Near the end of the summer, I started writing a novel. It doesn’t yet have a title, nor does its narrator have a name. Among my friends, this work in progress has come to be known as “the manuscript.” Its opening scene features a young man at the Mexico City International Airport; the rest is too complicated to explain. I began the fall 2025 semester—my junior year—with the intention to submit “the manuscript” to a small Mexican literary program that pairs aspiring, unpublished writers with well-established novelists. It wasn’t an unreachable goal, really: by the first of December, I would have to submit around 50 pages of 12-point, double-spaced Spanish prose.
I set up a schedule at the end of August: I would write for at least one hour every single day. To keep myself accountable, I even included this resolution at the top of a list of goals that hangs on the wall next to my desk. This list was the very last thing I saw as I closed the door to my dorm before heading back home for Christmas. “Write!” it reads.
Written, I had not. The deadline came and went, and I returned to campus in January with nothing tangible to show for my efforts. This failure troubled me because writing is something I thoroughly enjoy. As a child, I would compose short stories as a way to escape boredom, something to do when I wanted to play. Now in college, I was doing the same thing for the sake of getting into a literary program, and this felt like a necessary justification: a valid reason for me to spend my free time writing fiction. But turning a passion into a task had taken away what I enjoyed most about it. It made me want to stop doing it.
That I felt the need to justify an activity that brings me joy is symptomatic of a broader phenomenon shaping the experiences of many undergraduates. We feel pressured to treat everything we do as a means to an end, even when that renders our activities less exciting. Questions like “What do I enjoy doing?” or “What do I want to learn?” quickly turn into strategies for self-optimization: “What will look most impressive on my résumé?” we ask ourselves, or “What concentration will help me land the job I want to do next?”
The pre-professionalization of extracurriculars perfectly exemplifies this phenomenon. Would-be hobbies are now tools for future success—tools that will help land internships, job offers, or spots in graduate schools. Even activities like artistic clubs and advocacy groups have been affected, becoming sites for networking in the case of the former and instruments for self-fashioning in the case of the latter. In this climate, doing something for its own sake can feel like a rare, subversive act.
The pervasiveness of instrumental thinking affects our academic culture as well. This became clear to me after my friend Hannah invited me to join a reading club she was organizing with Sean D. Kelly, the dean of arts and humanities. Every two weeks throughout the fall semester, a group of students would meet Dean Kelly on the second floor of University Hall to discuss a section of Being and Time, the famously rich (and infamously challenging) work by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. There was something precious about these meetings, something I haven’t found that often in other Harvard classrooms: no one was there for course credit, and none of us intended to use the sessions as a résumé line, either. We were there out of genuine curiosity, and, as a consequence, every conversation felt stimulating and rich.
It is no coincidence that all of us in the Heidegger reading club also joined the Dean’s Student Advisory Board, a program established last September to “promote enthusiasm” for the arts and humanities. The new board comes together at a time when enrollments in the humanities are declining. In the 1970s, almost 30 percent of Harvard College first-year students planned to concentrate in the humanities. By 2022, according to the Crimson’s freshman survey, that number had fallen to 7 percent. Many observers have explained this decrease by pointing to economic pressures. Given the uncertain state of the job market, it can feel dangerous to commit to humanistic disciplines, as opposed to concentrations leading to more lucrative careers in finance, consulting, and technology—the path followed by just over half of College graduates in the class of 2025, according to another Crimson survey.
I think those analyses are correct, but I believe there is another explanation on a more personal, philosophical level. When it comes to the humanities, there is no higher purpose or utility than posing questions and looking for answers, because that quest is an end in itself. The same is true of other domains, such as basic research, where learning and building knowledge are the main sources of value. “We have this finite experience,” professor of organismic and evolutionary biology Benjamin L. de Bivort told me one morning over coffee. “And I think of basic science as a way of connecting this brief existence to the reality we happen to pass through.” Lacking an extrinsic purpose or application, endeavors like this demand that we carve out meaning in them for ourselves. That openness is freeing, but it can also feel frightening.
Would-be hobbies are now tools for success—tools that will help land internships, job offers, or spots in graduate schools.
Of course, this personal explanation is not separate from the economic one. Latching onto a career path with a fixed track can feel less scary, says Julia, a friend of mine who came into Harvard wanting to study comparative literature and the arts before she switched to government. “You go to law school, you become a lawyer, and you live happily,” she explains. “That is really safe. Even having that in mind is really safe.” Such longing for safety shapes how students approach life outside academics, too. Joining a prestigious student organization to rise through its ranks feels safer than, say, spending one’s free time on personal creative or intellectual projects. External recognition takes precedence over self-initiated quests for fulfillment.
IN THE END, and as the parallels with basic science suggest, these anxieties are not specific to the humanities. They are relevant to our very conception of education. I spoke to Dean Kelly about this in his office on a cold Monday morning in December. “The educational experience,” he told me, “should be an experience where we come to feel alive in our communities and in ourselves and in relation to what we’re hoping to be.” He cited Plato, who asserted that education should be a form of “serious play,” and I couldn’t help but think about my own approach to education: originally quite serious, but recently much more playful.
I first came into Harvard wanting to study chemical and physical biology, not really understanding all the possibilities a liberal arts education could offer. During my first semester, I finished my distributional requirements so that I’d be able to focus on biology and chemistry for the next seven semesters. I could picture the sequence of my education with almost perfect clarity: an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, a Ph.D. in computational biology, a postdoctoral fellowship, and then, hopefully, a tenure-track position.
Part of what makes education “play” is that you are not controlling everything.
Yet the more time I spent in the sciences, the more it dawned on me that, if I were to follow the route I had sketched out for myself, then the rest of my academic trajectory would be similar to the kind of life I was leading at Harvard. Do I even want this? I started wondering. Like many around me, I had latched onto a comfortable track, thinking of my education as a series of steps up a straight ladder. I hadn’t thought of college in terms of what it truly was, which is a pedagogical experience. Thus came the most consequential lesson I have learned while in Cambridge—not a fact about biology, but about myself: I didn’t want to be a scientist. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life! Over the next three semesters, I changed my concentration four times. I ultimately landed on philosophy.
Part of what makes education “play,” Dean Kelly told me, is that you are not controlling everything that happens. Students today are afraid of not being in control, he added, and that fact pervades our educational system. Indeed, during the first meeting of the advisory board, we students agreed that diverging from the well-worn path leading toward a career in finance or consulting can feel uncertain and provoke anxiety. In our December conversation, Dean Kelly offered a nudge: “It takes a lot of courage to get beyond that, but I think it’s the people who have that kind of courage [who] will do interesting things, whether that’s in basic science or, you know, writing novels.”
Dean Kelly’s comments reminded me of my own failed plan for the fall semester, and with this insight, I felt motivated to keep on writing. The Mexican literary program will run again in 2027, and I may or may not apply. Either way, though, I’ll make sure to work on “the manuscript.”
