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.

2. Course selections

Part of Harvard University's campus Elise Amendola/AP

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."

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