My family has been my link home during my time at Harvard; for everything else, I look no further than the campus. My friends. Oh, my friends. (Suddenly I feel like I'm thanking everyone at the Oscars.) At this newspaper, in my dorm rooms, on first-year orientation trips, wherever--I've made those types of friends that you can see yourself and your wife and kids going on vacation with in 20 years. I have close friends I met my first day at school, and others that I've only become close to in the last year. At Harvard, I've discovered that friendship is a continual process; not only can you make new friends at any time, but you can discover new things about old friends at any moment. The constant evolution of these friendships is what makes them so exciting and special, and such a great catalyst for happiness.
Yes, the Dean of Admissions says that another terrific class of students could be collected by gathering 1,600 Harvard rejectees, but that's somehow hard to believe. Where else could I have a set of friends who serve quite happily and efficiently as my own intellectual, personal, and comical Askjeeves.com? (What's postmodernism? What did Hobbes say about freedom? What class should I take? What should I get my girlfriend for her birthday? Where's the bathroom?)
Finally, I'm happy today because I'm happy with what I'm doing after college. I'm working in sports television; I'll be freelancing my services to NBC during the Olympics, and then to other networks and production teams for similar tasks. Granted, it's not an $80,000 a year job at an investment firm in New York, it's not as worthy a cause as the Peace Corps, and it's going to be a employment niche that requires a lot of travel, late nights, and obedience to authority. But it's something that excites me, and I enjoy the experiences I've had working in this field so far.
My job situation is owed to the internships I have received, which were procured to a large extent because of the Harvard tag on my resume. The skills that I brought to these internships and bring to my work next year were honed at this wonderful newspaper and at the sports department of WHRB, the campus radio station. And the work ethic, attitude and resilience I possess have been developed in my classwork and experiences within Harvard life. So I am a happy graduate. It's odd, but when I think about this fact, everything else--the advising, the randomization, the General Wong's chicken--all seems to fade away. Like my diploma, family, friends and jobs, happiness is something I plan to hold onto.
Aaron R. Cohen '00, a social studies concentrator in Quincy House, was editor of Fifteen Minutes in 1999.