Surviving Harvard: 7 stories from freshman year

From his new book 'That Book About Harvard,' writer Eric Kester shares stories of his embarrassments and mishaps at America's most famous college.

2. Course selections

Part of Harvard University's campus Elise Amendola/AP

Kester says he was initially intimidated by the course offerings when he was supposed to choose classes, but soon went with a policy of seeking out classes whose course descriptions did not include "any words ... longer than four syllables." His final schedule was a class studying the history of gladiators, a course about fairy tales, a science class focusing on dinosaurs, and a class in the anthropology department about aliens. "On paper, my schedule of 'GLADIATORS–FAIRY TALES–DINOSAURS–ALIENS' looked strikingly similar to a list I had written as a five-year-old entitled 'MY FaVoRiTE ThINgs!!!!!,'" Kester wrote. "It wasn't exactly the type of rigorous curriculum you'd expect from The World's Greatest University."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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