The View from Harvard Yard By Katherine Van Schaik, NSHSS Student Council Harvard 2008 Blizzards, seeing the Red Sox win the World Series while living in Boston, and staying in a dorm whose first residents were members of the class of '74...1874, that is. When I first arrived at Harvard, I didn't anticipate any of these experiences. I knew that Harvard had a 369-year history, and I knew that I could expect surprises, but I had no idea just how wonderful those surprises would be. I'm from South Carolina, and, before I arrived in Boston, I had collectively seen about twelve inches of snow in my entire life. It was quite a surprise to wake up one weekend in January and see nearly three feet of snow covering Harvard Yard. Evidently, Boston had experienced one of the top ten blizzards in its history, and the members of the class of 2008 and I were lucky enough to go out and play in it--with Harvard Yard as our playground. A few months before the blizzard, students were out in the Yard for a different reason--the Sox beat the Yankees. As any student who has been on the Harvard Admissions Tour knows, there is a statue of John Harvard in the middle of the Yard, and it was at John Harvard's feet that the students gathered to celebrate, chanting "Let's go Red Sox" amid cheers and clapping. Even the John Harvard statue looked triumphant, wearing the Sox cap and T-shirt placed on him by one of the students. Never before had I experienced such avid, loyal sports fans--but then, I had never lived in Boston before. The blizzard and the World Series were special, once-in-a-lifetime surprises. There is, though, one surprise that I live every day: my dorm, Matthews Hall, which first had students living in it in 1874. It's inspirational to me to think that hundreds of students, many of them long deceased, have shared the same view of Harvard Yard that I see every day from my window. I look at the initials carved on the windowsill with the number "'10" (signifying a graduation year) inscribed neatly beside them, and I wonder what courses that student took, what conversations he had with his roommates in this room, and what professors he had. Surely, even though he was here nearly a century ago, he experienced the same feelings that I do--the stresses of papers and tests, the mystery of a future career, the camaraderie shared with classmates, and, on bright autumn days or wintry nights or rainy spring afternoons, the connection one feels with each and every student who has been touched by this University. And that's the greatest surprise for me: the remarkable link that Harvard inspires in its students to all those who came before and all those who are to come in the future. I think that Harvard alumnus Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best in his reflection regarding the celebration of Harvard's three-hundredth anniversary in 1836: "Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts; but on that day the anointed eye saw the crowd of spirits that mingled with the procession in the vacant spaces, year by year, as the classes proceeded; and then the far longer train of ghosts that followed the Company, of the men that wore before us the college honors & the laurels of the state--the long winding train reaching back into eternity."