Stumbling Through the Yard

I’ve always been hyper-aware of the fact that I go to Harvard while rushing through the Yard. In the Square, on the streets, I’m anonymous, perhaps a passerby or tourist, but inside the gates, that all changes. I am a Harvard student. Moving past tour groups ogling outside of Widener, I sometimes can’t help but step out of my student role for just a minute and think about things from the outside. It’s tough to remember, in the thick of classes and activities and awkward social encounters, the esteem with which so many people hold our school.

Yet this awe the world has for this University used to only serve as a reminder of the shortcomings of the education here. So often in my four years at Harvard, I’ve walked through the Yard, absorbing the crisp sights and sounds of this academic playground with more than my fair share of cynicism and disdain. Bitter, acerbic, jaded, I would sweep my eyes from brick to branch disappointed and disaffected with certain elements of my education. “This is the best school in the world?” I would think after a Shakespeare section with a foreign teaching fellow who had hardly mastered conversational English, let alone the ability to express the rich and intricate arrangements of the great playwright. I’ve shivered in snow, rain, and even the occasional burst of sunshine after sitting through mind-numbing physics labs where menial and tedious tasks such as tracing lines on electrode-conducting paper have doubled as deepening my understanding of electromagnetism. Not quite. I’ve even laughed dry cackles of skepticism after emerging from hour-long lectures of incomprehensible professorial conjecture, knowing all the while that the test would be a painless regurgitation of colorful catch-phrases.

But my qualms cut deeper than mere classroom complaints. Staring at the spire of Memorial Church, marching to the rhythmic peals of its hourly bells, I would contemplate my travels beyond these steely gates: my post-Harvard future. In between rushed hellos and smiles of recognition, I would recall my loftier aspirations, the now-shriveling kernels of my boundless childhood dreams. Unsatisfying classes and inaccessible advising cast shadows on my brightest desires.

Yet in the past few months, the questions and doubts that so often accompanied me on my wintry walks have thawed. Nostalgia is setting in, and I’m beginning to answer the question of what Harvard has done for me. In my last few moments as Harvard student, I’m once again becoming sensitive to our school’s clout. Friends and classmates who commiserated with me about the shortcomings of the curriculum are landing precisely where they want. The future for all of us is still bright.

I can’t put my finger on the moment my impressions became more positive, but on the brink of graduation, my spirit for this school is stronger than ever. It’s not the facts my classes briefly stored in my short-term memory that have sparked the change. I’m sure I’ve forgotten much of the information I learned in lectures past. Though Harvard’s reputation rests on its academic prowess, courses here have not always been as fulfilling as I would have hoped.

My growing satisfaction with my experience is based on the lasting image of the school that I am now constructing out of my most poignant and meaningful memories here. It’s the conversations I’ve had, the network I’ll continue to spin that is so remarkable. With each academic or social frustration has come realizations and rationalizations that have helped me to grow and learn in a way that physics labs and response papers never could.

As I wander out into the real world, I can’t help but think that countless undergrads will have shared my reflective stumblings through the Yard, contemplating their disappointments and pleasures in the shadows of our famous brick. Somewhere in that classic landscape, our thoughts and experiences overlap. It’s the impression I’ve now made of Harvard, more than any property intrinsic to this institution that I’m beginning to cherish. It’s not the exact image of the tourists, the media, my professors, or even other students, but it’s an image nonetheless, folded into a series of alternate, but equally meaningful impressions. And it’s one that I’ve grown to love.



Wendy D. Widman ’06, who was a Crimson executive editor in 2005, is a chemistry concentrator in Mather House.