Harvard Swagger
My admissions letters to Harvard's Law School and Kennedy School of Government were like tickets to Mount Olympus, delivered from the mists of legend. Once I received them, it was an awkward adjustment to begin envisioning Harvard as an actual school. Admission itself had been the object of my labor and hope for as long as I could remember. Like the Holy Grail, Harvard was something to be quested after, not a place one could inhabit with a backpack and a notebook. But after one last, short summer in Los Angeles, I packed my things, boarded a plane and flew east to meet the myth.
I imagined that my classmates would be young prodigies, fluent in Latin and Greek, capable of reciting Shakespeare's plays from memory and solving the most perplexing equations with one hand while building a rocket with the other. In short, I thought they would be different from every other person I'd ever known. Yet, as it turned out, the other students did not have superhuman I.Q.'s. Oh, there were a few certified mutant geniuses, but the vast majority of the people I met seemed merely very bright--much like the vast majority of people I had known in high school and college, and much like the vast majority of people I know at UMBC.
But there was one thing that set those Harvard graduate students apart: Most of them had an above-average sense that they belonged at an elite university and were capable of greatness. I wouldn't call it pure self-confidence, because they tended to have plenty of insecurities about all of the usual things, and the Law School especially had a way of magnifying their doubts. But on the whole they really believed they mattered, and were on paths to true accomplishment, and they set their aspirations for themselves accordingly.
For many of them, this assurance seemed to come from the wealth and privilege they had experienced their whole lives. A few others seemed confident because they had overcome adversity, or just experienced enough--maybe in the Peace Corps, or the military--to have diminished their need for external validation. The rest of us probably felt validated by having been anointed by our admission letters as the heirs of tomorrow. What could ever be impossible for you, once you had been summoned to Olympus?
I wish I could take that sense of assurance, bottle it and share it with everyone. That assurance may be worth as much a Harvard degree, and it shouldn't require an Ivy League admission letter to achieve it. If you are at UMBC, you have the smarts and the opportunity to explore and hone your talents. You have what it takes to make a difference, and to fulfill your dreams. Believe it, and you make it so.
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