Surviving Harvard: 7 stories from freshman year

From his new book 'That Book About Harvard,' writer Eric Kester shares stories of his embarrassments and mishaps at America's most famous college.

- Molly Driscoll, Staff Writer

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Part of Harvard University's campus

Elise Amendola/AP

2. Course selections

Kester says he was initially intimidated by the course offerings when he was supposed to choose classes, but soon went with a policy of seeking out classes whose course descriptions did not include "any words ... longer than four syllables." His final schedule was a class studying the history of gladiators, a course about fairy tales, a science class focusing on dinosaurs, and a class in the anthropology department about aliens. "On paper, my schedule of 'GLADIATORS–FAIRY TALES–DINOSAURS–ALIENS' looked strikingly similar to a list I had written as a five-year-old entitled 'MY FaVoRiTE ThINgs!!!!!,'" Kester wrote. "It wasn't exactly the type of rigorous curriculum you'd expect from The World's Greatest University."