Of everything I have written at the Independent, I am proudest of the longest and shortest pieces. The longest, a history of the Harvard Graduate Student Union, was probably the most “journalistic” piece I ever produced. The most “Indy” piece, though, was just five words, which I came up with during a late-night mid-pandemic brainstorming […]
By Thucydides Every Housing Day, the same controversies arise. We hate the quad. We are wrong to hate the quad. We want to block with athletes, singer-songwriters, linking groups, or pure strangers. Harvard’s housing lottery has become a stunning demonstration of the human urge to find patterns in randomness. With only a few slight changes, […]
Privacy is hard to come by on campus. The Dean of Students Office warns first-years that “Very few singles are available” in the Yard. In some houses, even seniors might have to share a bedroom. Outside of residential life, students share classes in lecture halls, meals in dining halls, and parties in the rarefied halls […]
High salaries after graduation, famous professors, and well-trodden paths to being a mover and shaker: the ingredients for a popular academic concentration are fairly obvious. As of December 2020, 483 students were concentrating in Economics, 400 in Computer Science (including joint concentrators), and 245 in Applied Mathematics. At the other end of the spectrum, some […]
The closing number of 52! A Statistics Cabaret concludes an hour of music charting the life story of statistics-lover Lotus. The musical follows Lotus from conception to the age of 52, including a job in quantitative trading, a PhD, and one insane night in Vegas along the way. A different actor portrays Lotus at every […]
Dr. Julia P. Kielstra, D.Phil., Oxon., has degrees in English Literature from Bryn Mawr and Oxford and years of experience evaluating student writing for Cambridge International Examinations. I showed her the best—or worst—love poetry Harvard students could produce. The following responses are more or less verbatim, and completely unscripted. (She also happens to be my […]
A year ago, Harvard students faced their first Christmas under COVID-19. At the time, vaccines were still a distant dream, Delta the variant du jour, and Harvard staunchly committed to remote instruction. COVID-19 had completely shaken up everything anyone thought was possible in a university setting. If you got the virus, you and your loved […]
“In a Presidential, high-turnout, election, you have 58,000 people vote in Cambridge. In a low-turnout gubernatorial election… you have 46,000 people vote, but in a municipal election, you have maybe 23,000 people.” That’s Burhan Azeem, MIT graduate and newly-elected member of Cambridge City Council. “The city council… might write off Harvard students, as people who […]
Point: Tech Ethics Are Needed Now More Than Ever By Ryan Golemme ’23 When I took CS50: Introduction to Computer Science in the fall of 2020, there was a tacked-on ethics lesson in the final week as a part of Harvard’s Embedded EthiCS program. Though it was merely two people flatly talking over Zoom, and […]
15% of Harvard undergraduates have been diagnosed with a mental health issue, according to a 2018 HUHS survey cited in the July 2020 Report of the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health. 11% were in treatment, and 46% (including over half of all women) had “concerns” about potential undiagnosed issues that they may have […]