Author: HGSE Admissions
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More than just Professors
Although I went to a small liberal arts college for undergrad where professor accessibility and close student and faculty interactions were flags that many smaller institutions proudly waved as a plus, in all honesty, I didn’t take advantage of those perks. So when I began to think about Harvard in it’s massive University infrastructure of…
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The Ph.D. student experience: it’s an ultramarathon, not a sprint
This summer marked the halfway point of my Ph.D. program. Somehow, in what simultaneously feels like the blink of an eye and a huge chunk of time, three years have elapsed. What my day-to-day looks like has changed — in years 1 and 2, most of my time was spent on coursework, whereas now it’s…
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Navigating HGSE and Harvard as a Student of Color
I grew up in a predominantly white town, attended predominantly white schools, and attended a predominantly white institution for my undergraduate degree, so I thought I had the whole “attending a PWI” thing down as a student of color. While I was wrong because Harvard is a whole different ballgame. That said, I’ve found and…
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Puppies, plutonium, and other ways my professors have surprised me
My professor produced invisible objects from behind her back and pantomimed handing them to me, rapid fire. “Plutonium, a puppy, an empty cardboard box, a decorative plate decorated with plates!” Karen Brennan teaches Designing for Learning by Creating and is a brilliant innovator in the field of education, but today she was my partner in…
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From Cali to Cambridge
An ode to California. For Cambridge is not you. This is not the land of dreamers and beaches. But, living here won’t break you. Five states. Twenty-Five years. All roads leading to here. I have been on the move since I was born, but that does not make the process of moving or starting a…
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The Chat Group
There are two kinds of people in this world: people who are comfortable having a permanent notification tag on their phone app that says they have 1,253 unread messages. And then there are people who read every message every hour to avoid the dreaded unread notification. I am proudly part of the latter category. Yet,…
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14,000 km away from home, New Zealand to Boston
Two months ago, I traveled 21 hours taking two flights across the Pacific Ocean to get to Boston. From the first day of Orientation for International Students, I won the “Who traveled the furthest to get here!” title and realized I was the only one at HGSE from New Zealand. I can safely say that…
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Cross Registering 101
Prior to arriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I had spent the last seven years running an English tutoring organization called Superior English Tutoring that specializes in small-group conversation refinement sessions for advanced, non-native English speakers. That sentence is my answer to the oft-encountered “What do you do?” question, but it hardly summarizes…
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Class, Readings, Assignments, Group Discussions, Events…and an Internship
Prior to arriving to HGSE, I had envisioned that I would fully immerse myself into student life. I thought, “I’m going to get all of my readings done on time. I’m going to complete my assignments ahead of time. I’m going to attend all of the campus events that I’m interested in. I will not…
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Another First Day of School But This Time I am The Student
On August 20th, 2018, I turned onto Appian Way, entered the Gutman Library and took the elevator to the basement. For the first time in seven years, I wasn’t walking into a room as Ms. JT the school leader, I was walking in as Erica. For the first time in a long time, I…
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