Mary Ierulli

Mary L. Ierulli, who will be a high school senior next fall in Peoria, Ill., hadn't really decided what she would do this summer when she got a letter from the Harvard Summer School asking her to consider coming here in June.

"I was very thrilled that Harvard wrote to me," she said yesterday. Ierulli had been thinking of coming out east to college, and the Summer School seemed like a good place for a trial run.

Now, she said, she's sure. "I love it here; if I could come here I would. But it all depends on the Admissions Office." Ierulli said she thinks her growing enthusiasm for Harvard is echoed by most of the high school students who have come here for the summer. "I only know one person who doesn't want to come here, and that's only because she's from Chicago and is a little bit homesick," she said.

Ierulli's two courses are rather different from each other: one is on the 19th century English novel, while the other is on genocide in history. She said she decided to enroll in the literature course because she is very interested in the English novel. The genocide course--well, she wondered at first why people would take a genocide course, and doesn't really offer an explanation for her own initial interest in it. But she said she finds it very interesting, and very important: it deals with something she believes people should know about to avoid repetitions.

Ierulli has gotten to know the people who live in her entry, and spends the time when she's not reading for her courses doing things like going to the movies with them. "Of course, there's always reading to do, though," she added wryly.

"I'm very comfortable here," she said. "They say people out east are snobs, but I don't find it that way."