Harvard isn’t just calculus, it’s shared worldviews & shaping futures

Harvard isn’t just a ranking, world-class professors or the Latin mottos. Harvard, more than anything, is its people. At 1 am on countless nights during finals week, I was fuelled by the ramen my Taiwanese roommate made for us the way her mom had taught her back home. In a motion about the political turmoil in Bangladesh, my Bangladeshi debate partner cut through the theory with context none of us could Google.

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In our unit on the Cold War, my Bulgarian classmate didn’t need hypotheticals; she had grown up hearing what it felt like on the other side. These aren’t just different perspectives. They are worldviews and in my first year at Harvard, I have learnt just as much from these worldviews as I have from my professors.

There are two red-brick buildings that, for me, make up Harvard more than the others. The first, my dorm Pennypacker that had everything a first-year dorm needed: proximity, noise, a communal kitchen with more conversations than actual cooking and common room study breaks. Amritsar is obviously home, but 387 Harvard St will always be a close second. The second building, Annenberg, the first year dining hall, which truly is Hogwarts minus the owls. Over lunch, someone’s designing an algorithm to diagnose arrhythmias. Across the table, someone else is modelling fiscal policy in real time.

The learning within the classroom, too, is unmatched though. One day in Physical Sciences 11 we were talking about renewable energy; the next, I was racing a hydrogen fuel cell car down a hallway while someone timed laps on their phone. In Gov 40, we didn’t learn game theory by drawing matrices; we played squid games in lecture. And in Expos, we met inside the Harvard Art Museums, where I spent weeks writing about a 19th-century painting of Gobindgarh Fort while sitting a few feet from the original.

But what truly makes Harvard unique is the spirit of collaboration one can witness at Lamont Library sometime between the magical hours of midnight and sunrise. Every table’s covered in half-full coffees, shared Google Docs and whiteboards filling up with vector fields from mathematics.

At Harvard, the magic is in the little things. Bhangra practice at 10 pm on Tuesdays, watching Legally Blonde on the steps of Widener, cycling along the Charles on a spring afternoon and river run the night before Housing Day, where the entire freshman class decided, with complete sincerity, that their futures depended on a house assignment. Screaming “Go Crimson” while braving the rain at the Harvard-Yale Game and representing Harvard at WUDC in Panama which meant debating all day and hunting down the best empanadas by night.

And then there are the moments that are uniquely, unmistakably Harvard. From being inspired by Steven Levitksy’s How Democracies Die in high school to discussing the outcome of India’s elections with him in office hours. Talking to Bill Gates at Annenberg. Crossing paths in Harvard Yard with world leaders on the way to class.

The best part about Harvard isn’t getting in. It’s being here, among the kind of people who change how you see the world and are willing to be changed by the way you see it, too. And nothing can change that!