Hogwarts, music festivals, airports – you never know where you’ll be when you find out you got into Harvard!
Anita Lee
Taiwan/Canada
Arts in Education
It was an early Saturday morning when I was about to rush off to work and take my students to an annual music festival in Japan. I was so excited about this big news but yet had to hold my emotion for the whole day until my students finished the performance. On the very same evening, my fiancé also received his dream offer from Stanford. It was definitely a day of mixed feelings knowing that we both going to our dream schools soon, but also it’ll be a long year of long-distance relationship!
Nadia Kashem
New York City / Incheon, South Korea
Teacher Education Program
I was at Hogwarts . . . . Let me explain. I’m originally from New York City, but prior to coming to HGSE, I had been living in South Korea for a few years. That particular weekend, I was visiting Universal Studios Japan, and I was especially excited to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It was a trip that had been planned for months, so the timing was purely coincidental. I remember it was 6:26 a.m. (JST) on Saturday, March 2, 2019, so exactly 4:26 p.m. in Cambridge on that Friday afternoon. I suddenly woke up in bed in my hotel room even before my alarm clock went off. I had actually set my alarm early in order to get to the park entrance before the long lines would start, but I remembered that the admissions decisions could also possibly come out on the first Friday of March. Therefore, I knew I had to check my email. Apparently, the email had come at the exact time when I had woken up, and my phone had been on airplane mode, so it’s not as though I had received any notifications. What a strange coincidence again that I had woken up at the exact time! Anyway, I cried tears of joy, checked my laptop a million times to make sure the confetti streaming down the online acceptance letter on my screen were congratulatory confetti and not some computer virus, and then cried some more. Then I went to Universal Studios and celebrated. It just made my short weekend vacation even merrier. (And while there, I even bought Dumbledore’s Elder Wand to use as a pointer in my future classroom.) So I will forever remember March 2nd (or March 1st in the U.S.) as the day that I got my admissions letters from both Hogwarts and Harvard. It just didn’t come with the owl.
Prerna Subramanian
Higher Education
I was just getting ready to fly home when I saw the acceptance letter on my phone. I was so happy after reading the word “congratulations” that I burst into tears. The hardest part was waiting the entire plane ride so that I could surprise my parents in-person!
HGSE Admissions Blog 