What I learned at Harvard: My Summer Journalism Camp Highlights

The week before school started back (ugh), I attended the Harvard Crimson's Summer Journalism Academy. The Harvard Crimson is the main student newspaper at the College, and they put on a week-long journalism workshop for high school students like myself each year.

Here's hoping I don't get in trouble for using this image from Wikipedia

In the week that I was there, not only did I take more public transportation that in any prior week of my life, but I was also able to work at one of the oldest newspapers at the oldest College in the country. So old, I heard, that some of the dorms are in pretty poor condition. You'd think, with that endowment....

The building where I went to camp every day. I hadn't been to Boston/Cambridge before, and one of my biggest takeaways was that traffic squares can have more (or fewer) than four sides. Harvard College forms a semi-circle around Harvard Square, which is a few blocks away from this building. I really can't describe the Square in words that make sense; suffice it to say it's the main hub of the College, and maybe of Cambridge. I don't really know, I was only there a week.

This was the room where work was done. Along with 21 students, I concocted two stories and got a website going for our articles. You can see the finished result here-trying to learn something new, I used wicked Wordpress for the template.

I did not touch this man's foot on our tour of Harvard College. This statue, an artist's rendering of John Harvard, is one of the prime attractions of summer tourists such as myself, many of whom slap his left foot for good luck. This practice, I was told, was rather unsanitary for a number of reasons, and I had no GermX to slather it with at the time. Google this to learn more, but be careful!

We toured the Boston Globe as part of the camp, as well as the Harvard campus. Interestingly, the Globe was recently sold to the owner of the Red Sox for $70 million, which sounds like a lot until you realize that Dustin Pedroia's contract is for $110 million. No word on whether the Globe had any contract incentives included in the buyout.

It took a Harvard education for one to learn how to spell "college."

I said we toured the Harvard campus-Harvard University, of which Harvard College is the undergraduate school, has taken over much of Cambridge. The Harvard Law School is not on the same plot of land as the library, for example-it's a half a mile down Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge's main drag.

I'll close with a photo of  The Harvard Lampoon, which I was told is a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine. If you look closely, you can see an ibis on the top of the tower, which I was also told is occasionally stolen for fun by Harvard students. Crazy Ivy league kids! The soaking wet flag, by the way, is the official one for my birthstate, California. Why this was hanging here, I shall perhaps never know. 

For the next post, I hope to write about Fenway Park, the first and only major league ballpark I've visited.