Over at Harvard Extended, Ian posted about a problem that is particularly acute at the Extension School: lack of student community.

If there is one thing that is particularly difficult about being a HES student, it has to be the sense that you are all alone in tackling some of these difficult classes.  My first semester, I was required to be on-campus to take a couple of clases because they were required and did not have on-line sections available.  In general, there are about 5 times more classes available as on-campus classes than as distance classes.  Since I actually live in Washington, DC, I had to commute weekly to Cambridge to attend class.

In the evening, I would dutifully sit for class along with the other students.  Of course, there was little socializing between us.  We simply didn’t have the time.  With one class at 5:30 and another at 7:30, most people would be done with classes by 9:30.  At that hour, most people are thinking about heading home to make dinner rather than hang out on campus to socialize.

This makes sense.  Most people attending HES have day jobs.  Many have families as well.  The free time that college students have in the evenings and weekends to make friends with classmates and socialize simply isn’t there for HES students.  As a result, there is less of a feeling that you are a part of the college than, say, the College students.  At the College, most students live in the dorms and are carefully matched with others to stimulate interesting dialogue with others.  There is a deliberate effort to create community from a group of people that might have widely different backgrounds.

At HES, there is none of this.  There are a few HESA events every now and then, but they are poorly attended and not much use for learning about your fellow students.  Probably the best oppportunity I had to meet my fellow ALB candidates was EXPOs.  With a small class size, there was at least a bit of an opportunity to get to know a few others.

I’ve suggested in the past that there should be a greater effort on the part of the HES administration to bind the students together.  One suggestion that I had was to have us all join a cohort based on our ALB admit year.  Since we all proceed towards the degree at different rates, this seems like a sensible manner of connecting everyone.  In as much as people have to take EXPOs to apply for the ALB, that might be another mechanism for joining people together.  Nothing builds community like shared experiences, particularly difficult ones.

I’m probably going to graduate on 2009 without knowing a single person at HES.  That’s a bit sad.  I’ll have friends and family there but it’s not the same as graduating with classmates.  Only someone who has shared your struggle can truly understand what it means to get to that day.  I’m hoping that between now and then, I’ll make a few more friends at HES to share graduation with.

That would be nice.

I’m thrilled.

My Field of Study application has been approved which means that when I am awarded the ALB, I’ll have a Computer Science “field of study” noted on my transcripts. Yay! Also, one of my previous professors has agreed to provide support to my effort to complete a Bachelor’s thesis (called a Reading and Research project). This is all good news.

One of the weird things about HES (and Harvard in general) is that undergraduate degrees don’t have majors per se, but concentrations. Harvard College has a long list of undergraduate concentrations:

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