out and explore

very good advice.
posted by caddis at 11:17 PM on August 11, 2006

He should try to take a lighter course load during the second semester. Spring will have sprung, and he should be outside smelling the flowers, at least occasionally.
posted by lukemeister at 1:27 AM on August 12, 2006

>He won't be the smartest person in the room any more. That can be...difficult.

But then again, he may not be far off. And that could be a let-down for him too.

I came to a pretty good university from a rural farming community and was a little surprised, not to say disappointed, that all my classmates weren't towering geniuses.

People don't all get into university because they're smart; people may be insanely studious and hard-working but pretty dim on a practical, street-smart level.

I came to realise that some of the farm labourers and factory workers I'd left behind were just as smart as some of the people at university.

Their paths in life were determined more by parental/social/cultural expectations than any raw Darwinian measurement of intelligence.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 1:29 AM on August 12, 2006

My undergrad was one of those places where everyone's supposed to be a 24-karat genius, which meant that everyone spent tons and tons of time trying to look the part. People dropped references, nodded sagely, gaped when you admitted to not knowing what they were talking about, but it was largely b.s. -- an absolute blizzard of empty signifiers and gobbledygook. I figured this out and started calling people on it about six months in, which did nothing for my popularity but did earn me peace-of-mind. And by the time I was a sophomore it had utterly ceased to bother me. I was comfortable surfing the sea of blather and even blathed a bit myself.

The other freshmen your nephew meets meets will be brilliant-- no doubt about it. But make sure he knows that he's going to encounter a lot of bluster and puffery, and that he shouldn't take the cognitive dick-measuring seriously. If anyone asks what his I.Q. is, he should say it's 85, and if anyone asks him how old he was when he learned to read, he should say "sixteen."
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:53 AM on August 12, 2006 [1 favorite]

A few more things -- making it through the Crimson comp is fairly easy, and once you've made it through you've got a tremendous networking opportunity ahead of you that requires very little additional work (unless he wants to get more involved).

Many of the remaining publications are of little value except as resume builders, and even then they're only useful in that regard if you have specific objections in mind.

Someone upthread talked about kids being affecting smartness via pretention -- that's not at all the typical Harvard style (at least freshman year), and those who do go in for that are pretty scorned, actually.

More thn anything it's a school with a huge number of opportunities, but also a very cold place where no one will tell you much unless you ask -- so you have to ask questions all the time and get to know everyone you can, or else you'll miss out on a lot. I can't emphasize this point enough -- if you're not a squeaky wheel you won't get greased.
posted by little miss manners at 7:07 AM on August 12, 2006

I remember being in the lunch line one day at my Christian fundamentalist high school in the spring of '98, after we'd all announced our college choices. The lunch lady said, "I hear you decided on Harvard. I'll be praying for you." I was a little taken aback. I assumed she was questioning my ability to keep up with the academics, so I muttered, "Yeah, I'll be studying hard." Seeing I'd missed her point, she leaned forward and stage-whispered, "It's very liberal there."

And it was, thank God for me. Having been a black, gay Catholic in a white, super-straight Southern Baptist world, being truly accepted was a hugely welcome change. And I did feel accepted, and I think my freshman roommates did also. One of us was a tall, drawling, charming white jock from a tiny rural Midwestern town, majoring in computer science. Another was a pudgy, misanthropic Jewish fellow who'd graduated from NY's esteemed Stuyvesant, and insisted it was easy to get into Harvard if you knew the formula. Our third was a skinny Native American guy who had a way with the ladies and an awful propensity for binge drinking. And then there was me, the virginal, Catholic, teetotalling choirboy.

I liked them all. We got along well, and I don't think any of us had trouble finding meal partners at Annenberg, the freshman dining hall.

I was one of the students relying on some heavy-duty financial aid, but I very rarely felt self-conscious about that. Until I'd known some of my classmates for years, I didn't realize how rich their families were. It would have been a huge mistake to make any assumptions about my classmates from their financial status, so I'm glad I was mostly oblivious. Some of the richest students I knew were also some of the hardest-working, most resourceful, most giving folks I knew, putting in serious hours at the Phillips Brooks House service organization. And of course, many of the poorest students I knew did the same. (And there were students rich and poor who were lazy, disdainful, etc.) During my time there, some students' families lost most of what they had in the dot-com bust. And their friends and classmates helped them through it.

Politically, the campus is quite liberal, and conservatives will find their ideas challenged day in and day out. That can be exhausting. But there's a thriving conservative subculture that gives as good as it gets, in publications like the Salient.

Any inflated egos lingering from the high school years seemed mostly to fizzle by mid-sophomore year. This was most pronounced during prefrosh weekend, when all the students who were still kings and queens of their high schools invaded the campus. Next to these kids, you could see the effect a daily dose of humble pie had taken on the college students. All that said, calling Harvard students self-important is probably an apt generalization.

I didn't drink till junior year, nor did I feel any pressure to. Your nephew's mileage may vary on this point, but having traded notes with my siblings and friends, I don't think Harvard is worse than any other school. The drug scene is pretty significant, but again, I felt no pressure to participate.

In four years, no one ever asked what my SAT score or IQ was, and I never heard anyone else asked these questions.

Everything little miss manners said is spot-on, and I totally second the comment urging your nephew to participate in extracurriculars. They really are the lifeblood of the college.

And tell him as much as he may resent getting up before dawn on the morning of graduation, Rev. Gomes' sermon is entirely worth it.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 11:47 PM on August 12, 2006