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  College

I attended that venerable institution on the Charles River, Harvard, where I lived first at Hollis Hall, Harvard's fourth oldest building (the dormitory earlier occupied by Thoreau, Emerson, Santayana, roommates Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore, among other less notable residents), and then North House (orginally a Radcliffe dormitory, and now named Pforzheimer House, it will always be NoHo to those of us who lived there before the 90s). Among my extracurricular activities, I sang with both the all-male Harvard Glee Club and the mixed Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum.

Cool Link: Virtual Tour of Harvard Yard, with optional QuickTime and RealAudio clips. The fifth stop on the tour is Hollis Hall.

Cool Link: QTVR panoramic image outside Hollis Hall

Cool Link: QTVR panoramic image inside a Hollis Hall dorm room.

I entered college as a pre-med math major. While I did well in social sciences and humanities courses in high school (modesty aside, I graduated with a 4.0 average [actually, it was slightly above 4.0, but that's beside the point, and not all that difficult at my rural high school, believe me]), I was more comfortable then with the hard sciences.

Throughout my childhood, I had been told I should become a doctor; basically, it was seen as what anyone of above-average intelligence should aspire to. I didn't question it until I was a freshman at Harvard, where I realized there were so many more things I wanted to pursue--many of them only now available to me for the first time.

So I switched my major... several times. I discovered that I really hated my science courses, but was doing well in my social sciences and humanities courses. So I switched from pure math to a linguistics/applied math combination, then later to a linguistics/psychology combination. For a degree in linguistics, Harvard required mastery of two languages other than English. I already had learned French in high school, and decided on a whim to study Russian. My first-year Russian teacher instilled such a passion not only for the language and literature but for the entire Russian culture, that I switched into the Russian and Soviet Studies program, a cross-disciplinary concentration requiring coursework in Russian language, literature, history, government and economics. By that time, it was too late to switch majors again :-) so that's the field in which I finally earned my degree in June, 1984.

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