Abstract
In this submission, I recount my journey of personal growth during my first years at Harvard University. Amidst personal and academic rigors, I found myself grappling with a profound crisis of identity and purpose tied to my transition from service in the Marines to civilian life in college. The crux of my narrative revolves around my enrollment in GENED 1105: “Can We Know Our Past?”, which served as the catalyst for my intellectual and personal development. Through its curriculum, I embarked on a journey of discovery, academic enrichment, and self actualization. GENED 1105 provided me with a platform to integrate a wide range of life experiences and intellectual interests while reconciling past identities with present aspirations. This transformative experience underscored the irreplicable value of a liberal arts education and the role of General Education courses in facilitating holistic personal development. Ultimately, my narrative advocates for the General Education program at Harvard as an essential component of my personal, professional, and academic development, and I ardently believe in its potential to enrich others’ lives as it has mine.
Submission
“A transformative college experience awaits you!”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
The world seemed gray during my first year in Cambridge, but not due to the characteristically long winters and overcast weather. It sounds impetuous to be at the best school in the world yet feel sorry for yourself, but my story is not unique. The first-year experience at Harvard is a time of exploration and self-discovery for many young people; I was no different. But, in my case, exploration and self-discovery was a crisis of identity. A panicked scramble to pick up the pieces of a life that I lost the day I moved into Hurlbut Hall and ate my first meal in Annenberg. Stumbling around in the dark, I was looking for the blueprints of how to rebuild myself in this new phase of my life – how to refit the fragments of who I was into who I would become.
61 days. The elapsed time from my last day on a combat deployment conducting counter-terrorism operations in Southeast Asia to my move-in day at Harvard. Even less than that after accounting for 5 weeks of out-processing and a veteran higher education prep program. In 26 days I would go from Corporal Rice, United States Marine and Rifle team leader of a Special Operations Task Force, to Shane, the Math Ma and Expos 10 student with a lot of tattoos and no idea what a ‘coefficient’ or ‘bibliography’ were. In July of 2021, I was Ground Force Commander on over 40 missions in a hostile environment, entrusted with the lives of over 20 people and tens of millions of dollars in equipment and weaponry. In September of the same year, I failed a math exam and dropped elementary French from my schedule. The story of my first year at Harvard was not joyful exploration. It was not unbridled optimism for changes to come. It was losing who and what I was in the world. Unpacking 4 years and 3 deployments in service of my country. Giving up my source of identity and purpose. I made it to Harvard, but after that I was in freefall.
Until one day, I found a parachute. Being inexperienced while navigating my advising resources and choosing classes, I took my first General Education course Sophomore Fall. “GENED 1105: Can We Know Our Past?” with Professor Flad and Professor Ur. From our first assignment conducting ‘dorm room archaeology’, I knew I had found my niche. The class granted me exposure to something new at the intersection of what I was familiar with, what I was interested in, and what I was naturally inclined at with room to grow. For the very first time since matriculation, I felt excited walking through Harvard Yard to class in the morning.
GENED 1105 was the setting in which the narrative of my entire previous life leading up to Harvard wove itself into a new chapter. A childhood interest in antiquity from dinosaurs to the Pyramids of Giza, a calling to public service, using processual methods to organize data in space and time, working in new places far from home. Now, I could see how my life experiences weren’t something to be abandoned and forgotten, but a valuable quality to leverage in my studies. GENED 1105 introduced me to how I could become greater than the sum of my parts and past experiences. It shined a light on a path to make my time at Harvard my own. Before the end of the course, I would declare my concentration in Anthropology on the Archaeology Honors track.
Beyond introducing me to the fundamental concepts of archaeology, GENED 1105 taught me a new way to think about the world I interacted with everyday. It taught me to hear and understand different perspectives in a way I never had. I weighed the values I learned in GNED 1105 against my past interactions, and thought about how I could do things differently in the future. I began to see how forces driving our world are often rooted in the past, supporting the claim that interpreting the past is always a political act. I gained practical experience and collected original data in support of the Cambridge Old Burying Ground survey. At the end of the course, I applied everything I had learned to create an ArcGIS Story Map about the naming of public infrastructure in my home town in Northern Virginia after Confederate officers, meaningfully contributing to discourse around history, culture, war, and their place in public memory.
By the end of sophomore year, I was ready to put the past 2 semesters of classroom discussions and theory in my new discipline into practice. I spent a month with Mongolian reindeer herders in the Khövsgöl taiga conducting archaeological surveys, cataloging artifacts, and having interactions with our local guides. It was a beautiful, enriching experience. A Shaman invited me into his ortz (teepee-style shelter) for a ceremony with the spirits of elders and answering of questions. Handing him a scrap of paper with my name and Chinese Lunar New Year sign, I asked my question with the help of our interpreter,
“What will bring fulfillment to my life?”
His reply – “You have already found it.”
I was speechless. How had I gone from walking into my first day of GENED 1105 to sitting with a Shaman in Northern Mongolia drinking reindeer milk tea? One class changed the course of my life and set me on a path to become something more curious, adventurous, and happy than I could have ever imagined. The transformative experience that awaited me finally came into view, and the trees, mountains, rivers, and sunsets never looked more full of color.
Later the same summer, I traded the lush greens and blues of Northern Mongolia for the hot, dry sun of Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. There, I joined Professor Ur and the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey. Once again, I applied the lessons from GENED 1105 in a field setting, and further built on my new knowledge base under the same professor. During my time with EPAS I also acted in and recorded content to be uploaded and shared with students back in Cambridge as they attended lectures of the same General Education class that inspired me to pursue archaeology just one year earlier.
It took about two months to lose who and what I was, but two years later, I found myself on the far side of the biggest transformation I had undergone since becoming a US Marine. I never believed in the quippy taglines heard at Harvard matriculation until I had lived it. I could have never imagined that one class would change the trajectory of my life or thrust me into realizing my potential at the best university in the world, but it did. I believe therein lies the power of a General Education curriculum, and its role in a liberal arts education. More than a list of tasks to complete before receiving a degree, these classes, like GENED 1105, offer new paths to being in the world and to the world being in us. From the broken and lost to the focused and committed, Harvard’s program in General Education is the lifeblood of its liberal arts education; challenging preconceived notions, changing the course of students’ lives, and pushing people like me to make their time at Harvard their own.