THE HARVARD CRIMSON | MARCH 13, 2020
PAGE 4
EDITORIAL NOTE
OP-ED
A Note to Readers
What Harvard Students Won’t Tell You About Computer Science
By AIDAN F. RYAN and SHERA S. AVI-YONAH
O
n Tuesday morning, University officials announced that classes would move online and that undergraduates would be required to vacate their dorms by Sunday at 5 p.m. to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. We write to tell you what this means for The Crimson. As an organization staffed entirely by undergraduates — one that prints a daily paper in our press room on 14 Plympton Street — Harvard’s decision prevents us from carrying out daily operations as usual.
Today’s paper, the 36th produced by the 147th Guard of The Crimson, will likely be our last print edition this semester. Starting today, we will transition to an online-only operation and will continue to cover how these events impact Harvard and its students, faculty, and staff. Despite the considerable difficulties this will present, we believe it is important to continue our work, if in a different capacity. It has become more, not less, vital to pursue our mission of covering and informing Harvard affiliates as they fan across the globe. As the only breakfast-table daily serving Harvard and the city of Cam-
bridge, we have a duty to continue holding those in power accountable and to report the news, just as we have done for the past 147 years. During this transition, we ask again for your support, feedback, and trust. The Crimson’s first issue, printed on January 24, 1873, said “I will not philosophize; I will be read.” With your help, we intend to keep both of those promises. Sincerely, Aidan F. Ryan ’21 President of the 147th Guard Shera S. Avi-Yonah ’21 Managing Editor of the 147th Guard
Submit an Op-Ed Today!
The Crimson @thecrimson THE CRIMSON EDITORIAL BOARD
Notes from Day Three: Classmates Out of Place
C
oronavirus has tremendous global implications. But as a slate gray sky moved over campus this morning, a pre-apocalyptic frenzy waxed introspective. As many continue to sort out the details of their departures, intimate and existential questions replace outright panic. How do we make sense of an experience which will fundamentally alter the fabric of our lives and the institution of which we are a part? What happens when everything you believe makes school meaningful gets packed away? What happens when the micro-moments — the unnecessary but essential intimacies — evaporate into the cloud? How do you deal with the indefinites — the postponements and cancelations, the maybe-soons and whoknows-whens, the let’s-grab-a-meals and how-’bout-this-weekends? What is college without the all-for-naughts of coffee-coma typing storms, the hallway nods to halfway friends — the touched and touching moments of life here together? At a time when statistics and headlines seem to mediate our collective experience, and after we have taken the opportunity to highlight the obligations of our University and the vulnerability of so many, we think it’s worth pausing to stitch together the stories, emotions, and questions that have characterized these past few days — these days where life has stood still, the surreal intersection of
history and college life suddenly undone. Harvard’s Kuumba singers have spent months preparing for the organization’s now postponed 50th-anniversary celebrations. The men’s basketball team was denied a chance to enter the postseason on a hot streak. And even commencement itself seems in doubt. It’s not as if anyone has given up, but so much will just be left suspended, half-done — a petri dish of forced neglect. We are forced to reckon with what it means to pursue a process without an outcome — whether we value the expe-
Where the work of our everyday lives has been abandoned, a mythic humanness — a transcendent camaraderie — has taken its place. rience of creating, of working hard, of working together, as much as the end result of a grade, a performance, or a graduation ceremony. Harvard is not truly Harvard when completed online. This sudden displacement forces us to confront who we have become in our time at Harvard and what it means for us to be that person elsewhere — at home for some, in more unfamiliar places for others. What privileges are we reminded of? And how do we return here again with
generosity and selflessness? Despite the palpable presence of nihilism in the air — after all, what is Harvard without those with whom we live it — these past few days have also been marked by a tremendous showing of kindness, support, and love. When the University initially failed to provide our community’s most vulnerable members — those experiencing homelessness, from low-income backgrounds, and from outside of the United States — the support they needed, their peers began opening their homes, sending out “Emergency Housing Spreadsheets” through email lists and crowdfunding. Students paused to check in with one another. Student organizations are reaching out to their members, offering support and love in a time of shared distress. Some professors have offered them a place to store their belongings. Where the work of our everyday lives has been abandoned, a mythic human-ness — a transcendent camaraderie — has taken its place. We hope this spirit hangs on through the six long months ahead. This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
By MADELEINE L. LAPUERTA
I
walked into Harvard Yard’s gates in the fall of 2016 as an eager, a-bit-too-annoying freshman completely set on studying Computer Science. When I attended the first lecture of Harvard’s world-famous Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science,” I sat in the front row and even volunteered to answer a question. It was a simple prompt about binary notation, and I totally rocked it. As the semester went on, I slowly began to develop less of a clue regarding what I was doing. Loading and reading files? Never heard of it. C++? What on earth is that? Why is compiling so...hard? I struggled a lot in CS50, pulling all-nighters in Lamont Library only to end up with more lines of gibberish code than I had started with. The final project, though, gave me hope. I figured if I harnessed my creativity and focused on learning concepts I was excited about, I could make something really cool. So I downloaded XCode, taught myself Objective-C, and watched YouTube tutorials on how to create an iOS app. Fifty hours later, “I’d Rap That”, a photo caption generator based on a library of over six hundred rap lyrics, was done and working smoothly. When I checked my final grades, I was horrified at the result of my CS50 efforts: a C. Here I was, expecting to become a software engineer, with a C in the first college coding class I’d ever taken. So, I said goodbye to the Computer Science department and waved hello to the world of Economics. I fit in better in economics classes, anyway. I used to be really into polo shirts. Regardless of my major switch, I actually thought “I’d Rap That” was a good project. I sent an email to my professor, sticking up for myself and for my work. After much back-and-forth, my grade was changed. My GPA went up by 0.2. Later, when I launched “I’d Rap That” onto the iOS App Store, it received two thousand downloads within the first month. It also, for some reason, became quite popular in China. It was a good project, and I wondered why my professor hadn’t seen that. The summer after my freshman year, randomly and with no prompt, I suddenly knew I had to go back to Computer Science. I had allowed CS50 to scare me away. The tech-bro culture it perpetuated, with its t-shirts and swag and hackathon, had made me feel like computer science was not a place in which I could thrive. Besides, at the end of it, my initial efforts had been given a C. I had wrongly concluded that an arbitrary letter grade, given to me by a professor who simply did not understand the worth of the product I’d created, was a determinant of my intelligence in a field. I decided that I was not going to let tech bros affect my future and the choices I made. I actually liked Computer Science, and I was just going to have to deal with not fitting in. Sophomore fall, I walked into Computer Science 61: “Systems Programming and Machine Organization” wearing a summer dress and carrying a tote bag. By contrast, the classroom was packed with over one hundred boys in hoodies and sneakers, who seemingly already knew everything there was to know about systems programming and machine organization. That semester, I was never able to find someone who wanted to partner up with me. The teaching assistants saw me come to office hours by myself, knew I was struggling grades-wise, and yet none reached out and told me: “You got this, stick with it.” Partner-less, I finished the semester with another GPA-lowering grade. I stuck with Computer Science, anyways. The rest of my time at Harvard played out similarly, although things did get better. My junior spring, I worked as a course assistant for Computer Science 20: “Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science,” a title I hold again this semester simultaneously with an Applied Mathematics course. It’s important to me to reach out to the girls I see come to office hours alone, and tell them: “You can do this, stick with it.” I’ve worked for several startups, completed a summer internship at a big-tech company, am conducting my own CS research, and will be joining a top consulting firm after graduating in May. The hard work I put into obtaining these opportunities outshone any ways in which I’d struggled — any ways in which I did not fit in as an engineer. I notice that people at Harvard don’t often talk about finding coursework difficult since, at a hyper-competitive school, people become wary of showing any weakness. Well, here I am, talking about it. I’ve struggled, cried, and nearly failed in Computer Science, and my life has still moved forward. My hardships, in retrospect, have taught me more than my successes, and are likely the reason why, three years after receiving that soul-crushing C, I am doing just fine.
—Madeleine L. LaPuerta ’20 is a Computer Science concentrator in Leverett House.
