Good evening. Hello, welcome. Thank you once again for joining us tonight for our final webinar of the spring. I cannot believe we've done so many of these together. And so grateful that you're here to spend this time with us tonight. 

My name is Jason Meier. I use he/him pronouns, and I have the honor and pleasure of serving as the Associate Dean for Student Engagement at Harvard College. 

I sit within the Dean of Students Office and help support this incredible team with parent and family engagement and our extracurricular community. I'm going to be one of your moderators tonight, along with the incredible, Katie Patrick, who will introduce herself right now. 

Thank you, Jason. So my name is Katie Patrick. I use she/her pronouns. I am the Coordinator for Orientation and Family Engagement, and I work alongside Jason and Lily Castro to coordinate our orientation programs and family engagement events such as these. 

As Jason mentioned, this is our final webinar of the spring semester. And we are so thankful for everyone that was able to join us. And for everyone that watched the recordings at home, we really appreciate your time and for listening to us and spending time with us. So you can find those recordings on our website. I will drop that link here in just a moment. 

But to recap, we have discussed house life and housing day, career services, commencement in the Harvard Alumni Association. And tonight, we are very excited to be joined by some of our college leadership to have a 2023/2024 academic year wrap up conversation. 

This webinar series was designed to allow us to share information with all of our families at one time instead of just sharing our family weekend when we traditionally held these conversations. 

We also started a series like this during the summer for our incoming first-year families, and we had a really great turnout for those and we had a lot of fun. So we wanted to extend that experience to all of our families. 

Before we move into our discussion, we do have a couple quick tips and tricks for tonight. So first, as we mentioned and as you may have heard, this session is being recorded. And we will post those recordings to our website, and that link will also be shared in our family newsletter at the end of the semester. 

And following the session, you will also receive a quick survey. So please take a few moments to complete that. Your feedback really matters and really helps us to figure out what types of topics you all want to hear about, who should we be bringing to you all in conversation. So we really appreciate your feedback there. 

During this webinar, we also have the Q&A feature open and ready. So if you have questions, please start asking them now. We love having these conversations with you all and we want to be able to hear the questions that you have. And so please use that tool now. 

That's right. Thanks for that, Katie. The last piece of information that we want to share with you is regarding a law that parents and family members of all college students should be aware of. 

So this law is known as FERPA, which is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In short, FERPA states that a student's records belongs to them and them alone. So college students that are now in charge of their records and information and staff and faculty cannot share that information with anyone but the student. 

So if you do have questions regarding your student's individual records, be sure to ask them individually. We will not be able to share that information about you. And furthermore, Katie is going to share a link in the chat right now with a little bit more information about FERPA. 

Awesome. So I just sent that link to everyone, as well as where you can find all of our previous recordings. So now to bring up our lovely panelists, to have them introduce themselves, we are going to start with Dunne, Khurana here. 

Hi, Rakesh Khurana. I am a faculty member in the Sociology Department and at the Business School, and I have the great pleasure and gift of serving as dean of the college. 

I'm Amanda Claybaugh. I'm a faculty member in the English Department, and I also serve as the Dean of Undergraduate Education. 

Hey, everybody. I'm Tom Dunne. I'm the Dean of Students at the college. I'm new to Harvard. I joined the community this past summer. So I'm at the midway point of my first year. 

Thanks so much for being here for the three of you in that wonderful introduction. Dean Khurana, having been in many meetings with you over the years, I know that you like to open conversation with the mission of the college. 

So I was hoping you might be able to indulge us and begin that conversation by sharing the mission of Harvard College and spending a little bit of time addressing some of the challenges that we faced as an institution within this last year. 

Well, thanks, Jason. And I just also want to thank you and Katie and the entire team who've been making sure that we've been communicating with our families this year. Really grateful for all the hard work. 

So as Jason said, I always start with the mission. I feel like it really grounds us and reminds us of what our why is. So the mission of Harvard College has been for almost four centuries now to educate the citizens and citizen leaders of our society. It's a mission of college takes quite seriously. 

We help to educate some of the people who imagined this nation and its aspirations. Our students, our faculty, our staff were some of the people who helped lead the anti-slavery and abolition movements. 

Other than the two oldest military academies, no institution has given more lives in service of its nation than Harvard College. And other than the two oldest military academies, no institution has more people awarded the Medal of Honor than the college. 

And this notion of service and service leadership runs through so many dimensions of our collective, civic, intellectual, economic, political, cultural life, trying to make the world more just to discover ideas and voices from the past, to create new ideas. 

And like our own society, there's a great deal that we are proud of, but also recognition that Harvard is not a perfect institution. It hasn't been. We shouldn't be perfect. I think if we are trying for perfection, we're not playing a big enough game. 

But we know, for example, that Harvard hasn't always been as inclusive as it should have been and still could be. So we know that our aspirations run ahead of our reality. 

But we do this through our belief in the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education begins for us with what we call the intellectual transformation, new ways of knowing, new ways of understanding all toward the goal of developing an independent mind. 

We want our students to learn to think for themselves, to search for the truth, but recognize the truth is not easily attained. It has to be discovered, it has to be uncovered, it has to be recovered. Veritas has to be approached with humility. Things that we once believed to be true turned out to be more complex, contingent, or not even true at all. 

And so we embed that in a very diverse living and learning experience where students study alongside students who are different from them, who come from different walks of life, have different identities, evolving identities, which we believe not only deepens that intellectual transformation, but sets the conditions for what we call a social transformation. 

Our understanding what it really means to be part of a community. The community is not a collection of individual interests, and dialogue is not simply the exchange of claims and counterclaims where students learn to see behind each other's eyes, to hear from another's perspective. 

And then through those experiences, we hope our students begin to answer some questions for themselves. Who am I, and who do I want to be? How do I relate to others, and what can I learn from others? What are my gifts and talents, and how can I best use them to serve the world? So a personal transformation. 

This has been quite a year for our institution. I think in many ways, Harvard stands in a pivotal moment in its history. It is a moment that challenges us to reflect deeply on our values, our purpose, and our commitment to excellence and our commitment to inclusivity. 

It's an unprecedented time in some ways for Harvard, but indeed for all of higher education. And I think, as an institution, it's really incumbent upon us to rise to this moment of challenge with courage and humility and determination. 

And I feel like when I look around this grid, and I wish you could see the entire team, we're ready to do so. This has been really a year of listening and we have to acknowledge the rightful demands from stakeholders, students, faculty, staff, parents, society for Harvard to be better, not just for ourselves, but for the world at large. 

And our institution is a beacon of knowledge. I'm looking out the window right now. I can see people just coming to Harvard, standing in front of the John Harvard statue because I think it's a beacon that represents an important idea, high standards of integrity, high standards of inclusivity, high standards of excellence. 

And in the spirit, we also have to stand unequivocally against anti-semitism, islamophobia, anti-Palestinian, and Arab sentiments, hate in any form. And we know that that can not only challenge our context, but it's a poison that can undermine our sense of community and indeed humanity's very foundations. 

The evils of anti-semitism, for example, with its horrific history and devastating impact has to be understood and rejected by all, especially our young people who are our future. 

And so we stand really firmly against all of that and we believe that our strength lies in our diversity and our commitment in fostering an environment of respect, fostering an environment of understanding, fostering an environment of pluralism. And again, I'm really looking forward to not talking at you, but with you. 

But the last thing I want to say as we get into the questions is critiques of Harvard in higher education are not only inevitable, but they're necessary. They push us to reflect, they push us to improve, they push us to endure. 

And we stress tested, been stressed in a lot of ways. We've been looking at ourselves in the mirror. In other cases, the mirror has been put in front of us. As somebody who's owned scholarship critiques, higher education, I think we recognize the value and discomfort of being challenged. 

And sometimes the mediums and the messages are varied, but I think we've really tried to approach every moment of critique and challenge with a sense that it's coming from a good place, and we've tried to approach it with openness rather than defensiveness, with seeking the truth within the feedback and really using it as a growth and improvement moment. 

And we should be fearless in pursuing and hearing the truth. You can't walk 10 feet on this campus without seeing the word Veritas, and we should let it guide us wherever it may be leading us. 

And as I said in just a moment ago, our aspirations run ahead of our reality. And there's things that we haven't done as well as we should have. There's mistakes that have been made. We haven't been consistent always in our institutional messaging. 

We found gaps in our policies and we haven't ensured yet that we're a place where every student has felt like they're free to challenge conventional wisdom or perceive social consensus around a complex issue. 

And so again, we're committed to that, but I think we're also-- the last thing I want to say is the students here are incredible. We feel so lucky and fortunate to be around them. And there's so many things that also have gone right this year and that we're excited about sharing with you. 

Again, not to say that we shouldn't acknowledge all the challenges and things that we're working on. But I also think that sometimes to address the challenges in our world and our society as an institution, you also have to focus on what's right in an institution because that gives you the energy to address the things that you want to work on. So thanks, Jason. 

Awesome. Thank you so much for all those words and for leading this conversation with the mission. I really do agree that it grounds us and grounds our work. So really appreciate that kickoff for us. 

So now we're going to move into some questions that we have. Again, folks, if you have any questions, please throw them in the Q&A. We are going to be asking a few questions, but we hope to pull from there to answer live. So please do that. 

But we're going to start our conversation off with Dean Claybaugh. So talking about kind of different things happening in our campus right now, I was wondering if you could bring forward and talk about some emerging trends that you're seeing in the classroom and across academics. 

That's an interesting question. I would say that the thing that we were all thinking about this year academically was generative AI. And I've learned a lot from watching people around me engage with generative AI and watching how a new technology hits society and the kind of stages of dealing with it. 

So I think in the first stage, there was a lot of focus last summer on the rules and encouraging, making sure that each class had a statement of what appropriate use of generative AI would be, understanding that it has to vary class by class because what's appropriate in one educational context might not be in another. 

Now, we're at a more interesting second phase, which is figuring out what these techniques, what these technologies are good for in the classroom. And I can give you two examples. 

One that may surprise you is we heard a fantastic presentation by Eric Bierbaum, who happens to be faculty Dean of Lowell House, and he's also the head of our Safra Center for Ethics. And he talked about how he's able to use ChatGPT in a large lecture course to encourage students to express a wider range of opinions. 

So in his class, he teaches intro to political theory. And there's a lot of puzzles or philosophical problems that they ask students like, there's 10 people in a lifeboat and there's only room for eight, how do you decide which two get pushed off? 

And he said that over the years, students have become more and more reluctant to speak up for fear of saying the wrong thing or somehow saying something that offends their classmates. 

So what he does now is he has students write their answer down, use a QR code to enter it from their phones, and then ChatGPT immediately collates all the answers, groups them. And so he immediately gets a response that says the answers seem to fall into roughly three groups A, B, and C. 

But then, and this is the really interesting part, he's asked ChatGPT to also flag some outlier comments, some really interesting, quirky, one-offs that nobody else thought. And he'll start off the class by saying, there were three groups, but I actually want to dig into this one interesting outlier idea. He'll bring that forward. 

And often a student in this 100-person lecture class is eager to put their hand up and say, that was me who had that outlier idea that everyone's engaging with. And he said the students who are the outlier ones, they're always students who don't put their hands up normally. 

So it's a way of bringing other voices into the conversation and showing students that the range of opinion is much broader. So that's just one way in which I think we're finding that generative AI is really going to aid our teaching and help us do what we want to do more. 

That's awesome. Thank you so much for that insight. Dean Dunne, I'm going to move to my question for you now. So as you mentioned in your introduction, you are within your first year here. Could you tell us a little bit about what you've seen in your first year that you think is exciting or surprising? 

Exciting and surprising is driving on Storrow Drive. The driving here is an experience. Very invigorating. I think I would say something that surprised me is the strength of the house communities here. I have the ability to eat in many of the houses. And so I eat there with my family. We live right in Harvard Square, and we'll go to the houses for dinner. 

And I think in part my sense is that the size of the houses, the literal size of the dining rooms is the right size for people to all seem to know each other. It really stands out to me that people in the dining halls are in conversation with each other, not on phones and laptops, which have always really been struck by. 

I recently had the HoCos, the student leadership of the houses come to my house for a social, and they highlighted a bunch of the annual events that take place. 

And just the range of really creative celebratory programs that happen in the houses I think is something that when I think of what's unique about Harvard and what's a real strength of the experience, that's something that really comes to mind for me. 

That's great. Thank you so much. So going off of some different events and things that you've seen-- Dean Khurana, I know one thing that I love the most is looking at your Instagram, if anyone has not followed. 

So I see all the different things that you go to on our campus and around. So I would love to hear, what are some of your favorite events and traditions that you have partaken in or seen at Harvard? 

Well, first of all, let me apologize for my Instagram because my kids make fun of it. I'll get texts from them sometimes saying, please clean your lens. And things are smudgy. 

Well, one thing I really like to do is just be around the students. It's such a gift. Every day I literally walk into the gates and pinch myself that I get to be around the students at this moment in their life, in which they are forming, but they're also teaching me. 

The thing is that my mom always used to tell us about the importance of keeping a beginner's mind. It's philosophical tradition or spiritual tradition in some areas. And it's the idea of being able to have the sense that you don't know it all. And in fact, that actually the way that you currently look at the world is also a way of not seeing other parts of the world. 

And so having our students and just being in conversation with them and in dialogue with them has been really, really helpful. Obviously, we all have our experiences that we can bring with being older. And sometimes having that can be helpful. 

But I find that one of the most important things is just listening and hearing the students, encouraging them, like we did the other day, which was this incredible thing. I don't know if people fully could imagine what Harvard yard looked like the other day during the eclipse. 

Faculty had canceled or delayed classes, or they were holding the classes outside. Our Dean of Students Office had bought eclipse glasses, I'm looking for them, they're around here somewhere, for everybody. And people put the screens down. And I didn't see anybody looking at screens, and they were in groups. 

And there was no like concert, there was no music. There was a sense of just togetherness and this humility of all of us looking up at this amazing celestial event and a sense that, you know what, we're all on this-- this is the only planet we have. 

Like the way Carl Sagan used to say it, this is our little pale blue dot. Anything that's ever lived, as Carl Sagan used to say-- I went to Cornell, so I'm going to quote him a lot. 

He said, anyone who's ever lived, anyone who's ever died, anyone who's ever done anything, and everybody who's ever been born, everybody who's ever had an idea, every good thing that's ever happened, every bad thing that's happened, it's only happened on this planet. 

And it just reminds us that we're all in this together. That despite right now challenges about focusing on real challenges, this is the only thing that we have. We have each other. 

And I really felt when we were all looking at that clip, something transcendent, something bigger than all of us. And I have to say that and then obviously the sort of total rave that was yard fest the other day, which is like two back to back amazing sort of community events. And I wish other people could have been here to witness that because it could show what's possible. 

So I'd say those are the kinds of things that really I don't know if I could ever capture that in an Instagram picture, but it's those moments of truth. And you see them thousands of times a day on this campus. 

They're happening on the shuttle bus, in the dining hall, in a classroom, a conversation, a walking out saying, what do you think of that idea? Oh, I'm so glad that you thought differently about that because I think it really opened up the conversation. 

Like, those things are the transformative experience. There's not one moment. It's an accretion of lots of these little things. And that when you look back, students are like, wow, I'm changing. I'm becoming the person I wanted to be. So that's always been amazing. Sorry I took so long, but it was just really powerful these last few days. 

Definitely. It has been such a fun time on campus these last few days with all the events. So that leads into a really great question. Amanda, I would love to hear your perspective. What do you enjoy most about working with our students from your role? 

Yeah, just a little biographical background. I was a graduate student here in the '90s, and then I went and taught at Columbia University for 10 years before I came back. 

And so had a really vivid sense when I came back of how Harvard-- I would have thought that basically all the students who go to Ivy League schools are the same, right? That they're all applying to all the same schools and it's kind of random who goes where. 

When I came back to Harvard, I was really struck by what I take to be distinctive of the Harvard students, which is that they take what they're learning in the classroom and they want to carry it out into the world. And it is an incredible aspect of them, their kind of energy and entrepreneurial ability to not just learn something here, but to make a difference out in the world. 

And so I've learned so much from them in that way because that's not how I was. Like, I took what I learned in the classroom and stayed in the classroom and became a professor. So it's really energizing and exciting for me to see this other way of processing knowledge. 

And I have to say that on days when there's a lot of meetings or the work feels hard, I just talk to some senior about what they're up to and what it all added up to, and it just re-energizes me. 

I would say that what I hope for us in the future is to do more to help students tell that story about their time here. I think right now I feel like we're not-- students have some-- we haven't yet really helped students articulate what their education is for and about, or we could maybe do more of that for a new generation. 

So I think students right now, they sometimes think about what they're doing in the classroom in terms of the jobs that it will get them or they'll talk about credentialing. Like, I'm doing a concentration, but then I'm going to do a secondary field and I'm going to do a language citation, or maybe I should do a concurrent master's. There's all these kinds of credential things. 

What I think the students who really thrive here are students who can tell a narrative about going from the classroom to the world, whether that's through their research. 

I think talking to students about senior theses, whether they did their research in a lab or in an archive or in a site somewhere halfway around the globe, if you ask them what question are you asking, and why does that question matter to you, they will tell incredible stories about something that came from their background, something that's important to their community or their political or religious commitments, some class they took that totally sparked a new way of thinking. And they see how it all came together into here's the question I want my thesis to answer, and this is what that answer is going to mean to me. 

So I think of research first when I think about learning outside the classroom because I'm a professor. But I think students make just as much meaning when they go global, when they study abroad for a semester, when they do an internship abroad over the summer, when they learn what it's like to work in a foreign city, in a totally different culture. So going global, learning languages. 

Another thing that I think is really a way for them to connect the classroom to the world is through public service. And one of the things we're really proud of that we launched this year is our certificate in civic engagement, which enables students to take their coursework and connect it to 300 hours of really serious public service out in the world to say, what am I learning, and how is that shaping the service I'm doing to my society? 

And then I think there's room in the innovation space. I think we have a lot of really exciting kind of startup opportunities for our students at the Innovation Lab in our Lemann Center for Creativity and Entrepreneurship. And those are often places where students, again, take an idea they learned about and then run with it through an incubator. 

So I think one of my goals for next year is to really think about how to listen to how students tell that story of taking things out into the world, and then help incoming students think about their time here in that same way. 

Thanks for that, Amanda. We have an incredible question in the Q&A and would love your insight and anyone else who would like to jump in. 

So as the parent of a rising senior, how would you advise to support that student's transition from Harvard College to the professional world? Or if the student is considering a PHD, would you recommend going into that program immediately or taking a few years off? 

Well, I think if I put on our PhD advisor hats, I think we would both say-- so this is us speaking as professors, not as deans, I think we both say it's good to take some time off before the PhD. I think students who thrive in PhD programs do so if they're aware of other options. 

I always tell my students, you need to go out into the world and learn about some other form of meaningful work before you come back in and do your PHD because you should always have an exit strategy when you're doing a PhD. 

And you should always be able to imagine if an academic career doesn't end up making sense-- oh, my goodness, my lights just-- sorry, I have to wave my arms now because I have motion sensitive lights. OK, they're back on. Sorry, guys. That was embarrassing. So I would say take a break for the PhD track. 

So how to prepare for the professional world track, I put my dean hat back on and say we have an incredible-- the Mignone Center for Career Success stands there, stands ready there. 

If your child doesn't know how to get started with that, just email me and I will connect them. But there's an incredible team there who can give really the best possible advice about that. 

And we have an incredible webinar that you all have access to with staff from the Mignone Center. So lots of pearls of wisdom from their experience in supporting our students as they navigate what can be a very complicated entry into whatever that next step may be, whether it's the working world or another degree. 

We have another incredible question that's very front of mind. I know for so many people right now across the country, not just parents and families at Harvard, but Rakesh, I was hoping you could speak to this very briefly. How are, and if they are, what's happening with the vast delays in Harvard financial aid? 

Thanks. I know that this isn't the headlines around the FAFSA, which is the submission of federal financial aid submission documents. If you go to the website and/or you Google Harvard College FAFSA and go to the news section, you'll see the following statement. 

And it says, how will the delayed FAFSA processing impact admissions or financial aid decisions? And says, do not worry! Delayed FAFSA submissions will not impact the timing of admissions or financial aid decisions at Harvard. 

So there's more underneath that. If you're admitted and if you've submitted and have all the necessary tax returns to IDOC, which is by our financial aid application deadline, the decision will be available at the time of admission. 

So I want people to know that there's folks who are in the financial aid office who can answer specific questions. I do know that it's a stress for many other folks. 

But I think at our institution, they've been really leaning into proactive to make sure that we don't have this unnecessary anxiety as we're really proud of our financial aid program. The majority of our students are receiving some aid. 

And we know that colleges and universities are not cheap. I know that from personal experience. And so this can be very stressful and we're really trying to make sure that we're providing information. And at least at Harvard specifically, this is the approach you can take. 

Thanks for that, Rakesh. I do want to remind all of our participants who are watching live, if you do have questions to go ahead and add them to the Q&A so we can address those for you. 

Awesome. Thank you all so much. I'll jump back into the questions that I have for you. So Dean Dunne, I'm going to hand this off to you next. We talked a little bit about growth in the classroom. 

I would really love to hear what advice you would have for families if their student is looking to maybe grow outside of the classroom and get involved in some organizations on campus, take on some leadership roles. What advice do you have for them there? 

Yeah, I think, Katie, the first thing is to encourage students to cast a wide net for advice. There's a number of people within the residential system, for example, paths, tutors, proctors, many of whom have long standing relationships at Harvard and would be helpful to say, hey, here's some things that I think are interesting. 

The majority of student organizations at Harvard are open to any student. And so I think there's sometimes a sense, particularly with first year students, that you join a group at the beginning of the year and then the moment has closed because the activities fair is over. And that's certainly not the case. 

I know a ton of groups that are eager and really excited to welcome members throughout the year. And so it just takes a little bit of initiative on behalf of the student to get on the SOCO app and cold call a group, which is a good life skill, and email a president and say, hey, I'm interested in your group. 

I also think it's really important at Harvard to change your thinking about your approach to a place like Harvard now that you're at Harvard is it should be different. 

And I would encourage-- if I was talking to one of my own kids, I would say, what's something that you're not good at? What is something that you have never done before? 

Because I think one of the great things about a place like Harvard that's residentially-based, everyone's living, studying, eating here together, is this is your probably one chance in life to become a European clog dancer or whatever it is that you maybe never thought you'd be interested in. 

And I think that it's a good exercise. You develop good life skills post-college to say, what's it like to try something that's new and also something I feel like I might not initially succeed right away? 

And there's been a lot of discussion around the achievement culture in this country and burnout. And a great way to counteract that is to do something that surprises your family, surprises yourself. 

It's OK if you're terrible at it. I think people here really appreciate commitment and dedication, even if you're not the best singer or you've never done that activity before. So that's the advice I would give. 

And I think I love the moments where someone decides to do something in the spring of their senior year because they recognize, OK, this is my last chance for some of this stuff. 

And to keep writing your Harvard story as you're in it and not feel like, oh, I set my course as a first year or second year student, and then I just continued that narrative until graduation. 

I love the people that discover something in those last months and jump on board and try something. So I think that's the advice I would give to my own kids. Run out there and be terrible at things. It's going to be OK. You can have fun. 

I'd love that so much, Tom. Just for our viewers watching live and on recording, I did drop a link to something that Tom referenced called SOCO. Stands for the Student Organization Center Online. 

So it is behind a login. So you as a parent or family member will not have access, but it does contain contact information, upcoming events, and information about all of our 500 plus organizations. 

There is a question in the chat that I want to address and really speak about, Tom, that you mentioned. We do want our students to explore, try new things, but there is an application for some certs, some types of clubs, right? 

There is a capacity to some of the things you could do. We love our acapella troupes, but they can't take everyone. We love some of our theater troupes, but there isn't a role for everyone. And so there is a process for some. 

What we have learned in the course of the year is that we're sitting at around 60% of our organizations are free and open to all students at all times. And so, yes, there are some that are a little more competitive than others in terms of applications and becoming a part of it. 

And what I would say is if you don't get in the first time, for that student to go back to the leadership of that org and say, What could I have done to make my application stronger? and then come back real strong, right? 

Jason, if I could just add one thing to what you and Tom said. I was a faculty dean in one of the houses. You don't have to comp a house. The houses have so many things. They put on musicals, they have competitions of dancing. They are ways to participate in social building house community. There are cooking clubs. 

I just think also that one thing I know that we have some of these organizations where you have to try out or they feel like you're competitive to get in. 

But one thing I have to just want to tell people, you don't have to comp community at Harvard. There's so many places to just come in-- and in particular, Residential Life. 

And our houses are pretty unique at just having a huge tent where always-- whether you're at the back of the tent in the beginning of the year, you could-- I always love to your point, Tom, the students who ran to the center of house life in their senior year. It's never too late. 

There's another great question in the chat about sophomore orientation. And so I'm going to link to it for everyone in the larger webinar chat. It is not mandatory, but goodness gracious, will it help you acclimate in a really meaningful way. 

There is a wonderful online Canvas course, which we really encourage our sophomores to be engaged in, as well as an incredible slate of programming really designed to welcome our students to their house community and get to know the intricacies. 

Because as Rakesh shared, every house is so unique and so different. And so we're hopeful that we will be able to welcome your students in a meaningful way through that. So thank you for those great questions and we'll keep adding them on. 

Thank you so much. My next question is for Dean Khurana. And I would love to hear if there's some-- from our students first time on their campus, so from orientation to their senior year, what are some changes that you see in our students from the time that they arrive to commencement? 

I mean, each student has their own story. So everybody writes their own chapter through Harvard. And one of the things that's just amazing to me-- I serve as a first year advisor, and then get to be with students until they graduate. 

I would say there's three things that are really amazing. One is you still see students trying to figure out like, OK, how do I share my high school resume with people? 

And so dropping lots of things that they were doing in high school as a way of very understandably kind of establishing themselves and also maybe trying to convince others that they belong here. And every student here belongs here. And that's like the one thing I always tell them. I was like, we're so lucky to have you. 

But you can still sense that you're trying to find your people, you're trying to figure out what you want to do. You're trying to figure out who you are independently of your parents and families. 

And then by the time you see them as seniors, how put together they are, and the dialogue and the sense-- and they've totally changed what they said they were going to study where they had maybe in the beginning reverse engineered becoming a Supreme Court justice. 

And now they're going on to do something incredible in some organization, or they've decided that like they're hearing the calling of getting a PhD or going to work as a teacher in middle school where they just-- they loved school and it was where they felt most alive. 

And I just love watching that, just seeing people comfortable in their own skin. Because at the end of the day, the goal of our liberal arts and science education-- I talk about it as intellectual, social, and personal. 

Part of what liberal arts and sciences do, especially residential liberal arts and sciences program, is that we see the whole person. And when we talk about intellectual, social, and personal, we know they're all interacting and interweaving with each other. 

And to see that kind of developing is pretty amazing because at the end of the day, we want our students to leave with a sort of inner core, a kind of inner strength so that when the world pushes at you, you have something to push back with. 

So actually, the situation that Amanda described. Maybe in the first couple of years, you might have felt shy about having a non-conforming point of view or something that was a little heterodox. But actually, by the time you leave, you're actually confident in your ability to do that. And you could do it in a way that invites engagement, that invites critique. 

And that when you hear something challenging, rather than sort of shying away from it, you inquire. That's really interesting. Where did you get that perspective from? How did you get to that point? Have you thought about other approaches? 

So you see people leading with questions. It's almost like the opposite of what you see in the first year, where often they're leading with advocacy or statements and declarations versus leading with questions and inquiry and curiosity, and it's something to behold. 

Can we all chime in on that one? OK. So I would say that one thing think about a lot is it's really hard to get into college and it's really hard to get into Harvard. 

And so our students come to us at the end of a 13-year marathon, and they often come to us thinking of having become habituated to thinking of the classroom as a place where it's stressful, it's a place of anxiety. 

It's a place where they need to perform, where they need to jump through hoops, where the question-- they've gotten into Harvard and now the question is, what's the next step for them? 

And the transformation that I love to see and what I find really re-energizing about talking to seniors is for most of them, by the end, the classroom has become a place not of stress and anxiety, but of deep meaning and joy. 

Like, if you ask them a question like why is your concentration the best concentration, they will say, because as an econ major or as a French major or as a physics major, I now see the world differently. I got a pair of lenses from my concentration, and the world looks different to me. And it helps me answer, as I said earlier, the questions that matter most to me. 

So they find joy in what they're learning, they find meaning in it, and they also are less concerned about getting the A than in pushing themselves and falling a little short, but then learning something out of that and trying again. 

So to me, the happiest moments are when students say-- I just talked to a senior actually last weekend who said, I never thought I was good at science. And then I started taking classes here in my first year and I realized maybe when science is well-taught, I can do it. 

And she said, I majored in neuroscience, and it was hard for me. But I am so proud of myself for that challenge and now I'm graduating with a neuroscience degree. 

And those kinds of stories about people who really push themselves to do a hard thing that is challenging but meaningful without worrying about the grade at the end of it, I think that's the development that we're all really eager to see. 

Amanda, I think that's so beautifully ties into a question that's in the chat, when we are learning for joy and doing things because we see that value in learning knowledge. 

So I'm curious about where do you see the study of humanities headed right now, especially as more and more seem to be leaning towards majors that might guarantee what they perceive to be financial success? 

Yes, so up until 18 months ago, this is a question that comes up a lot. And there's another question in the question box. I see my child wants to study in English, but everyone's asking him, what's he going to do with that? Please have your child write to me. I will reassure him. 

And what I would say about that to the child who's worried that they can't get a job out of English is I'll say what I say to all students, which is that getting ready for a career is a really consequential decision, actually. And so you should, in doing it, rely on more than the advice of some sophomore who told you what the savvy path is. 

I think our students are a little too influenced sometimes by, oh, no, everyone knows if you do English, you can't get a job. Well, let's test that hypothesis. Why don't you go and talk to the Career Success Center and say, what do people do with English concentrations and see what the answer is and see if that sounds good? That's what I will encourage your son to do when he emails me. 

But about the bigger question. So as I said, 18 months ago, I would have had an answer like that. But generative AI has really changed the landscape about stem in the humanities in ways that I think are going to unfold over the next five years and be very surprising. 

So one of the things I did this year was serve on-- I co-led a committee on the future of generative AI and education with our colleague, a physics professor who's the dean of science. And that was an incredible learning opportunity for me because he is a genius at stem and I am not. 

But what he very strongly believes is that ChatGPT and generative AI is going to be transformative because it decreases the salience and value of knowing how to code because now you can write computer programs with words. I can tell ChatGPT do this, and it writes the program based on just my words about what I want it to do. 

And so what he thinks is that that makes computer science less of automatic thing, but it also raises a whole host of new questions about what kind of effect is this technology going to have on our world. 

What is it going to have on our work life, on our political system? What happens to the arts? Who owns the poems and the songs that are being hovered up by ChatGPT and pushed back out? All of these are questions facing us as a society that we actually need all the liberal arts disciplines to help us answer. 

So I think there's going to be a recentering or a redistribution of interest across the discipline. So of course, there's still a place for computer science, for students who love it and who want to be out there in the frontiers designing the next generation of large language models. That's absolutely a path. But I think it's no longer going to be quite the default path. I think there's going to be a broader range of opportunities for students. 

And if I can just add something. The other day, Amanda, Tom, and I were at an event where an alum who graduated about 30 years ago, Dr. Rajapaksa, was an English major and she's a physician and a national figure on communicating science and health. 

And people asked her, well, what are you going to do with that? Well, she was such an impressive person and she loved the English language. And it's clear that she connected all of these things together. 

I think just to add the last thing Amanda said, each of these are a way of seeing the world. You can be an English major or concentrate, but it doesn't make you an English professor any more than studying economics as an undergrad makes you an economist. 

It's a pathway to seeing the world, and it's one step of what really is more about integrating a lot of different ways, which is really what liberal arts and science is about. 

That's awesome. Thank you all so much for that. My final question, and it's the same question for all of you, so I will open it up, is just if you could share any new and exciting initiatives in your area that you want to highlight now while we have the families with us. And I can hand it off to Dean Khurana first. 

Well, I think there's one that all three of us are kind of working on really closely together around intellectual vitality. This is been something that for the last couple of years that the college has been working on. 

We in conversations with students over the last couple of years recognized and heard from students that when they would get into the classroom or in conversations with friends, they felt like sometimes on certain topics, difficult, complex topics, charged topics, they were kind of walking on eggshells. 

And this was coming from a variety of different areas we tried to really diagnose and understand. One being that as Amanda said, high schools have changed a lot. And what you needed to succeed in high school is different than what happens in college. 

We also know that our students are coming from highly stratified societies. Many of us are not-- there's a lot of sociological data. We don't grow up with a lot of diversity of perspectives and points of view, socioeconomic diversity around us, international, global, cultural diversity. 

And Harvard is really one of the first places that young people are coming to really meet people who are different from them, coming from different walks of life and different identities. And we put all this effort to do that. 

What we learned is how important it is to set up the norms and the culture where people can really engage meaningfully with each other across their differences to also find what they have in common, to be hard on the problem and easy on each other, to approach each other with a sense of grace, but also the skills in order to do that. 

The reality is there's not a lot of role modeling right now from those of us who are older, showing students and younger people are the capacity to change our mind, our willingness to change our mind rather than double down on something. 

And so a lot of what we're working on is in this area of intellectual vitality. It's been going on for the last couple of years, but it's really taking off in the fall but has really begun in full earnest this year. And I'll pass it on to others and glad to share other things as well, but also direct people to the intellectual vitality website. 

Yeah, I would just add we had an earlier-- I want to say a bit about an event that happened earlier this week that meant a lot to me. In this year, I've spent a lot of time thinking-- I think we saw a lot of examples of bad ways for people to respond to contentious international events, contentious political questions. 

And I spent a lot of time thinking about what good ways are and specifically what a good way to respond to these events that is in keeping with our mission as an educational institution, right? 

So I want Harvard to be a place where students debate, where they feel free to express what they believe about these issues, where they feel ready and able to listen to what other people believe. 

But I also feel, and this is the professor in me, that I want college to be a place where they also learn more about these issues. And one of the stories that worried me the most in the fall was actually one that did not get a ton of national press, was a story about a first year student whose friends asked him, what do you think about Israel-Palestine? And he said, I don't know. I don't have an opinion. I don't know enough. 

And he was really ridiculed and shamed. And so his advisor found out about this and was very supportive and helped him. But thought, I never want-- we are a school. I always wanted to be OK to say, I don't know. I want to learn. 

And so with that in mind, Tom and I have been setting up these dinners where we invite students, about 30 students to sit down with faculty who are experts in a subject and just talk the subject through, not like arguing point versus point, but just saying, oh, that's interesting. So if you think that, what follows from that? I don't quite get this part of your argument. What about this objection I've heard of? 

And so the faculty, two faculty who disagree with each other kind of productively frame the conversation. Then people sit in small groups, the students and the faculty talking, and then we reconvene as a large group to discuss what everyone sort of learned. And then the students leave, and this is my favorite part, with copies of the faculty's books in their hands so they can keep learning and thinking about this issue. 

And so we've had two. This spring we had one on war, on two experts on how wars start and what we know about how they end, and how this might shape actions people want to support in any of the many conflicts that are going on around the world right now. 

And then just earlier this week, we hosted another one on politics in the university, where students were able to ask a lot of questions they had about what the best way forward is. So I feel very encouraged about by these events because they show what I think the college can do at its best. 

I think, Katie, a project I'm excited about is launching this Friday evening is a kickoff for Harvard Votes, which is a student-run project that's been at Harvard for a number of years, but works-- it's this great sort of connective body that is student-run and directed, but they work with colleagues in the PBHA and also Harvard's IOP Institute of Politics. 

And this social on Friday is faculty, students, and staff coming together. We have someone from a national voter engagement NGO coming, and it's really our kickoff preparing for the election cycle next November. 

And I think that it's been a thread referenced. I think Amanda talked earlier about students really being eager to connect what they're learning inside the classroom and on-campus with the greater outside world. This is a great way for them to do that. 

The first thing that we're focused on as a priority is engaging as many community members as we can who are at Harvard with voting themselves, being informed, educated, engaged voters. 

But then also there's this opportunity to help lead voter engagement efforts in their home communities so that many of our students are here in the fall, but want to vote absentee in their home state. 

And so after they go through the process of figuring out how am I going to do absentee, many of our students are voting for a presidential election for the first time, which is a really cool experience. 

But also identifying ways that our students have these incredible projects where they stand up over the summer, webinars for high school students from all over the country to think about how you register their peers as seniors in high school looking at voter engagement, how voters can navigate the process in their home states. 

And so that's something that's really exciting. It'll be a big part of the fall. And if people are looking for things for their students to be involved in, that's, again, one of these opportunities that's open to everyone. So you can take a look at the Harvard Votes page and all the student contact information is there. 

That's awesome. Are there any other final thoughts or anything? 

I just wanted to just thank all of our family and all the guardians who are taking care of our students. One of the things I really love always meeting is the parents. And you can see that the acorns didn't fall far from the trees. There's just a wonderfulness about the families. 

I also just want to maybe just-- I know, again, as we started, Jason, you asked the questions been challenging. But so many things have gone right this year. 

The record number of Rhodes scholars with international more than-- 12 Rhodes Scholars, six Marshall Scholars. Our colleagues have won the Nobel Prize in economics, a number of international academies. People have won the kind of research that makes a real difference. 

And again, I just want to maybe end where we started, which is this is a challenging moment for higher education, but we also need your help. We need people to be ambassadors for education. I know that, again, there's things that we have to do better, but I think we all hopefully here is that how education can really transform lives. 

And so think about ways to talk about, whether it's whatever institution that you're connected to, a high school or an education, tell people about your own experiences, tell people how education changed your life and impacted your life. I think we have to remind ourselves of how important it is. 

And the last thing I would say is that, again, Harvard is an institution that is always in the process of becoming. Again, we're not a perfect institution, but we're an institution that helped birth this country. We're 140 years older than the nation. 

We're an institution that came through the Civil War and came out stronger from it, created a more and our journey toward more inclusion through World Wars, through depressions, the pandemics. 

Don't lose faith in the power of education. And we're not going to shy away from the challenges ahead. We're going to meet them with courage, integrity, humility, innovation, the things that have always defined this institution. 

And that together, I think, all of us in the community, all of you as family members will help us ensure that Harvard is not only a place of academic excellence, but a touchstone of hope and possibility and positive change in the world. 

And we hope you see that change in your students, in your children as they've spending their formative years with us here in Cambridge. And the journey continues. The university will endure and continue trying to be the best version of itself. And I believe that our community will only grow stronger as we tread this path together. Semper Veritas. 

Thank you so much for those closing words. And I just want to share our panelist's contact information. If you do have any questions, they're more than happy to chat with you. And if you do have any questions that you have for Jason and I, you can reach us here at the parents email. Send us a note, and I'm more than happy to chat with you. 

And thank you all so much, again, for your time. It has been so lovely sharing this space with you. And we really look forward to continuing these conversations with you all in the future. 

See you soon. Thank you.