Introspection
Chloe Gambol
The author, pictured as a child. She was diagnosed with childhood onset fluency disorder at age five, but can’t remember a time when she didn’t stutter.
On Display
By letting someone into my space, albeit virtually, I can share with them how I see the world.
David Andrade
David A. Andrade '24 was one of the 80 percent of students who remained enrolled during the 2020-2021 school year.
Olivia Tai 2
For Tai, taking gap semesters helped her answer some of the big questions, like "How can I self-actualize more? What is that thing I want to rally around? Do I have the capacity for depth?”
Olivia M. Tai
Olivia M. Tai '21-22 has taken two gap semesters — one pre-pandemic and one post-pandemic.
David Paffenholz
David M. Paffenholz ’22,who took the entire 2020-2021 school year off, spent his year interning for Snapchat — at first remotely from his home in Germany, and then in France with a friend, and then in Spain with his girlfriend.
Big Small Things
I love the job itself: the menial labor, the simplicity of the tasks, the smallness and apparent insignificance of my work.
For FGLI Students, the Complicated Calculus Behind Gapping
Taking time off is a hard decision to make, one that requires some deprogramming of the addiction to ladder-climbing that got us into Harvard in the first place — but for those who choose to take the leap, it’s an invaluable opportunity to reflect and reevaluate. But what about those who are never given the choice in the first place?
How Real is BeReal?
The first time one of my friends tried to sell me on BeReal, I balked. A mandatory photo of my face at an unpredictable time each day?
'Self-Care' in the Age of the Influencer
The idea of self-care has been co-opted by beauty corporations, “wellness” gurus, and social media influencers to the point where it now resembles self-indulgence.
Bachelor Sports Fan
The author will be the first to criticize the Bachelor franchise, which she's been watching for seven years. But how different is being a Bachelor fan from being an avid sports fan, really?
Growth and Decay
In a time when I felt I had nothing, not even a sense of who I was, I remembered that the earth gives me — gives us — so many gifts that I don’t have to work to earn or prove myself worthy of.
Kaitlyn Endpaper 4
A waterfall on Saratoga Creek, which runs through the author's hometown — her favorite place to slow down and decompress.
Kaitlyn Endpaper 2
Sunlight illuminates the trees on the author's favorite hiking trail in Villa Montalvo.
At Lê's Restaurant, a Taste of Belonging
Without looking at the menu, I order my usual gỏi cuốn (spring rolls), bún thịt nướng chả giò (grilled meat vermicelli), cá kho tộ (caramelized catfish in a clay pot), and canh chua (sweet and sour soup). Yes, even though I usually come to Lê’s by myself, I always order a feast.
On Finstas and Fractured Selves
My New Year’s resolution was to try my best to stop taking everything so damn seriously: do more, think less, lower the stakes. I wanted to do whatever possible to get out of my own head — to reconnect with the humor and voice I felt like I had lost, to move through and inside of my life instead of adjacent to it.
Bad Plant Mom
Plenty of people kill their plants, but I shouldn’t be one of them. Plants motivate much of my art and writing; I’m taking a plant biology course and researching forests for my thesis. There’s an embarrassing dissonance between how much I care about plants and how little I manage to take care of them.
How Not to Cook
If I kept hauling home a bag of miscellaneous produce every week, if I kept laboring over Moroccan baked fish and spiced chickpea stew, then maybe I was growing. Maybe I was clawing back control.
The Endless Cycle of Nostalgia
On the first day of freshman year, I printed out and hung up an Andy Bernard quote from “The Office” that read: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”