An Enlightening Weekend

STEP right up, Mom and Dad. If your child is in the Class of 1991, then this weekend is the perfect opportunity to discover where your fortune is going. The invitation letter you received in January promised an "informative, provocative" and "enjoyable" weekend. Read on, and you might be able to add "revealing."

Consider this weekend a long-awaited reply to your lament of several years ago, before you sent your budding venture capitalists, gene splicers and leftfielders to Harvard. "I only wish I could go with you," you cried.

Now here's your chance.

Time is short, though; one day is already gone. To fully absorb college life in the remaining time, you'll need some guidance. If you follow it diligently, you'll understand how Junior has been living since he or she stuffed a suitcase and a duffel bag two Septembers ago.

Call it the 24-hour Crimson Undergraduate Experience. If at times it seems like boot camp, don't despair: We're here for four years.

OF course, The Experience really started yesterday morning. Hopefully, you didn't begin by mistakenly proposing a 7 a.m. breakfast to your Ivied offpsring. Inviting a Harvard student to anything at the crack of dawn is akin to requesting a special order of duck a l'orange at the Harvard Union. It's just not done.

If you haven't done so yet, adjust immediately to College Standard Time, where all engagements are pushed back two hours and an 8 o'clock section meets after dinner, not after breakfast.

Hard to believe? Look around the Square at 7 a.m. any day--even the sidewalk is still asleep. If Harvard were an army barracks, reveille would be at 10 a.m.

But today you're in luck; it's the weekend. Do as the Harvard student and sleep until 11 a.m. Of course, class starts at 10:45 a.m., so you'll have to be rather quick in the shower.

On your way out the door, you'll need to choose a lecture from among the several offered. For the exceptionally astute parents, this decision is the perfect opportunity to display your undergraduate finesse. Consider your choices carefully, and don't forget that your son or daughter picks not from three, but from hundreds. How to decide? It's simple--choose the lecture which seems most relaxed, most enjoyable, and least mentally taxing.

As your offspring would advise, "go for the gut."

After the lecture, you'll find yourself in a house dining hall for your complementary lunch. Don't shy away from institutional food; it usually doesn't bite back. And whatever you do, don't shirk your culinary duty by taking your son or daughter to a fancy restaraunt in the Square. This is the surest way to maintain a blissful oblivion concerning the squalor of college eating. Your children are what they eat, and as a parent, you have a right to know what they're becoming.

The afternoon should pass uneventfully if you follow one injunction: No trips to the Square for insignia clothing. That's why Orientation Week was invented. After two years of prominently wearing your Harvard sweatshirt, hat and mittens (and not just in winter), everyone back home is well aware that Junior attends Harvard.

After dinner, it's time to find a place to stay. Sadly enough, the Crimson Undergraduate Experience does not include room service, feather pillows or wake-up calls. Find a place, if you can, where the bathrooms are cleaned once every other week, where the only food delivered to your room is from Dial-a-Pizza, and where a game of checkers can be heard through the walls.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't go to sleep before the television networks do. Going to bed early is, as the Administrative Board might put it, "behavior unbecoming of a Harvard student."

Alas, the weekend will soon come to a close. With luck, you were able to step unhesitantly into your childrens's lives and live--if for only a brief while--the Undergraduate Experience. But of course, since you're reading The Crimson, you're already halfway there.

Adam L. Berger '91 has been living the Undergraduate Experience for more than two years. He's beginning to get used to the food.