HGSE Admissions Blog

Coming in as a graduate student, I had the impression that student organizations should not be one of my priorities. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much they have enriched my time at Harvard.

The only organization I’m formally involved with is HIVE, the Harvard Innovation and Ventures in Education. It has brought together some of our most entrepreneurially-inclined peers for all kinds of networking and pitching events. I will personally be leading our Silicon Valley Trek next spring. I heard about this trek a year ago and since then, had secretly wished to be the one to lead it. I’m spending some of my time these days speaking with alums of this trek to ponder over how best to execute the current iteration.

But the beauty of student organizations is that you don’t need to be formally involved to benefit. Two proactive students from HGSE came together to found the Harvard Emerging Technologies Organization. I enjoy dropping in on their sessions that have brought in great speakers on everything from blockchain technology to artificial intelligence. Several of my cohort-mates are really into yoga and I joined them one early morning to stretch and free my mind on the banks of the beautiful Charles river. Here are some of my favorite events over the last few months:

• Going apple-picking with the Harvard Office of Student Affairs was a great family activity that really exposed me to food and experiences that are quintessentially New England
• HGSE had the most incredible Halloween party complete with trick-or-treating, a magician and a Harry Potter stall. The wealth of kid-friendly activities at HGSE really appeals to me.
• I often find myself at the Harvard Innovation Labs for workshops and to network with entrepreneurs. There was a wonderful talk with the COO of Lyft as a guest speaker.
• A few months ago, I read ‘Smart People Should Build Things’ by Andrew Yang. A few weeks ago, I was facing him at Harvard Law School and learning how he was a 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate! I had read about David Sengeh as a student in ‘Creating Innovators’, a book I use in my teaching. At MIT, I heard him talk about being appointed Chief Innovation Officer of Sierra Leone!
•  If I had to pick my favorite experience over this period, I would pick watching ‘Salam’, a documentary about Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate. This event at MIT was so grand, it drew several hundred Pakistanis from all over the region and led to a very progressive discussion on the status of minorities in Pakistan.

There’s just always so much going on between student organizations, speakers and impromptu activities that my Excel sheet to plan my schedule is constantly in a frenzy. My cohort-mates and I spend much of our time exchanging information on the best events to attend across the area. In fact, some of the gems I’ve found are actually in the undergraduate Harvard College. I’d always heard Harvard College took student organizations very seriously so I attended their activity fair and was blown away by the wealth of clubs and opportunities. I attended a session driven by the undergraduate Islamic society and found the discussion on marginalized Muslim communities incredibly eye-opening and informative. Just a few days ago, I met some undergraduate students from Dev (a Harvard College group) at a demo at the business school. I learned that they were running an agency similar to the one I manage in Pakistan. We had so much knowledge to exchange and I’ve had a chance to informally mentor students there in a way that is incredibly personally rewarding.

During orientation, they told us to balance our schedule by only taking four classes and letting Harvard be our fifth class. I totally concur: unless you’re spending a chunk of your time running through lists of events and activities and making painstaking decisions on what to attend, you’re really missing out.

Written by Jazib Zahir. Photos provided by Jazib Zahir

My name is Jazib Zahir and I’m doing an Ed.M. in TIE. I studied undergraduate engineering at Stanford and have been working in my home country of Pakistan since then. I’ve been managing a software studio where we do app development and taught courses related to communication, entrepreneurship and education at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.