Message from the Dean

Dear Members of the Class of 2013:

Welcome back and happy new term!

I want to share with you three separate conversations I had several years ago.

In the first, a then freshman reported the delight he’d experienced in staying after class to ask questions of his professor. This was not something he was accustomed to doing at Harvard, and he was, by his admission, nervous. The teacher apparently provided helpful answers, but then the conversation took off in unanticipated directions, and the two of them talked for an hour about the professional choices made over time by the teacher after he’d stumbled quite by chance on the field in which he now has an appointment. According to this freshman, it was “a fascinating hour…I don’t know why I’d felt any apprehension raising my initial questions.”

In the second conversation, a then sophomore remarked: “I sure would like to be starting Harvard now and to have the extra term (fall of sophomore year) to explore possible concentrations.” While she was beginning to feel more confident about her academic commitments, she recalled making a hasty decision in her first spring and missing out on an opportunity or two the next fall as a result.

In the third conversation, a graduate of the College, hearing me describe the array of advising options now available to freshmen and the extended period for declaring a concentration, asked if we were reminding new students of the luxury of being enrolled in a college within a university. For him, learning occurred all over Cambridge and Boston. In fact, in a two-week period in the fall of 1999, he said he’d heard scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall speak, had gone to lectures by John Major, ex-Prime Minister and member of the House of Lords, and Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, and had begun to think much more about writing when Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, discussed his journey from public school teacher to author. It was in moments like these he apparently began to discover his real passions. Audience participation led to directed, independent reading, which in turn led to summer work and a cherished term-time course or two “I never would have dreamt of taking."

My hope for you this spring is that you reach out not only to your academic adviser, proctor, and peer fellow but also to the teaching staff, that you be patient about charting your ultimate course here, and that, with creativity and curiosity, you move your exploration to all parts of the University…to those not-for-credit opportunities that have the potential to open doors and point to new pursuits.

Good luck, and keep in mind our abiding interest and eagerness to help.

Sincerely,
Tom Dingman
Dean of Freshmen