Getting Here

The dedicated sailor says that it was the Sailing Team's well organized, impressive recruiting effort which brought him to Harvard.

"I wouldn't have applied otherwise," he says. He would have chosen Brown instead, he says, where his younger sister is currently a junior.

Laitin says the stereotypical views he held of Harvard changed upon his recruiting visit when he saw the diversity on campus.

"[Harvard] is different than any other college in that there's almost everything in a not very big student body," he says.

Laitin has another semester left before he will graduate. His time of was the result of a sophomore fall which he calls "miserable."

Laitin is an economics concentrator, and he says that it was he required sequence of economics classes sophomore year that drove him off campus for a break. "It was the worst two hours, three times a week," he says of those classes.

Despite his initial setback, Laitin says he stuck with economics despite the hardship involved, because there "was nothing interesting enough" to give up what he had already invested in the economics curriculum.

Laitin says he knew coming to Harvard would involve difficult decisions early-on in his course of study.

"If I'd wanted to search around for years and years, I should have gone to Brown," he says.

In the end, he says he finds his course work, "fairly easy" and "occasionally interesting." He is not on an honors track, and he says he is fine with that decision.

Time Out

Laitin took advantage of his timeout from Harvard to work in cloud forest as part of a Global-Roots volunteer program in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Because it does not rain year-long in that area, it is considered a cloud, and not a rain, forest, Laitin explains.

In Monteverde, Laitin worked on trails, hung out with the locals and played soccer.

Laitin's trip to Costa Rica was not his first extended experience abroad.