When I came to Harvard, I was debating between math and science, and I guess I thought in the end I wanted something that could connect to the real world. I liked puzzle-solving and connections.
After ‘The White Shadow’ was over, I did some more work, but then I wound up taking a year off to teach at Harvard. It afforded me the chance to have a variegated career – a very interesting one.
Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire – Hopper, Sargent, Twain – and postcards from beloved bookstores where I’ve spent all my time and money – Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.
I don’t want it to be something that becomes a cage, where to be a successful Black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. I want someone to eventually disrupt the model I have established.
Today I still feel like the most illiterate person ever to have roamed the campuses of Wellesley and Harvard, where I later transferred. I remain intimidated by all the books I haven’t read, but over the years I’ve come to realize that being a student is a lifelong adventure.
The innovators’ spirit of America still exists. However, there is a narrative in America which goes like – you must go to MIT to get your calling card. Or you go to Harvard and then you drop out and then you’ve made it.
If I went to any other college, I probably would have been pre-med. But I felt like I had freedom to do what I wanted to do at Harvard.
We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something.
The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.
I entered Harvard Medical School knowing nothing of research.
Harvard was very important to me and has been very important to so many people for so many years.
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we’ve made it.
I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn’t believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.
Facebook wasn’t built out of a Harvard dorm window.
I’m going to do some consulting for nonprofits and arts agencies. These are areas I’m interested in that didn’t come directly out of Harvard, but certainly I started looking at things in a different manner.
As someone who attended six different public schools across America, went to Harvard, and subsequently became a tutor in Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side, I’ve witnessed firsthand the differences in learning styles between public school educations and private.
But after the time there I’d had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn’t last very long.
I don’t think anybody could understand what its like to be an athlete at Harvard University.
When you think about Boston, Harvard and M.I.T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park.
I went to an all-girls pre school where everyone went off to Harvard or Yale, and I had zero interest in doing so. I think they thought I was on drugs. There was a neighboring all-boys school, so we’d get together and do dumb things. It was your typical Catholic-American upbringing.
Harvard is the home of American ideas.
I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
Social gaming is not something Zuckerberg could have imagined back when he was creating Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. The change began in May 2007, when Facebook announced it would let outside developers create applications that run on top of Facebook.
Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.
I went to Harvard College, grew up in Boston, and went to high school in Boston.
When I address admitted students each spring, I ask them to consider two questions: Why would Harvard be the right place for the person I am? Why would it be the right place for the person that I want to become? These questions, in my mind, get at the heart of any admissions process.
The actions of the University in my case make it abundantly clear that the Administration’s rhetoric about Harvard’s desire to attract and retain the most distinguished women in the world is empty.
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
In law school, we studied the famous book ‘Getting to Yes,’ co-written by the head of the Harvard Law School Negotiation Project.
That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.
My father is a poet. He’s a literary giant of this country – writes in Hindi – and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
I want to continue to strengthen Harvard’s fabulous collections in old printed material, but at the same time, I want to help Harvard move into the world of digitized information.
During my first round of law school applications, I didn’t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford – the mystical ‘top three’ schools. I didn’t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn’t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed.
You think Bill Gates would have dropped out of Harvard and toiled away creating Microsoft if he thought the government was going to take most of the company? Or Steve Jobs – drop out of Stanford to create Apple?
There’s a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate.
Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist.
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.
If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.
Harvard produces leaders. People with Harvard degrees go on to become administrators in high-level positions in state educational departments and in public schools around the country.
I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, ‘You can like Mozart and ice hockey…’ – and then I used to say ‘golf,’ but Tiger took over golf! – ‘and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.’
I won’t say there aren’t any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know.
I learned a lesson I couldn’t get from Harvard. I’m not no media darling. I’m not the golden boy; not that I ever was.
I’ve been called worse than a Harvard kid.
I came home from school one day, and there was a phone call for me. And I picked up the phone. They said, ‘This is the Harvard Admissions Department. We’d like to let you know that you’re accepted in the freshman class.’ And I said, ‘Come on, who is this really?’
I’d say Harvard graduates leave here with a sense of the possible and the limit – and a sense that there are no limits to what humans can do and that you can always be pushing, whatever limit you think might be there.
In the United States we have the great Harvard Business School, but America is the country with the greatest debt in the world.
I’ve played at the Comedy Studio. I never did as an undergrad, but I have in recent years, whenever I’ve gone back to anything at Harvard, I’ve tried to go there and do some sets.
I could’ve gone to Harvard twice, the money I lost on cars.
I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard – very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.
