Washington-based magazine writer Ted Rose '94 reports that he thought
of Harvard recently while "deep in the Southeast Asian interior, in
the French colonial Laotian city of Luang Prabang. While I was there,
I learned that there was only one American living in the city, working
as a glassmaker next to a beautiful wat near the Mekong River. For
some reason, probably the stifling heat, I became convinced that this
glassmaker surely was a Harvard graduate.
When I found him, an
athletic-looking guy in his late twenties working away in the basement
along with two Lao nationals, I didn't beat around the bush. 'By any
chance, did you go to Harvard?' The graduate of Montclair State
College later told me, over a wonderful dinner at his house, that
questions like mine were precisely the reason he had fled to Luang
Prabang in the first place."
From "Asteroid-Naming in the New Millennium," by Primus V, in "The
College Pump" section of Harvard Magazine, January-February 2001,
Vol. 103, No. 3.
When I decided to apply to Harvard, the first two teachers I
approached for recommendations would not write them. They said that
Harvard was a bunch of comunists, atheists, and snobs, and that I
would flunk out. They also said that if I went there, I would lose my
soul, which sounded fairly intriguing.
William Fitzsimmons, "An Admitted Fascination", The
Gazette (Spotlight on Financial Aid at Harvard), December 2004.
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