Feature

Post-Reunion Musings

Nora Khan

I have just returned from my fifth year Harvard College reunion, held this past weekend on the main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Of the near thousand people I graduated with, about three hundred friends, colleagues, and acquaintances returned to commune, reminisce, and gaze with wary anticipation at the members attending the concurrent 10th, 15th, and 20th year reunions. Crossing the Yard through the “adult” alumni camps with my former roommates and best friends, we maneuvered through milling, excited families of older graduates guarding their children, all teeming and brash.

A band strummed in the welcome tent, placed outside the Science Center, where I once used to hustle to check my e-mail between classes. We were quickly surrounded by classmates, their faces entirely familiar and yet strange. I'd distinctly felt as though I'd both arrived home to a like community, and also been thrown adrift amongst a group of fascinating, driven adults who it would take more than a strained conversation over soup to re-commune with. Slowly, I caught up over the next two days with peers who now work in the publishing industry, are fellow poets, journalists, young editors at journals, budding historians, new doctors beginning the grind of residency in New York City, entrepreneurs in Ghana.

I'd managed my nerves as I'd spent last week leading up to the weekend reflecting in whole on my college experience, on the lessons and individuals I had the astounding fortune of encountering at Harvard. I can say, with confidence, that I determined my life calling, to write, as an undergraduate. There, I explored a wide berth of knowledge, within the (very wide) binds of French and British history, continental philosophy, criticism and theory, and English and American literature. This range allowed flexibility for exploration, which in turn prompted my mind to self-motivate to discern the core of my intellectual interests.

I went to a competitive preparatory school in Washington, D.C. and been raised, thanks to two very committed, open-minded parents, to keep my intellectual interests varied and broad. I'd been head of a political debate magazine, helped edit my high school literary journal, and thrived in both sciences and the humanities. I entered college with a clear sense of the importance of exploration and diversity in interests; college would clearly be a space for intellectual play. “Play” is an often misunderstood concept, usually suggesting mindless indulgence. Yet, imaginative, “free play” is essential for a healthy mind. Given the sheer number of intellectual titans at Harvard, from the poet Jorie Graham to James Wood to Henry Louis Gates, it seemed obscene to lock into a closed field. Literature, of course, is the ultimate space of imaginative play, and after three years of English courses and creative writing workshops, I began a creative thesis, a novel, under mentorship of the novelist Jamaica Kincaid.

At reunion, I heard from a few peers that they regretted not taking a broader range of classes outside of their concentration. My central piece of advice to young Bangladeshis looking to apply to university in America is to keep an open mind: your interests will change. Thinking of yourself merely in terms of a career path can potentially close off opportunities to explore the knotty depths of your mind to their limits. After reunion, I am increasingly cognizant of one fact: without committing to explore varied fields of thought during my first three years of college, I most likely would not have taken the lunge to take a fiction workshop, and hence never have recognized fiction as a calling until much later in life - or never at all.