I went to visit Harvard after already committing to attend for the pre-frosh weekend they hosted in the spring. I was staying with a girl who picked me up completely hung over. I fared better than her other pre-frosh who she was too hung over to pick up earlier. This poor pre-frosh was left standing in from of the John Harvard waiting for her until out of sympathy my host’s roommate fetched her.
Now, I expected drinking, but this girl brewed beer in her closet!! She had her own setup right there that she proudly showed off. The cops had busted her room the night before, so all her bottles were shove hastily in the closet with her brewing apparatus.
She wanted to take me to lunch in the dining hall, but recalling that she had lost both her own and her best friends ID, she realized this was an impossibility. But refusing to make a pre-frosh pay for her first meal at Harvard, she asked to see my schedule of events (which she subsequently forbid me to use for the rest of the weekend). She studied it for awhile, and then told me to follow her.
So we showed up at the Taiwanese Society meeting. Neither she, nor I, are even remotely Tawainese, but she marched up confidently, professed that she was very interested in Taiwanese culture, and chatted comfortably with the members and she deftly collected food. We made a quick exit, and went from club meeting to club meeting. We capped off our afternoon by ending up at the Black Student Association barbeque, she, still mingling naturally, not feeling the bit out of place as she helped herself to fried chicken and watermelon slices.
That night, I met up with some other pre frosh, and so did not go out with her. However, at about 3 in the morning, she bursts into the room, a few pre-frosh in tow, who then proceeded to throw up everywhere. Needless to say I had a few qualms about the place I had signed away four years of my life to.
So here I am, at Harvard. Though my time here has been nothing like my pore-frosh experience, I sometimes still wonder. Was it the right choice? Was it right to commit to a school that I had never visited, and not excruciatingly search? I really can’t tell you. But what I do know is that no matter what the food in the dining hall is like, what course they offer, what professor they have, whether you go on their tour 10 times, you will never know whether the school is right for you or not.
Happiness at a school is determined by so many things that the applications process cannot quantify. To be concise, there is no way to know whether you will like a school or not until you go there. That sounds kind of bleak, that college is just a crapshoot, and you get lucky and have a good time there or not. But I think that it is promising. It means that you are not dependent on circumstance, but that you can create your happiness anywhere you go. I thought when I got into Harvard that my happiness was set. However I learned that I have to make the most out of where I am, whether Harvard or anywhere else.
