Studying Abroad at Harvard?
Katarina Runesson has spent half of her undergraduate career thousands of miles away from her college at the University of Eähjö in Sweden. The globe-trotting political science student has studied in Seoul, South Korea; Managua, Nicaragua; and, most recently, Hamburg, Germany. This fall, she’s capping off her world tour here in Cambridge as part of Harvard’s little-known Visiting Undergraduate Student (VUS) program.
“It was kind of a joke to apply to Harvard,” she says. “I was joking about how I would frame the rejection letter. I don’t know anyone who’s been to Harvard—it’s a legend.” Each year, the VUS admissions office receives around 90 applications from around the world—and from U.S. colleges, including next-door neighbors Wellesley and MIT—from students who want to spend a semester or year at Harvard, according to E. Marlene Vergara Rotner, director of the VUS program. Fifty-four candidates applied to study at Harvard this fall, and 17 were admitted and came. Out of those students, 10—a larger proportion than most years, according to VUS staff assistant Pia Setti—are international students.
“We want our students to be welcome at other institutions, and it’s a form of reciprocity,” Rotner says of the VUS program. And the international applicant pool in particular is growing, Setti says. This fall she has gotten more requests for applications from Germany, the Netherlands and Italy than in previous years.
Visiting students—whether from Wellesley or Singapore—come to Harvard for a maximum of two terms. The visiting student program is not unique to Harvard; Yale and Columbia both offer options for study to non-degree candidates. But within Harvard itself, it offers a unique academic and social experience: no Core or concentration requirements, an academic program that usually features extensive cross-registration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and a semester or year of immersion in Harvard’s social idiosyncrasies. In fact, since most international visiting students have either studied or lived in the U.S. for extended periods of time, their study-abroad experience is less about a cultural introduction to the U.S. and more about a specifically Harvard experience.
Nick Martin, for instance, who studies at the University of Gallen in Switzerland, attended The German School in Potomac, Md., a K-12 school taught mostly in German and intended for the children of diplomats and military personnel stationed in the D.C. area. Coming to Harvard has been easy, he says. “I feel like a lot of other undergraduates,” Martin says. “I can go to a sports bar and understand the concept of baseball. I probably won’t take away as much culturally but it’s much easier for me to fit in and hit the ground running.”
Most visiting students come to Harvard specifically for the academic programs that either complement their area of study—economics is an overwhelmingly popular concentration—or allow them to experience the American liberal arts education that contrasts sharply with the pre-professional focus of many European and Asian universities. Momsen, who is taking mostly economics classes and is cross-registered at HBS and KSG, says he came to Harvard for an educational experience his university in Germany doesn’t offer.
“I was very disappointed in my first year in Germany,” he says. “I didn’t find it such a great place to explore academic interests. It was just memorizing a lot of stuff for the exam, and I wanted to see if there was a different way of doing it.” Many visiting students take the opportunity to look beyond their main area of study. “The reason I came here is to scope out the subjects I can’t take at home,” says Martin, who had few electives at the University of St. Gallen outside of his specialized field in finance but is now taking advantage of Harvard offerings like Sociology 150, “The Social Underpinnings of Taste,” and History of Art and Architecture 11, “Landmarks of World Architecture.” (“No, I won’t get credit for Landmarks,” he says.)
Carlos Gonzalez Barragan, who studies international finance at the Universidad de Monterrey, first came to Harvard for the spring 2002 semester to take economics classes but petitioned to extend his study for the fall. “I found all these cool, interesting classes in other departments that I wouldn’t find at home,” Barragan says. “The nice thing about being a visiting student is that you don’t have Harvard requirements. You can take whatever you want as long as it’s not lotteried, and as long as you can get credit at your home university.”
Aside from academics, becoming integrated into the College via the Houses is a major part of the visiting students’ study-abroad experience—especially because most of the universities abroad are non-residential.
“My university is just a bunch of buildings where classes are taught,” Martin says. “Here, you live with a hundred other students. You have your own microcosm that is very estranged from the real world.” Due to the College’s housing crunch, however, none of the visiting students are guaranteed on-campus housing, according to Rotner.
Visitors are lucky if they find out before arriving in Cambridge whether or not they will be able to move into campus dorms. “We are able to eventually house every student who is seeking residential housing on campus,” says Julia G. Fox, coordinator of the Transfer and Visiting Student Program. “We don’t always know when they arrive where spaces might be, so they usually stay with a friend or find a temporary situation.” Fourteen visiting students—including nine international students—live in Harvard housing this fall, though some moved in as late as October.
“It’s hard not knowing where you are going to live a month before you come,” says Barragan, who first came to Harvard in February 2002. He says he never considered renting an apartment off-campus. “It’d be more expensive and it wouldn’t be the same.” Instead, 20 days before he was due to arrive he found out he’d been Quadded—not that he knew what to make of it. “I didn’t have all the prejudices about the Quad,” he said. “They just dumped me there.”
Some international visiting students—especially those who have submitted late applications for housing—arrive at the beginning of the semester without knowing whether Harvard will have a spot for them. Rooms become available, according to College Housing Officer David Woodberry, when full-time undergraduates with guaranteed housing decide to leave at the beginning of the semester. Even though the College gained 85 extra beds this year after reducing faculty housing in DeWolfe by two floors, Woodberry says, many visiting students had to stay with relatives or friends or at a hostel when they first arrived in September.
Martin, who admits he applied for housing late—“I was writing my thesis and wasn’t really worried about Harvard housing,” he says—moved into his room in DeWolfe on Oct. 1. Until then, he crashed on a couch in the Claverly suite of a high school friend, Philip M. Hodges ’04. “It was good because I had someone to show me around, but obviously I was kind of a nuisance. I was known in Claverly as the kid who sleeps on Phil’s couch,” he says.
Visiting students arrive at Harvard with the enviable enthusiasm of first-years, impressed even by sections and dining hall fare. “I’m so impressed with the food,” gushes Ranussen. “I’m still not tired of it. You’re talking to someone who lived on noodles for four years, and here I am in this beautiful dining hall—I don’t have to do any grocery shopping, or cooking, or cleaning up after the cooking.” Harvard’s breadth of extracurricular activities, while surprising to most students who are used to their home universities’ strictly academic focus, also offers the chance to participate in IM sports or any number of campus clubs. But most immediately fall into the same traps as regular Harvard students—and that includes rarely venturing beyond Cambridge.
“I’ve done the cardinal sin and been stuck in Harvard Square the past few weeks,” says Yimin Lam, a junior from Singapore who attends college in Ontario, Canada. “But right now, Harvard Square is enough for me…you know how they say Harvard Square is the center of the universe? It seems to be true. I’ve seen Robert McNamara here and Ted Sorensen, and in the previous weeks there was Barbara Bush. Everybody converges here.”
Not surprisingly, one of the most common impressions of Harvard’s social life is that an inordinate amount of time is devoted to classwork. “People seem to study a lot here,” Momsen says. “I was surprised to see people studying in the dining halls—that’s not what students do, at least not at the German university I go to.” And students like Barragan who say the workload at their home university is greater note that Harvard students spend an extraordinary amount of time pursuing extracurriculars, which leaves little time for an active social life.
“Harvard is not a party school at all, I noticed that the first week I got here,” he says. “But the upside is you get to meet people personally.” Many international students also say that life at Harvard is noticeably affected by the high drinking age—and by undergraduates’ self-imposed hectic schedules. “It’s different here because of the drinking age,” Runessonsays. “In Sweden everyone at a university is of drinking age, but here it’s difficult if you want to coordinate something with all your friends if they’re not 21.” Despite these constraints, Ranussen says she has enjoyed hitting spots like John Harvard’s in the Square.
“It’s nice, it’s close to Adams so it’s easy to meet there for a beer. I’m still flattered that they keep carding me—I’m 24!” she says. “The day they stop carding me I’ll have to go out and get anti-wrinkle cream.” Martin says he’s also noticed that students here are often hard-pressed to find time to go out casually. “In Europe, no matter what you’re doing, people find a way to get together at night to grab a beer. I miss that kind of daily, casual interaction,” he says. “People will generally tend to casually end up in a café in the afternoon or go out to a pub at night, not to get drunk but to cap off the day.”
Other visiting students say that while they’re here, they are more than ready to adopt a hectic schedule in order to fully benefit from their limited time at Harvard. “I think visiting students might actually be in a more compelling position to take advantage of what Harvard has to offer, exactly because we’re only here for a year as compared to the normal, four-year degree-seeking folks,” Lam says. “My friends have commented on how busy I seem to be, always going for some meeting or talk here and there. I think the normal student usually tells himself that, ‘Oh, I have four more years I this place, I’ll just go next time.’”