2 weeks in

Ok as of today I've been in Harvard for 2 weeks... A lot of things have happened, and a lot more little things that struck me, so I'll try to give a feel of the place; Note: disjointed entry ahead.

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My class seems like a nice bunch of people; I was just talking to one of them today and we were remarking on how there didn't seem to be any psychos in it, but who knows? One might go all Alfred Hitchcock on us a month into the course. But for now things are great; we're 15 strong, which is somewhat smaller than the 26 of last year. There's a former marine in our class (4 years, wow kinda like having an NSman around but more siong), a coursemate from Part II Biochem in Cambridge (together we represent the undergrad uni with the largest representation) and a good mix of male/female and USA/international. Everyone's friendly, though we observed that the girls in general were more chatty than the guys (mostly shy)? Hmm...

Our department is having a retreat in October, and every year the faculty of my department play a beach volleyball game with the incoming class, as part of the 'bonding' that is supposed to take place in all retreats. Apparently they're REALLY into the game, and take it VERY seriously... they beat the incoming students every year (after all, they have every year to practice, whereas most ppl come in not having played volleyball for decades...and we've barely lived through two). We've been told by our seniors that the faculty tend to have loose intepretations of rules... referees, who are often graduate students, are outranked by worked up professors. Yesterday was our first practice session; we're eating sand for sure.

The university knows its graduate students well; every event they want graduate students to attend is shamelessly advertised with free food. With the past 2 weeks of orientation, most of us have forgotten what paying for food feels like. For example in the first week of September, my department orientation started everyday at 10am with breakfast, followed by lunch at 12pm, dinner at 6pm and often another pizza and beer event squeezed somewhere in between (the pizza boxes during one event would have reached two storeys high). Considering that they also gave us free laptops (I'm typing this on my new Dell, suck on that MIT students =P ) we've been very happy and content; kinda like the cows they feed up before they're lead to the slaughter. Classes and labs start next Monday...

We've had our opening ceremony in Sanders Hall, complete with speech from the interim president of Harvard Unversity and the Dean of the Graduate school of Arts and Sciences. The speeches were ok; I guess I expected something more inspiring. I had passed by the undergraduate opening ceremony a few days earlier, held in the open yard, and that stopped me in my tracks. A choir's singing wafting through the sunny autumn yard, followed by an awesome speech on international relations and Harvard's place as a mover not observer of current and future events... Considering that graduate students are going to be here for 5 years or more, it'll have definitely been nice to have a more uplifting start to our time here.

But we did get a lot of free food.

Harvard's architecture, I think would impress anyone who's not been to Oxbridge. Coming from Cambridge (UK) however, I just keep comparing most of the buildings here to Robinson college... red brick buildings, lacking any of the medieval architecture typical of the older Oxbridge colleges. The place just doesn't strike you as forcefully as Cambridge did, in the sense of finding yourself somewhere totally unimaginable and fantastic. So for friends planning to visit from Cambridge, don't expect too much =P

And I've already met a few who I've not seen in ages: Jean, Shen Han and Herman are here for attachments or exchange programs... apparently I just missed a few others =\

I've spent half my time trying to sort through the admin here; registering for courses, signing up for lab rotations, applying for a credit card, social security number etc. The other half is spent watching the Colbert Report on youtube (hilarious! Why can't we get news like this back home? Hmm well on 2nd thoughts I guess I know why)

Oh and it's great that now all those cool online tools apply to you once you're in the USA, things like typing an address in Google and having it automatically display the address on a map, local tv listings when you type a show into Yahoo! etc etc. Oh plus the fact that Harvard is mostly wireless, and more importantly that my laptop now holds 3 hours of charge (as compared to 25 mins on my old one), it's possible to just sit on the grass in Harvard Yard and chat online with friends.

Just one of the many things I need to remind myself to do NOW and not later. Cos later goes past too soon.

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Oh and in case no one knows yet...the hacker of the post below is "J"...seems like going to MIT really turns you into a computer geek overnight =P