The move to college at the start of your first year can be among the most disorienting stretches of a young person's life, whether you’re going a few blocks or thousands of miles away. 

Everything familiar fades away. The sounds of your surroundings will change, and you will leave the people who shaped you. At Harvard, the magnitude of that adjustment is real and relentless. The city is large, the academics are demanding, and everyone around you seems to have arrived knowing something you don't. The first few weeks it can feel impossible to find spaces on campus where you feel you belong. Yet, you do find them, even if it’s not where you had expected. 

Students talk about finding community in their dorm, a student org, or their concentration (Harvard's word for major), and those things are true. But the reality for some is comfort comes from stranger places. In the accretion of hours spent somewhere, the routines you develop by accident. These are mine.

Annenberg Hall

Annenberg is Harvard's first-year-only dining hall, set in a Victorian Gothic building that started out as a grand alumni hall for major occasions. Tall ceilings, stained glass, long wood tables, statues, and portraits looking down from the walls. The first time you walk in, the scale of it is almost comic for a place you’re going to eat cereal. 

As a first-year, I spent much more time in Annenberg than the dining itself required. Dinner conversations stretched for hours, and you’re constantly meeting new people from across the country and world. Annenberg has an energy that comes from several hundred people all being new to the same thing at the same time. All slightly unsure and more open than they’ll ever be because they haven’t found their circles yet. I met my best friends over mediocre dining hall pizza. Annenberg is not about the food. It's the hours around it. The dining hall taught me how to have conversations that challenge my thinking. You have access to Annenberg for a year, that’s what makes it worth indulging while you have it.

Zimmer Hall

For my first two years at Harvard, I concentrated in applied mathematics, which meant I spent a significant portion of my life in Zimmer Hall, formerly known as the Science Center. This space has been home to the Mathematics Department since its opening in 1973. Hosting classes, office hours, the Math Question Center, and Cabot Science Library. The building and I developed a relationship I did not entirely ask for. 

I say that with affection, mostly. There's a specific kind of companionship that forms amongst people who are all confused together, and the math department's spaces cultivated exactly that. The Math Question Center, a drop-in room where students can get help on problem sets, turned into a space where the collectively lost gathered. Everyone arriving convinced that they’re the only one struggling, but we left knowing we weren’t. It’s hard to admit when you don’t understand something. It’s easier when the person next to you is admitting it too. 

I no longer concentrate in math, but Zimmer shaped something in how I think about sitting with difficulty. It taught me to stay in the room when nothing is clicking and how to ask for help without shame. 

A Bench Along the Charles

There's a Harvard ritual that doesn't have an official name but that almost everyone does eventually: the river walk. When a problem set or paper is grinding you down, you walk to the Charles River. It's just under a ten-minute walk from Harvard Yard and steps away from the nine upperclassman river houses. By the time the water comes into view, something has already loosed. The city opens up and I remember, a little surprised every time, that I live somewhere beautiful. 

Spring holds the real payoff. Ducklings appear along the banks, waddling with an indifference to everything around them. No midterms. No four-year plan. Ducks in a world built to accommodate them, even when that means causing a traffic jam on Memorial Drive. There's one bench I return to with the best view and closest proximity to the ducklings. The Charles, and this bench, is where I remember that I exist outside of the Harvard bubble. Campus can become your whole world. The river is a good corrective.

The Harvard Square CVS

I will be honest: this one is not a special place. It is expensive, the self-checkout machines have humbled me more times than I care to count, and a single drink and some allergy medicine should not cost what they cost. 

And yet. Open 24/7, 365 days a year, the CVS on JFK St. is one of the closest things to a convenience store that most of us have readily available access to on campus, which means it sees everyone eventually. Snacks, cold medicine, toothpaste, shampoo, a birthday card in a pinch, they seem to have all you need when you need it at 2am on a Tuesday. It runs on pure necessity, and necessity turns out to be a powerful force for our community. You’d be surprised with the familiar faces and meaningful conversations that can happen in such a setting. There were weeks I saw the staff there more reliably than seeing my closest friends, which says something about the staff's consistency and something a little different about my social life. 

(One tip: Harvard University Health Services has a discounted medication vending machine that can save you money on the things you'll inevitably need mid-semester. It is just inside the HUHS lobby near the Smith Center Campus Center entrance off Mount Auburn Steet. Find it before you need it because you will need it.) 

Cambridge

When I got into Harvard and traveled to New England from North Carolina for the first time, I didn't know what to expect. I had assumptions about campus, most of which turned out to be wrong. I arrived expecting four years in a place that would surely shape me. Then a clean exit toward whatever came next. 

I was wrong about that, and I'm glad. Along the way it became the kind of place I started imagining staying. The way fall moves through the Yard in October. A city that takes ideas seriously without always taking itself too seriously. And the Charles, always the Charles. The belonging I found here was cumulative. The sense that I’d left some small mark that would outlast a semester, or eight of them. When I first got in, I couldn’t have imagined wanting to call Cambridge home for years coming. Now I can’t imagine not.

A campus is easy to memorize. Home can be harder to find, rarely looking the way you pictured. But it turns up somewhere along a river, inside a dining hall, in the stacks of Widener library or beneath the fluorescent lighting of a CVS at an hour you'd rather not name. You find it by showing up in the same places, over and over, until one day they start to feel like yours.