Harvard is ultimately special to me because of the people I’ve met here. 

When I come home on vacation, people ask me about my classes. While I’ve learned lots in my classes, some of my most formative experiences so far have happened through community engagement outside the classroom.

I grew up in a military family, moving all around the country and the world, but my experience at Harvard has still heralded a lot of firsts in terms of meeting new people from different backgrounds. So much of my learning in college has happened not just in classes, or even clubs, but in the time spent learning from the perspectives and stories of my community members here on campus.

One of my favorite ways Harvard works to bring its students together is through the Presidential Initiative on Interfaith Engagement. The Initiative is a project of Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber. It began in 2025 with the aim of supporting pluralism across Harvard. They host events that increase students’ awareness of their peers’ cultural and spiritual traditions through interfaith dialogue.

My first experience with the office was through a posting in one of our email lists about an interfaith dinner. I sometimes struggle with small talk. I never abandoned the childish “why” as my favorite question, and I’m the kind of person who likes to get to the heart of things. So a dinner with facilitated discussions about belonging and being a part of something larger than one’s self seemed like a great way for me to meet new people.

As I sat around the table with my group, I felt genuinely listened to by people who were just as curious about my beliefs and experiences as I was about theirs. The discussion facilitators made the space feel safe enough for me to express myself. One of the group norms was “lessons leave; stories stay.” It really helped set the expectation that people were there to learn from one another. Thoughts that ordinarily felt too vulnerable or tender for me to share flowed easily across that table.

Another great aspect of the initiative is that it is university-wide. This means that I had the opportunity to connect not only with my peers at the college, but also with students, faculty, and staff from across all of our graduate programs as well. My favorite example of this full community on display was at the Across this Table Event. Three enormous tables were set up for dinner in our campus center. Seat cards were arranged so that college students, graduate students, faculty, and staff were all encouraged to intersperse. I even ended up sitting across the table from President Garber! Seeing my faculty and staff at that event sharing their stories really humanized them for me as a student.

Perhaps the best thing that came out of my experience with the Interfaith Initiative was how it helped me connect with one of the other freshmen from my dorm. He helped plan interfaith events, and by the end of my first year, he knew I enjoyed going to them, so he’d tell me about new events they were planning when I saw him in the stairwell or out in the yard.

Eventually, he told me he and some other students and staff were working on an interfaith hike! Having noticed that nature was often a common theme in the stories people shared, they’d planned an event for Harvard community members to walk through the woods together and talk about their spiritual, cultural, and ethical traditions.

The day of the hike, Massachusetts threw its rainy spring weather at us, but the group was in such good spirits. We had conversations about how people reconcile religion and science, conversations about how our beliefs guided our pursuits in college, and how our beliefs had evolved over time. I learned so much about my classmates, especially my friend from my dorm.

There are many people I’ve met through Harvard’s Interfaith Initiative who I would not otherwise have encountered, either because they’re graduate students, because they’re in different student organizations than I am, because they take classes in different departments, or because they are in different religious groups on campus. Yet my Harvard experience has been so much richer because of them and their perspectives.