All The GSD Girls Look Like Victoria Legrand

It's not that every woman at my school looks exactly like Legrand, above, Beach House's lead singer, but each one looks a little bit like her. As an amalgamation, the female student body might very well be Legrand. Not that there's anything wrong with this. Legrand is bewitching, cool, magnetic and fashionable. She's probably the biggest female contributor to a band and the best embodiment of its sound these days. Like Steve Nash, most of my female peers could start their own bands without even trying.

The other unexpected lesson from my recently completed first year of graduate school is how gigantic of a tourist destination Harvard University is. Harvard is like Times Square -- internationally renowned and immediately recognizable to everyone, though Times Square's fame comes from its commercialism, spectacle and gaudiness, while Harvard is known as the paragon of American education, success and privilege. (I'll take the latter.) Nonetheless, I've been surprised how many tourists there are. They're in the Yard every day, taking pictures, and are impossible to miss. They even come to the GSD, which doesn't strike me as appealing to anyone but the niche traveler, to photograph the hive-like array of studio desks and gawk.

From this, I've learned how important the Harvard brand is to the university's culture, in a way that was never remotely true at my alma mater. I'm glad I didn't go to college at Harvard because it seems the famous professors, famous guest lecturers, famous alumni, famous buildings and famous endowment are more important than the students. Protecting the first group is a greater priority than advancing the second. This isn't a problem in graduate school when the programs are smaller -- such as mine, with about 30 students per class -- the students are more mature, cognizant of their future careers and know what they want from their education and professors, and the program's reputation partly depends on its ability to place graduates in good jobs. But if I were an intellectually curious but somewhat aimless undergraduate (which I was), I would most certainly have been as lost in Harvard's shuffle as one could be.

I now have a greater appreciation for why liberal arts colleges exist. The small class sizes, the attentive professors, the committed students and the enclosed campuses are all wonderful, if not integral, for 18 to 22 year-olds.