Transcription and editing by April Sperry

Commanding an audience of over 700 students per semester, Economics 10 is undoubtedly the largest class on Harvard’s campus. With a best-selling Economics textbook and a two-year stint as President George W. Bush’s Chairman of the Economic Advisers under his belt, Professor N. Gregory Mankiw is one of the most influential and well-known economists of our day.

But how many students actually know Professor Mankiw? In case you’re too intimidated to attend his office hours, The Voice took the liberty of sitting down with the man and the legend, himself, to ask him a few questions. Because, you know, no one wants to be that kid who raises his/her hand during lecture in Sanders Theater.

How has the teaching experience been for you?

I love teaching at Harvard in particular. It’s a great school with interesting and motivated students. It’s a very intellectual environment, so not only do I teach great students, but I have really smart colleagues to learn from. I usually take classes myself, either in the economics department or another department, so I’ll always be a student. Being a professor is kind of like a continuation of that, but you don’t pay tuition. They actually pay you a salary. It’s a wonderful lifestyle.

What classes have you taken in the past?

Two years ago, I took Stephen Pinker’s course on the human mind. I had never taken a psychology course in my life. I realized that having gotten through college was in fact a mistake and when I heard that Stephen Pinker was teaching an introductory psychology course here, I said, “this is perfect.” I had read some of his stuff and thought it was terrific, so I sat in on the lectures and I learned a lot.

You also worked in the Bush Administration. What is the difference between working there and working here?

It was wonderful for me to take a two-year break from Harvard. I’ve been at Harvard for a long time, and it’s nice to have a change of pace once in a while. So I went down and worked for George Bush from 2003 to 2005. It’s a very different environment, obviously, working in the White House and working in academia.

For one, it’s much more stressful. There’s always the media watching everything that the White House does. You have much more control over your own time in academia; the nice thing about being an academic is that you have a lot of autonomy. You teach classes when you want to teach them; you do the research you want to do; you accept the student invitations you want to accept; you write the articles you want to write. There’s a lot of freedom being a Harvard professor, whereas working for the President is a full-time job. You’re working for a boss in a way that you don’t really when you’re a professor, and you’re constantly furthering his agenda.

For me, the most exciting thing about the two years was how much I learned. The nature of being a professor is that you like learning new stuff. Working in the White House, you get to see how it works in the process, but you’re also forced to think about economic issues that wouldn’t have crossed your desk in a normal academic setting.

Have you recently or do you plan to teach a smaller class?

Last year and the year before, I taught a freshman seminar. I didn’t have time this year, but next year I’ll increase my teaching load, and I would be delighted to teach a freshman seminar again.

The economics department has gotten a lot of criticisms for the lack of student-faculty interaction. Do you think it’s fair?

To some degree, I think it is fair, actually. I think the problem is, essentially, that you have a very high student-faculty ratio. I don’t know the exact numbers, but our student-faculty ratio is roughly twice the university average. There are really only two ways to reduce the student-faculty ratio, and that’s either sending students away, which we don’t like, or hiring more faculty, which is our first choice, and we can’t do that unless the Dean uses his authority to hire more.

Why do you think that so many students at Harvard are interested in economics?

I think that economics is a wonderful combination of things. On the one hand, it’s a new field, something that you haven’t really studied in high school, so it has a novelty factor. It’s analytic, so if you have an analytic frame of mind, it appeals to you. It’s about the world and social phenomena, so it’s very practical, and it’s a pretty good preparation for lots of different careers, whether it’s business, or law, or even medicine now with health policy. So it’s a very good starting point for many different career paths, as well as being intellectually exciting.

Do you identify as a conservative?

I consider myself to be a classical liberal, like John Stuart Mill. Some people call that conservative, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to describe it.

There was a post on HarvardFML that said you liked Bad Romance by Lady Gaga and that you played it in class. Is that true?

I think I mentioned it on the blog. I do like Lady Gaga and I have some of her songs on my iPod.

A few one-liner questions for Professor Mankiw

Princeton or Harvard?

Princeton.

CS50 or Literature and Sexuality?

CS50.

Worst thing about Harvard?

The traffic during rush hour coming in from Wellesley. No, I take it back. The worst thing about Harvard is the weather in the winter.

Best thing about Harvard

Students.

The Voice or The Crimson?

Well, The Voice, of course.

Your role model?

Milton Friedman.

Describe the typical economics student in 3 words

Hard-working, earnest, and curious.

Photo by Heidi Lim.

By Michelle Nguyen

The Voice takes you through the ten male prototypes you’ll encounter at Harvard.

1. The One Who’s a Virgin

You can’t swing a purse in Harvard Yard without hitting a virgin Harvard male. He comes in all shapes and sizes (pun fully intended). Even some very eligible-seeming bros belong here –they probably spent high school hitting the stacks instead of the sack– although they tend to migrate out of this zone really fast during their freshman year. He has the potential of becoming a great boyfriend, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to get over the initial awkwardness. *Accidentally* hooking up with a virgin always makes for great Sunday brunch stories though, so there’s the silver lining.

2. The One Who Will Stay a Virgin

Another classic Harvard category. It’s astounding how a place so small can hold so many socially awkward and sexually frustrated young people. It’s very easy to spot this one. He seems awkward. He walks awkward. He is awkward. He probably also lives in Lamont and packs his stuff in a carry-on during Finals season. He might also have red hair. Bless his heart, though. He could invent a social networking site one day and all the arrogant bitches of Harvard who ignored him (you included) can cry themselves to sleep at night.

3. The One Who Would Be King

You know, the kid who harbored presidential ambitions when everyone else was dreaming about chocolate and cartoon characters and stuff. He is most likely a tall, well-dressed Government major from the south who frequents the Institute of Politics as often as the rest of us mortals do Berryline. You might be charmed by his composure and drive, but like anything else in his life, the ladies that he dates must all serve the Grand Plan. I’m Asian and foreign (Communist, even), so I never even tried. But if you want to, just google “Jackie Kennedy” for a good role model. Or Marilyn Monroe. It’s all a matter of preference.

4. The One Who Would Die Trying To Be King

Prior to Harvard, he friends all 1,600+ classmates on Facebook. During Freshman Week, he hands out business cards that say “49th President of the United States” in gold embossed letterings. He’ll run for the Undergraduate Council. He’ll probably also spearhead a stupid anti-something campaign to get his name in a Crimson headline. He’s not to be confused with boys from the first category who are usually reticent about their ambitions and (thus) might actually make it happen. By junior year, he becomes an easy target for cruel dining hall jokes. But who are we kidding? We all go to Harvard and about a third of your classmates hold some kind of presidential-type ambition.

5. The One Who’s Gay

“If he’s too good to be true, he probably isn’t” goes the saying in Sex and the City. At Harvard, my saying is that “every guy is gay until proven otherwise.” The Harvard homosexual guy is well-dressed, charming, good-looking, smart and gets you. He’s all that a girl can ever hope for in someone to produce double legacy children with. Except that it’s physiologically impossible. Unless you drug him or something. But I personally am all about consent. Also beware of the one who’s in the closet. There are quite a few of them, even in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. Do you really want to be the one he dates before coming out as gay?

6. The One Who Knows Everything

He got into Harvard because he’s a genius. He has a perfect GPA and standardized test scores. He makes Phi Beta Kappa. He’ll graduate with high honors. You should make friends with him –it’s actually nice to know someone who knows things, but I’m not sure about pursuing a romantic relationship with him. Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I’ve always thought of the encyclopedia type as asexual. There’s also that guy who actually is asexual. He’s more interested in making friends with his lab RAs and experimenting on mice than getting to know you.

7. The One Who Lives in His Sweatpants

(Unless it’s punch season, then he lives in a suit and bow tie and reverse baseball cap.)

With 41 Division I varsity teams, Harvard has quite a number of athletes. He’s easy to spot since he’s so big and walks funny. It’s very likely that he majors in Economics or Sociology. It’s also very likely that he’s attractive, so much so he doesn’t seem to belong on the Harvard campus.

The bro spends his freshman year with fellow bros on the team, taking the same classes, eating together, and crashing the same sketchy dorm parties. Then, he becomes a sophomore, joins a final club and mingles with bros from other teams. It’s all very testosterone-heavy and homoerotic, really. Especially when you think about some water sport teams where the boys spend most of their time together in very little clothing. Hmmmm.

It’s easy to wiggle your way into the pants of the bro (so long as you’re not clothed and he’s not sober). It’s much harder – if impossible – to wiggle your way into his heart. The competition is stiff and often scantily-clad, what with sorority girls and other girls and even more girls from the Greater Boston Area (see: The Harvard Hoochies). He probably doesn’t know how to date girls anyway.

8. The One Who Loves Himself

I’m not talking about the act of loving himself –which is perfectly fine, unless you’re a Dorm Crew worker cleaning his bathroom. A member of this species is the apple of his parents’ eyes. He stares at his reflection on the back of his iPhone and flashes a megawatt smile at himself. He spends hours every day wondering why he’s so damn perfect. He plucks his eyebrows. He gets what he wants. He forgets to grow up. He might be into you, but ultimately, he always loves himself more.

(Image: The Winklevi, courtesy of Google Images)

9. The One Who’s Nice and Finishes Last

He’s your friend. Close friend, even. He walks you to class and listens as you whine over a failed weekend and a failed LS1a exam and a failed (almost) romance with X athlete on the Y team in the Z final club. He doesn’t try to take advantage of you when you’re drunk and vulnerable. He probably has a crush on you. You probably know it, too. But for some reasons you always go for the Harvard jerks who will break your heart. Which brings us to…

10. The One Who Breaks Your Heart

He’s perfect. He’s tall, handsome, athletic, charming, and obviously intelligent. He probably has a rich-sounding last name (like something with a hyphen or a Harvard Residential House in it). He sweeps you off your feet, then rips your heart out and drops it like a piece of rock. He also gets smoother and douchier as he gets older. But no matter, you find his arrogance and douchiness attractive anyway. He’s hot property, and he knows it. So he is very committed to playing the field, at least until his love handles start to develop and his hair falls out. The protocol is never to get attached, but very few can manage this. (Much as we love to tell ourselves otherwise.)

10+1. The One Who’s Actually Perfect

There are about five of them, and they’re all in a relationship. When you do find one who’s single, you get so nervous that you fuck up your chances anyway. You then get to go back to ignoring the nice guy and chasing after the douche. Let’s face it, girl: You, too, go to Harvard and therefore have a thousand of issues and insecurities. Like 99.99% of these boys, you’re also a little nutty. There’s a reason romance (almost) doesn’t exist on this campus. But here’s to hoping, anyway. <3

Click here to purchase the “10 Guys” Calendar for 2012:

“10 Guys You’ll Meet at Harvard” Calendar

I started dating Ryan knowing that I would eventually leave him. For whom, or what, I knew not. It was my third year as a Vietnamese international student in Singapore, and already, I could feel myself clamoring for farther, greener pastures. I slapped an expiration date on the budding relationship out of both habit and necessity. Admittedly, I was being selfish, but at the tender age of seventeen, I was still in that vulnerable stage where I craved the assurance that someone could like me for who I was, and the thought of being alone in this foreign land scared me to tears. So I relied on this boy to give me the closeness that I wanted, even though I could never really reciprocate his feelings.

I finally summoned the courage to leave Ryan ten months into the relationship and three weeks shy of our high school graduation. “It’s not you, it’s me. You deserve someone who appreciates you better than I ever could,” I said, my voice muffled by guilt. It was a tired and mostly deceptive cliché people use to mask the disillusionments of a break-up. In this case though, it was true. My emotional unavailability was poisonous, and I couldn’t bear seeing it eat away at him. I had planned several versions of my future in my head, none of which included Ryan. You know that joyful moment in a relationship when he brought your roommate food because she was sick, and you realized that this might be the real deal? For me, it was less joyful and more frightful. This was starting to become real, and it was time to find the exit. Permanence was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had no idea where I would be a month from then, but I knew that I was about to leave the Lion City. He was but a fragment of a past I was ready to leave behind.

He couldn’t have been all that surprised. I had envisioned the breakup at the very onset of our relationship, musing then and again of a future in a foreign land, embracing the exotic and chasing wild geese. When I tried to break up with him, he just stared at me blankly. He probably thought that his kindness and devotion would make me change my mind, and that my flighty disposition was just a phase. “Where are you going?” he asked. “I don’t know, but I’m leaving this country.”

Perhaps in the deepest recesses of my mind, I did love Ryan. But I was always reluctant to fall into the embrace of all-consuming love. I was terrified by my attraction to him, and the fear only increased as he became more of a real person with each passing day, someone I actually liked. At some point, the fear of being emotionally invested and then having to deal with the inevitable breakup consumed the promise and possibility of being in love, and there was nowhere else to go but out.

I wanted to call my mother as soon as I left Ryan. The emotional burden was proving harder to withstand by myself than I had thought. But I would have had to explain to her the concept of casual dating, my peculiar propensity for “expiration dating,” and my aversion to attachment because I didn’t know how to commit to a place, much less a person. I decided to leave the soul-baring soliloquy to Taylor Swift instead.

Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that I ended up at Harvard, a place where people are so overcommitted that no one really commits. We are so busy scrambling to the top of our classes and pre-professional extracurricular activities that we neglect to realize how utterly alone we are most of the time. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we hide our deeply deflective, but destined for greatness selves behind a veil of accomplishments because it’s so much easier to write a seven-page analysis of a book we don’t actually know, than sustain a seven-minute conversation with a person we really hope to know. We are stumped by someone’s nervous flirtations because the protocol for reaction is not listed in our overpriced textbooks. The options are endless, but the directions are lacking. So we resign ourselves to programming a plethora of websites that attempt to make love happen and cross our fingers.

At Harvard, I quickly developed a habit of giving false information to members of the opposite sex. On Thursday night, I am a Wellesley freshman with a major in contemporary arts. Friday night, I hail from New York and my mother is half-German. None of this is true. I am 100% Vietnamese, and the closest encounter I’ve had with art involved scribbling my giant initials in pink ink across a wall in my room, which my mother swiftly repainted. I dally in the realm of easy hookups and contrived flirtations, where things like backgrounds, hopes and dreams don’t matter at all. I’d like to think that this is less because I value the anonymity of a hookup, and more because if I’m just a concoction of a self and not a reality, then I can’t hurt the other person and he can’t hurt me.

It sometimes strikes me in a flash of blind panic that I might be eternally gripped by the curse of loneliness and commitment phobia. “It’s okay,” someone who attended Harvard eons ago once told me. “Just focus on the academics, everything else will work itself out.” Maybe that’s true. For the time being, though, the concept of “life companion” brings to my mind an image of a Cavalier spaniel scrunching its nose and wagging its furry tail, and that makes me smile.

The popularity index of David J. Malan ’99, the lecturer of the hugely popular but also notoriously brutal Computer Science (CS) 50 course at Harvard College, skyrocketed after Harvard Thinks Big, a recent collaborative effort between the CEB, HUTV and the UC that assembled a team of 10 Harvard professors, each of who gave a 10-minute presentation on any topic that they are passionate about.

In that all-star lineup of captivating thinkers and speakers, Malan stood out with his energetic pitch for CS50, complete with an impassioned ripping of a phonebook to demonstrate binary search. He is the youngest speaker, with a statuesque figure and a sleek sense of style, and that definitely did not hurt.

Unsurprisingly, in the evening that shortly precedes Valentine’s Day, Malan emerged as the latest HarvardFML and ISawYouHarvard (ISYH) sensation, inspiring hordes of sexually frustrated posts that ranged from desperate pleas “Be my Valentine!” to sincere compliments of his attractiveness and charisma.

“The Guy Who Never Left”

Sitting in his office on the third floor of Maxwell Dworkin, Malan seems quintessentially “Harvard.” Seemingly plain and terse in his blue jeans and conservative blue sweater, Malan actually packs a boxful of pleasant surprises. Hailing from Connecticut, he spent his undergraduate years at Harvard, three of which in Mather House ­–“The best house!” he declares– went on to Harvard graduate schools for his Master and Doctorate in Computer Science, and is now lecturing in the College and the Extension School. He is, in his own words, “the guy who never left.”

“Almost,” he quickly appends, explaining that he left Harvard for three years, moving to Philadelphia for one of them for a startup, taught at Tufts for half a year, then continued to moonlight there for the summer.

“So I kind of left,” Malan says. “But I always came back.”

The Beginning

It is very hard not to be captivated by Malan. He has an interesting story. Originally a Government concentrator, he took CS50 during his second year at Harvard, and as they say, the rest is history. What started out as a whirlwind romance with an elective transformed over the years into a longstanding and committed relationship. It was love at the first p-set.

“It was the first time that, quite literally, homework was fun,” he says. “On the very last possible day, I changed from Pass/Fail to Graded status, and at the end of the semester, I re-declared my concentration as computer science.”

The event that sparked off Malan’s journey towards becoming a lecturer was, interestingly enough, his failed bid for the UC presidency in his junior year. You learn from your failures, and what Malan took away from this “miserable” lost was the realization that he needed to polish up his public speaking skills.

He joined the Harvard Computer Society (HCS), he said, with the intention of taking over their seminars program and the occasional classes that were offered to students on campus.

The HCS stint then led to a paid job as a Teaching Fellow at the Extension School, and finally the golden opportunity to lecture for the same course when its original lecturer unexpectedly stepped down. Malan, then a senior in his final semester of college, found himself lecturing for an audience of about 100 students, with his five or six friends as TFs.

“We all had a great time,” he reminisces.

He clearly did, because barely eight years later, Malan came full circle and took the lecture stand at the College, for the very same course that ignited his passion for computers in the first place.

It is the classic story of how a student arrives at Harvard with a preconceived notion of how his path at school and life will proceed, takes an unexpected turn, and never looks back. It is the story that you probably embody yourself, but amazes you all the same once you hear it directly from another.

Computers, Computers, Computers

Somehow, computers always find their way back into our conversation, leaving nary a tinge of doubt where Malan’s passion in life lies. He can talk about computers for hours, with a glint in his eyes as he savors the opportunity to engage in the one topic he loves the most.

I try to stealthily veer the conversation into more Voice-y territories, probing him about his social life and his experience at Harvard. Malan answers my inconsequential questions dutifully and thoughtfully, but I could tell he was dying to get back to speaking about programming and web applications.

During his time at the College, Malan was a User’s Assistance on campus and for three years, ran the Frosh IM program with his Mather roommate. It was during this period of time that he wrote one of the first programs for campus, which was to replace the piece of paper used at the time for registration with a website. That was when Malan taught himself how to make Website.

A typical day in his life now revolves around Harvard-specific application and coding projects like Shuttleboy, Harvard maps, Harvard tweets, Harvard news, etc., which are all hosted on CS50.net.

One gets the feeling that Malan treats and treasures these projects like a father would his kids–with much attention and pride. And in a way, they are his children. He excitedly broke the news to me that Shuttleboy –the application that allows users to access the shuttle schedule easily via text messages–received over 2,000 texts in the course of the past week.

When asked what he thinks a computer-less world would be like, he pauses before finally answering, “Both less stressful and less fun.”

What strikes me the most about Malan, besides his palpable love for the “geeky” branch of science, was that he evoked the rare sense of security that can only be found in someone so consumed in his passion that he remains oblivious in seeing his own allure.

“Dorky”, “boring”, and “very boring” are but some of the less-than-flattering terms he uses to describe his collegiate self at Harvard years ago.

Malan has a problem with CS50’s reputation as a “monster” course that undeniably prevents many students, including himself in his freshman year, from taking it. He called the concern valid but unfortunate.

“More than 70 percent of the class had never taken CS before, so its absolutely not the case that most students of the course had taken AP CS or were geeks in high school and knew everything there was to know about programming,” Malan clarifies. “It’s very much the opposite.”

“Finals Clubs or Fraternities?” I encourage Malan to answer one last question before walking out of his office, even though I already know the answer.

“Neither. That was never my scene. Though I was actually invited to dine at The Spee last night. I was finally cool enough to eat at a finals club.”

He finishes the sentence with a gentle smile that in many ways encapsulated perfectly who Malan is: kind, unpretentious, and almost unsettlingly inspiring.

First off, all of you fun-loving prefrosh can breathe a sigh of relief! The party scene does exist at Harvard, and it is a lot more vibrant than most people give it credit for. After all, we might go on to become the next Bill Gates or Nelson Mandela, but right now we are still just a bunch of college-aged kids living in proximity to one another. As the weekends roll around, many of us stow away our books and laptops, put on our best (and most stain-resistant) outfits and get ready to boogie the night away.

As the campus is rather spread out, from the banks of the Charles River all the way to Porter Square (yes we’re talking about the Radcliffe Quadrangle, colloquially known to many as “the effing Quad”), the parties can inevitably seem all over the place too. You generally have four destinations when it comes to partying: House dining halls, dorms, fraternities and finals clubs. The Voice will walk you through the maze that is Harvard party scene. Don’t worry, if you are sociable enough and acquaint yourself with the right folks, after a couple of months you will find yourself faced with the ultimate question: “Which one to go to?” and not “Wherefore are the parties?!?”

HoCo Parties

Organized by HoCo (House Committees), these official House parties, like Leverett’s 80s Dance, Winthop’s Jungle Boogie, and Adam’s Sweet and Nasty, take place conspicuously in dining halls of Harvard’s upperclassman houses. They are pretty well organized, attract large crowds and provide alcoholic drinks if you are of age. Also, they are open to all and are publicly advertised so you don’t have to investigate as to what exactly “there’s something going on in Eliot” means. The downside is that they also cost money, anywhere from five to seven bucks, and that means you really have to make a choice between burrito and boogie.

Of the house parties, the crème de la crème is without a doubt Currier House’s two-storied Halloween party, Heaven and Hell. The entire Fishbowl, the mammoth empty space just outside the dining hall, and the upper balcony are turned into dance floors, serving respectively as “Hell” and “Heaven.” It is also the only HoCo party that is completely free, which means you have to get there early or risk standing in line in the rain for half an hour only to be turned away because it is “at capacity.” Also, it was chilly and my makeup ran down my face. In retrospect, I should have considered dressing up as a vampire.

Fraternity Parties

Despite Harvard’s officially policy of not promoting Greek life and therefore not recognizing fraternities and sororities, Greek parties still have quite a presence on campus every weekend. The three frats – Sigma Chi, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) and Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) – throw parties almost every weekend. Of these, only Sigma Chi has a house on Massachusetts Avenue where their parties take place. SAE and AEPi settle for establishing their party turfs around Harvard’s upperclassman houses.

Frat parties are generally fun, relatively well organized, and endowed with a generous supply of “refreshments.” They can’t really compare to MIT frat parties, which run like butter, but they are also just right around the corner, and you don’t have to worry about the T acting out and closing down at 12:45am, leaving you stranded in a geek-dominated land.

Some organizations at Harvard, like the Crimson, the Advocate or the Lampoon, have their own landed headquarters that are also used to throw parties almost every weekend. The Crimson, especially, is notorious for having random parties during the week, inspiring some to call it a “wannabe finals club.” The catch about these parties is that you usually have to be on a guest list. You can either become a comper (prospective members of these organizations who are undergoing a training process), or you can make friends with current members and get them to put your name on the list. Remember, Harvard is all about having and establishing the right connections.

Dorm Parties

Dorm parties at Harvard are very welcoming to crashers, as long as it is not a private birthday party with a grand total of four guests. If you manage to find it, you will be let in. One of the best dorm parties I have ever gone to (in Eliot’s famous Cockpit) happened completely by chance. I went up the wrong entryway and found the right party. I happen to prefer dorm parties because they are usually of the right size. Dining hall parties can get overly crowded, and my 4’11” stature means that I get squashed easily by drunken and smelly kids. Not fun. You also stand a better chance of mingling and having meaningful conversations with the other people in the room, and more connections means more fun-loving friends and party invites in the future.

Harvard housing gets better as one moves up the seniority scale, and it can get really good once you’re about to leave. Seniors generally get single rooms, and some will have the privilege of residing in one of Harvard’s famed party suites. These are usually the biggest rooms in the house, with a spacious common room that’s conducive for party throwing. Occupants of these suites change every year, but the people who lobby for them during the housing lottery are well aware of the unstated responsibility that comes with owning a party suite: throwing party on a regular basis. The nature of the party might change, but the most important thing is that there will still be one. Let’s do a walkthrough of the best of Harvard’s party suites.

Quincy’s balcony suite: At first glance, New Quincy’s concrete architecture seems downright ugly. However, what this building lacks in red bricks and old elegance, it more than makes up for in its spacious rooms and gorgeous view from the glass windows. The sixth floor is where AEPi and random dorm parties happen, which means it’s always bustling with music and drunken partygoers every weekend, but the third floor is where the quality of the party suite prevails. With two large common rooms, a terrace, and a built-in bar, the Balcony suite is Quincy House’s prized possession and a gem in Harvard’s party scene.

Pforzheimer House’s Belltower: Home to a blocking group of twelve seniors, the Belltower is undoubtedly one of the most partilicious spaces on campus. If you find yourself wandering around campus on a weekend, not knowing where to go, hop on the shuttle and knock on the doors of Pfoho Moors 410. Chances are, you will find yourself surrounded by drunken upperclassmen dancing atop the room’s built-in bar and underneath a slanted glass window that shows the beautiful Quad sky. However, be prepared for less-than-friendly bouncers who will turn you away with the “we are at capacity” schtick. It helps to show as little clothes as possible for the girls, and for the boys, unless you know someone who lives there, you might want to look for other options.

Any room in Mather: Regardless of your opinion on Mather House’s architecture, this is irrefutably the party house of the River. Freshmen desperate for a party but are too lazy to trek to the Quad might consider going to the concrete house instead. There’s always something going on in multiple Mather’s suites, and you are always welcome. Mather suites allow for its occupants to have single bedrooms on the second floor, and a reasonably sized common room on the first floor, making any suite a potential “party suite.” If you take the elevator to the 18^th floor of Mather Tower, you will have a chance to enjoy the view of Cambridge and the night sky through a large glass window while boogying to the music.

Currier’s Ten-Man: The party house of the Quad, Currier has a ridiculous number of party rooms that after a while, I give up trying to remember their names. Some examples include the Gilbert Solarium, Tuchman Solarium, Gilbert Living Room, the Treehouse, and of course, the Ten-Man suite right off the main entrance. Any of these rooms holds parties regularly, but the Ten-Man deserves an honorable mention for its built-in bar and an elevator that opens right into the gigantic common room. The elevator, unfortunately, is only for its ten residents, but there is also a set of stairs for you to train those leg muscles. Do not, I repeat, do not try to jump down the steps while inebriated.

Also notable are Kirkland House’s Swamp, the seven-man suite on the second floor of Kirkland’s I-entryway with three large common rooms, Eliot House’s Cockpit (C53) and Ground Zero (B43), Winthrop House’s C-entryway Penthouse (C51) and Adam House’s A-47, which also doubles up as the “Heaven” part of the house’s annual Halloween party, Heaven and Hell.

Final Clubs

Eight male final clubs, which are generally understood to be the more elitist versions of fraternities, round up the social scene at Harvard. Unlike fraternities, these eight clubs, called the A.D., the Delphic, the Fly, the Fox, the Owl, the Porcellian, the Phoenix and the Spee, don’t have national affiliation. Unlike most other student organizations and groups on campus, they aren’t recognized by Harvard and are privately financed. These clubs own landed properties with a combined worth of tens of millions of dollars around Harvard Square, cluttered mostly on Mt. Auburn street.

Final club parties are like a giant mole on your backside that you suspect to be skin cancer. You get it checked out, and it turns out to be just a normal mole like any other mole on your body. The point is that they are overrated. At the beginning of the year, you will find yourself surrounded by groups of girls who are “going to the Spee tonight.” You will start to wonder if it is the be all and end all of everything “cool.” You will be faced with a debilitating fear that the bouncer might turn you away at the door. Then you will realize that as long as you are a freshman girl who looks like you are there to have fun, in whatever sense of the word, you will be let in. It is a bunch of guys standing around with a bunch of girls in a house with obnoxiously loud music in the background. Big whoop. The downside is that you generally have to compete with over eager girls from around the Greater Boston area, including Wellesley, Tufts, BC, BU, just to name a few, for a limited pool of guys. You also cannot bring those guy friends of yours, because they will not get in for physiological reasons. Take my advice and try to make one of your guys come dressed in impeccable drag costume and see what happens.

On special occasions like Valentine’s Day or the garden party season, final clubs do throw large, elaborate themed parties that are worth checking out. Be forewarned that these parties will feature a ridiculous gender imbalance. The final clubs scene has been overly dissected and discussed since time immemorial at Harvard. Here is my two cents: you should, and most of you girls probably will, go to it at least once at some point just to see what all the hoo-ha was about. But be prepared for what might happen once you are inside.

Last Bits of Advice

Despite popular belief, Harvardians do party, and we do go crazy. Cambridge laws stipulated that sales of alcohol be halted by 10:45pm, and there can be no parties after 2:00am. As a freshman, at least for the first couple of months, your choice will inevitably be limited. Some girls will final clubs hop. The privileged few with “connections” will skitter down Plympton street and dodge your “Where are you going?” question with a sheepish smile and a vague “Just a friend’s.” Most will bitterly fork out the five or seven dollars it takes to squeeze into a dining hall party. Others will chill with a dozen of their friends somewhere in a freshman dormitory, wondering where the booze is at and bemoaning the 21-year age limit. Freshman boys are at the bottom of the partying food chain, at least until you join a larger social organization, so always brace yourself for brutal rejections at the door.

Eventually though, the nights of wandering around JFK Street or sitting soberly on your behinds in a freshman common room, wishing that you were at a party will be a thing of the past, and you will learn to utilize all the amazing partying opportunities that Harvard has to offer. Go out there, make friends, and start having fun!