Capital

The Harvard spirit

During my first few months at Harvard, I couldn’t help but think that a lot of Harvard students were extremely intense and overly obsessed with success. I used to consider myself a pretty ambitious person, but at Harvard I have noticed a very high level of ambition from the students. I have been trying to manage and create a balance between my ambitions and my personality as a caring human being; so seeing extraordinary ambition amongst Harvard students led me to think that many of them are sacrificing the essence of a ‘normal happy life’ to success. It took me a while to understand where such ambition comes from and there are a few lessons we can all learn from this.
To explain to you the zeal to thrive amongst Harvard students, let me give you some characteristics about the institution and the mentality students come to Harvard with. The energy Harvard students have is indescribable. Some students come here with a plan for the four years of their stay in Harvard, others come having read most of the books for the courses they want to take, some even come with thesis ideas which they will write on their fourth year of their Harvard careers. There are some extreme cases where students are very careful to watch over the image they create of themselves because they hope to run for Congress or the Senate or even for Presidency in their lives. There are over 400 student organizations in a college of roughly 6,000 students. The joke is that Harvard students are used to being presidents of organizations so they come and start their own here. The university tries so hard to provide accessible mental and psychological help for students who get overwhelmed with work because they work too hard. Even though this seems very extreme, there is a big lesson to learn from it. I often think about the driving force behind every student here and I get very amazed.
When students achieve something, they don’t get satisfied, they want to do more, bigger things. Harvard students don’t sit down and wait for the right time to happen, but rather they make their ideas happen as soon as they get it. They are constantly looking for gaps to fill; they are looking for ways to achieve their goals. What amazes me is that for a Harvard student, the sky is NOT the limit. When people think here, they think very big. As I am writing this article now, there are probably students talking about the companies they are going to start once they graduate, how they are going to beat Bill Gates, writing letters to some of the most influential people in the world, writing applications to do internship at the leading financial firms in the world. Whatever they do, the confidence they have in themselves is beyond belief. There are some undergraduate students who are already writing their books, some are going to work at the White House this summer, and I have even met a student writing a thesis that argues against a theory of a Nobel Prize winner. They put 150% into what they do, and they think big.
Some can say that such level of ambition is driven by an unquenchable thirst for success, but I like to look at it differently. Of course Harvard students want to be Number One in literally everything they do, and they use the opportunities given to them to make sure they become Number One. My interpretation is that these students look at life as a ladder, and at every stage they test their limits. It seems like they are driven with the question, ‘how far can I reach? What can I do that has not been done before?’ I see students constantly looking for gaps to fill, for problems in society, and once they find it then they look for a solution for it. If there is a kind of business that doesn’t exist in the world today, I can assure you that there are students here working on it. Some of these students think really big, they want to affect the entire world rather than just a country. They think big, they act big, and they do big things. Eventually, some end up having big influence in society.
Harvard does a good job at bringing together students with extraordinary drive, and it gives them a platform to develop that drive into real life solutions to real life problems. But, that drive isn’t necessarily created at Harvard. So, can such ambitious students exist only in Harvard? Absolutely not. There is great potential amongst the youth in Ethiopia, but a lot of times the roof is our limit. We usually don’t think beyond what we see and what we do in our daily lives, and I consider that crippling a perfectly healthy human being.

Yoseph can be contacted at askyoseph@gmail.com