Life at the heart of Harvard

Harvard retained its place as the world's number one university in the latest world rankings. But what's it like to study there? And what are their students like? It's the most exciting, stimulating, life-changing place, writes ROSITA BOLAND, who spent a year as a student there

TOMORROW IS the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s election. On his inauguration day – January 20th earlier this year – I watched the ceremony of Harvard’s current most famous alumnus in Langdell North, a lecture theatre in Harvard Law School, where Obama once took classes.

In between looking at America’s new president on the screen, I glanced at his class graduation photograph, which had been blown up and stuck on the wall. The buzz on campus, from which several faculty members had just been appointed to high-profile posts in Washington, was almost physical. On that celebratory day, as on so many others during my year at Harvard, I found myself marvelling that I was there.

It all began back in February 2008, when I was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The greatest gift of the fellowship is access.

It enabled me to attend any class on campus, both at undergraduate level and at the graduate schools – and at MIT, should I have had any extra time (I didn’t, apart from a few visits to Media Lab). I arrived in Cambridge in August 2008, met the 28 other journalists on the fellowship, got orientated, and started the glorious, but near overwhelming process of choosing classes from catalogues as thick as phonebooks.

As a features writer whose interests are esoteric and wide-ranging, I was unfortunately interested in everything, but I only had one year, not the 30 I would have needed to do everything I wanted. However, I still wanted to experience a little of as much as I could. Thus my simple, unscientific strategy was to research flagship classes in the graduate schools, take a couple of those, and then take whatever I was intrigued by in the undergrad school.

At the Business School – a surreal experience merely to walk through its luxurious, entitled and moneyed campus – I took Capitalism and Democracy with an 80-year old professor who sternly reminded his class that several of the school’s former students were responsible for the current US financial meltdown.

I also read case studies and sat in as a guest on a couple of Michael Porter’s superb masterclasses on the Strategy of Competitiveness, itself the most competitive class to get into on campus. At the Law School, I took an intensive full-time three-week workshop in Negotiation, which was the single outstanding experience of my year.

At the Kennedy School of Government, I took two key classes, one of them on Leadership. How, I marvelled early on, does someone even begin to teach leadership to a class of 120 highly opinionated and ambitious people representing 53 countries and their disparate cultures?

Ronald Heifetz has taught this class for 25 years at Harvard, and it was only towards the end of this uniquely challenging, provocative, often confrontational semester (students sometimes rebelled), that it finally started to make sense to me. The other astonishing class I took there was on Effective Implementation, which was about managing your goals and ideas.

At undergrad level, I took Steven Pinker’s Introduction to Psychology; critic James Wood’s utterly original teaching of Post-War Modern Fiction; a narrative non-fiction seminar; and a fantastic History of Documentary class, which resembled a mini film-festival – it ran from 4pm to 10pm once a week, with a one-hour break.

I sat in on several other classes at random, including Michael Sandel’s Justice and Moral Reasoning, which has just gone online.

During all this, although I was constantly on the look-out, I only once came across another Irish student: a PhD student in the Business School, who’d lived in the US for 20 years. Why is this, I wondered? Why don’t we Irish think big when applying to university – after all, Harvard offers financial aid to undergraduates who are accepted and cannot afford the fees.

Apart from the opportunity to wander where I wanted, I valued the range of ages and backgrounds of the students I mixed with. At the undergrad school, everyone is 18ish to 22. At the Law School, the average age is 24. At the Business School, it’s 27. The Kennedy School’s diverse programmes has everyone from students aged 22 up to those in their 50s.

I spent a lot of time there, and most of my fellow students, who represented 92 countries – political spin doctors, judges, a former astronaut, heads of NGO’s, bankers on a career change, community workers, people wanting to run for public office, policy-makers, a native American Indian tribal leader, members of the military – were taking a one-year mid-career Master in Public Administration, where the average age was probably 40. We were frequently reminded by our professors that we had as much to learn from each other via our collective life experience, as we had from the classes we attended.

No matter what age a Harvard student, they all have one thing in common beyond their smartness – they are utterly confident. They have high expectations of themselves. They work incredibly hard.

The Harvard students I met don’t take the privilege of being there lightly: most wondered how they ever got there to begin with. There is something extremely powerful about spending time in a place where there are so many bright people and so much intellectual stimulation. It cannot but have an affect on you, as it did on me. I literally began to think differently; to think in a more analytical and rigorous way.

In addition to classes, we met twice a week at the Nieman Foundation for off-the-record talks by various well-known people, ranging from David Simon, creator of The Wire, to Nicholas Negroponte, who founded Media Lab at MIT and who created the One Laptop per Child project, to a controversial US general who had formerly run the Guantanamo Bay prison.

And there were speakers on campus every single day; Ban Ki-moon, General David Petraeus; David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager. Every day, I had to choose between about 20 things to do. It’s a university community like no other, so the joke goes: “There are two Nobel Laureates speaking today, which one do you go to?”

In between classes and exploring Cambridge, I tried to learn to skate at the Law School’s outdoor ice-rink, signed up to use the observatory on top of the Science Centre, did some mentoring at the Crimson, the student newspaper, and spent lots of time with my 28 fellow journalists, all of them inspirational people.

Among them, one who covers the drug war on the US-Mexican border had taken the fellowship because he had received one death threat too many; two had received Pulitzers for investigative journalism; and a fourth, from South Ossetia, who is now a political refugee in the US, had somehow survived the murder of her husband and the experience of being kidnapped and poisoned, an experience that has permanently undermined her health. I made friends for life within that group, and although we left Harvard in June, we’ve already had one mini-reunion and are planning our next.

It’s almost impossible to recount my time there without it sounding over the top, because frankly, everything about Harvard is extreme. Harvard is frequently (and currently) ranked the world’s top university; despite the recession, it still has a staggering endowment of billions of dollars; and it attracts brilliant professors who have the resources to teach amazing classes to future movers and shakers in every field. And it famously attracts the famous, whom you come across as a matter of course. Halfway though my History of Documentary class I realised that Rose, the articulate young woman who periodically sat behind me was Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, JFK’s grandaughter.

Harvard is unashamedly what it is, it doesn’t hide its many dazzling lights under any hedge; it focuses them right in your face and challenges you from the moment you arrive there. It’s the most exciting, stimulating, life-changing place I’ve ever been, and I loved every second.

• Rosita Boland is an Irish Times feature writer

Harvard Highs College Figures

$26 billion

• Harvard has the world's second-largest financial endowment of any non-profit organisation (behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), worth $26 billion as of September 2009 - a year ago, it was worth €33 billion.

29,112

• A record 29,112 students applied for undergraduate places this year. Seven per cent were accepted.

$48,868

• Cost of one year undergrad tuition, rooms and board $48,868 (€32,580) – Harvard undergrads live on campus for four years. The majority of undergrads receive financial aid.

6,500

• Number of undergraduates

12,500

• Number of student's in Harvard's graduate schools

1

• First Harvard class to go online – Michael Sandel's Justice and Moral Reasoning undergraduate class – justiceharvard.org
  
  

Harvard Roll Of Honour: Famous Students

American politics:

John Hancock, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama

International polictics:Canadian president Pierre Trudeau, Mexican President Felipe Calderón and current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

Authors:Ralph Waldo Emerson and William S. Burroughs.

Poets:T.S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings

Musicians:composer Leonard Bernstein, cellist Yo Yo Ma

Actors:Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Mira Sorvino, Tommy Lee Jones

Film directors:Darren Aronofsky, Nelson Antonio Denis, Mira Nair,Terrence Malick.

75 Nobel Prizewinners

The Nieman Fellowship

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard was established in 1937. It offers between 23 and 29 fully-funded fellowships a year to mid-career journalists; an opportunity to step back from deadlines and focus on study.

Half of those selected are American, and the other half from the rest of the world. To date, 1,300 journalists from 89 countries have been awarded one, including three from Ireland. Open to print, broadcast, and digital media journalists.

nieman.harvard.edu