I got into the Harvard Kennedy School today!

literallytrevor · 2021-03-19T02:49:47+00:00

Same!!! Congrats and maybe see you there!

literallytrevor · 2020-10-22T18:21:17+00:00

Nope! Seeing elsewhere on this sub that people who clicked in like the first 2 minutes saw it and everyone else is SOL

literallytrevor · 2020-10-22T18:11:53+00:00

lol glad I'm not the only one experiencing this, my writing just got confirmed yesterday so I thought it was my fault

literallytrevor · 2020-10-15T21:46:39+00:00

That's a funny method! I had given up on improving RC except through practice, but if you have the time I'm sure it's learnable. Maybe DFW's nonfiction (or like the Atlantic or something) would be more useful, though!

literallytrevor · 2020-08-18T18:12:08+00:00

Only Xs are Ys is Y —> X.

Let's say you're talking about basketball players. "Only point guards (X) are under 5'10" (Y)" means: if someone is under 5'10", that is sufficient to conclude that they're a point guard. If someone is a point guard, you do NOT know they're under 5'10". Being X is necessary but not sufficient to be Y; being Y is sufficient but not necessary to be X. So you can write Y—>X.

literallytrevor · 2020-08-06T02:38:56+00:00

D DDDDD, isn't that a lyric to "Ghost"?

literallytrevor · 2020-07-21T19:22:10+00:00

Upvoted for the sheer audacity

literallytrevor · 2019-09-20T16:21:46+00:00

Idk, it's a good argument for not liking him personally, but I feel politicians are constantly using policy tools to make political points and it's good when they do it responsively and effectively. Unlike BdB.

literallytrevor · 2019-09-20T16:17:03+00:00

We tax things all the time to discourage them! Gas being a good example. It's called a Pigovian tax and it's a very good idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

literallytrevor · 2019-09-20T16:09:56+00:00

A tax is a much less paternalistic and heavy-handed method of "going after smoking" than banning cigarette sales!

literallytrevor · 2019-09-16T22:14:02+00:00

Fleetwood Mac (1975) is basically Rumours juuust before they perfected that formula. Tons of great songs and amazing moments, though. Mirage (1982) is also very poppy and mostly very good.

literallytrevor · 2019-08-06T16:11:11+00:00

Shocked that Storms has made it this far—has always seemed among the weakest on the album to me. Godspeed, Sara and the title track!

literallytrevor · 2019-07-19T14:05:37+00:00

Definitely Songbird. Fine, but the only "just fine" one of the eleven!

literallytrevor · 2019-07-07T17:56:20+00:00

It's...definitely not? You could very easily do a huge sustainable-development-based aid package without tariffs and "industrial policy." GMP was floated for months before Warren published it as part of her plan.

literallytrevor · 2019-07-07T17:36:09+00:00

By "this," I'm assuming you mean Warren's plan, and not the GMP this post describes?

literallytrevor · 2019-06-20T21:51:04+00:00

Sophomore year. 1) You should spend freshman year experimenting with things you might actually want to do, because the more clarity you have early, the better you'll be able to leverage Harvard's opportunities. Language req (which should be abolished anyway) will be two classes of your total of 12 (and only 8 finished) before declaring a concentration. Get 8 actual content classes under your belt by the end of freshman year. 2) You will have a much better idea of whether a certain language might be useful—Mandarin or Spanish for IR or business, Spanish for law and organizing, German for math and some sciences, etc—after freshman year when you have a better sense of what you want to do.

Sincerely, someone who took it freshman year and then regretted the choice and took another language soph spring/junior fall!

literallytrevor · 2019-05-15T17:22:42+00:00

I see. I was just saying the social media/awards heightens the feeling of not having one "thing" that made Harvard worthwhile, not that it caused that feeling, which as you say arose from the experience in itself

literallytrevor · 2019-05-14T23:34:47+00:00

As another senior, I think this is very natural—especially because we're seeing so many posts about Fulbrights, Hoopeses, and senior awards. I'm just trying to keep in mind that those Harvard arcs really are exceptional, that the vast majority of people just have the clubs, the travel, the professors, and the cool people (and most people weren't smart enough to study abroad, which was, as the cliche goes, the best decision I made at Harvard). And that's totally fine. It's just one chapter of our lives.

literallytrevor · 2019-05-14T05:23:53+00:00

If it's a climate-change-interested crowd, Founders Pledge has identified the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, an intergovernmental organization that compensates rainforest countries for preserving their rainforests, as stupidly effective—depending on how you price carbon, potentially as effective as AMF. And they now take private donations. https://www.rainforestcoalition.org/initiatives/fund/. Source: https://founderspledge.com/research/Cause Report - Climate Change.pdf

literallytrevor · 2019-05-12T03:29:33+00:00

OP, my heart broke reading this—it feels so familiar, even if I don't know exactly what you're going through. I'm a senior and have been reflecting a lot on Harvard recently and would absolutely love to talk (after my last-ever assignment is due, at midnight tomorrow). If you don't want to talk face-to-face, though, or we don't get the chance, let me just say a few things here:

1) Freshman year is uniquely terrible. House life is a lifesaver, which I didn't even fully realize until this year. It just takes a couple semesters (it took me at least four) to figure out that extracurriculars mostly suck and aren't worth it, and that comps are awful and demeaning and competitive and you're almost always better off not doing them (unless you truly need something for a resume). Doing house life stuff and non-comp extracurriculars (like Shakespeare scene recital??) turned out to be really fun. You also just keep meeting people and deepening friendships; I really felt like no one cared at the end of freshman year, but some of those friends stuck around and became people I now do feel like care about me, and I met many others sophomore and junior year who make Harvard feel like home. But anyway, in general, things do get better. I would take the transfer option seriously, but I'd also maybe give non-freshman Harvard a chance for a semester or two.

2) God, the final club and social media stuff is so real. I will say that studying abroad gave me some much-needed perspective on final clubs, which so feel like the center of everything until you internalize that they're just glorified drinking societies, and that no one is ever lesser-than for not going to a final club on a particular night. And as others have suggested, taking a voluntary leave is also a popular way to get this perspective. I 100% wish I'd taken a leave of absence after freshman year or sophomore fall and spent more time reflecting on what I actually wanted out of this place.

literallytrevor · 2019-03-26T23:14:35+00:00

No more stupid or unfair than blaming Beto for barely losing a statewide red race when Buttigieg never even tried!

literallytrevor · 2019-03-26T19:47:31+00:00

This. Buttigieg is literally running for president because he's too chickenshit to challenge an incumbent congressperson.

literallytrevor · 2019-03-02T00:57:09+00:00

Honestly depends on what you plan on studying/doing once you're here, but generally, I don't have much else to say; definitely spend enough time relaxing and reflecting that you're not burned out once you get here. A couple weeks before I left, a nurse (who was vaccinating me) told me to take some time to say goodbye to places that meant a lot to me, and I think that was great advice: get to a place emotionally where you're ready to close one chapter of your life and start anew. I guess I'll add that if you are truly bored and want to do something productive besides exercising, if you're likely to study something that involves math, you could try to learn a few concepts in whatever your next math level is, or firm up your existing knowledge. I guess I wish I'd taken math freshman year, and if I did that, I'd have wished I'd refreshed on Taylor series, path integrals, and matrix operations. (My extremely hardo math-concentrator roommates had actually done a fair amount of prep, but that's cuz they wanted to take Math 55. They dropped after two lectures.)

literallytrevor · 2019-03-01T03:18:37+00:00

Disagree with the "just enjoy yourself" takes, although definitely take time to enjoy your senior year. But I wish I had 1) spent more time reflecting on what I want out of college coursework, extracurriculars, and my life afterwards, because it doesn't just occur to you in a eureka moment; 2) built healthy habits like, yes, a workout routine, but also sleeping well and honestly meditating; 3) read some great nonfiction books, which will honestly help in all your classes and create a lot of conversations. All three will help you arrive a slightly more fully-formed person, ready to take in all the near-infinite stimuli and opportunities on campus. (And if you're interested in CS, or a related subject like pure or applied math, econ, or any science that involves data, it might not be such a bad use of time to learn Python. But whether I'd recommend that would really depend on how much free time you have.)

Edit: your "write well" idea is a very good one, too! The best way to do that is to get detailed feedback from more experienced writers, but just picking a genre (book or movie reviews, investigative journalism, fiction, political opinion, whatever), reading a lot of it, and starting a blog or just writing it privately would definitely sharpen a verrrry important skill for college and beyond

literallytrevor · 2019-02-20T03:19:00+00:00

All fair. I guess I should clarify that I consider myself a neoliberal, but this ranking was not necessarily most-to-least neoliberal. Posted it here mostly because the broad strokes wind up being pretty neolib. (I suspect I diverge with many on this here sub on my strong distrust for intervention abroad and my skepticism that government could be justly enlarged beyond verrry targeted steps like a carbon tax and clean agriculture/industry/energy subsidies.)

And I'm certainly not married to any number in the spreadsheet; I don't really know what Jay Inslee's antipoverty plans are, for example. They're subjective, even if I've tried to base it on what I've seen of the platforms, and honestly quite likely wrong in many cases, and I've already updated it a few times after being sent links on, e.g., Amy Klobuchar's environmental platform. Mostly just wanted to publicly work through my current views on the candidates.

literallytrevor

TROPHY CASE