This article was originally posted on March 23, 2015. Slight modifications have been made to apply to the current time and year.
HBS Partner Emily Dohse looks at Boston to find the 20 things that graduating ECs have to do before they leave and start their real lives in the real world.
Congrats, ECs! You are |thisclose| to the end of your formal education. I don’t want to throw anyone into a premature nostalgia panic, but there are twenty things you need to do one last time before leaving HBS. The real world has been patiently waiting for you; make sure you’re ready for it.
1. Get started. In April of 1998, The Harvard Crimson published “100 Things to Do Before You Graduate” and ended their list with “Get Started.” I think that’s a great place for ECs to begin, now that you’re in the twilight of your HBS career. Go and get in a good mental space, get your favorite pen out, and start checking things off this list.
2. Attend the EC Gala on April 8th. The Real World doesn’t have regular formal events, so take advantage of this gala. Get dressed up, take photos with fellow ECs, dance until you have to make your friend hold your shoes, and party like it’s prom.
3. Sit on a bench on the banks of the Charles. Take time to just be still, and reflect on everything you have accomplished and are about to achieve.
4. Do Boston stuff. Once you leave Boston, everyone will ask you if you’ve been to Quincy Market, thrown tea into the ocean, and had a beer at Cheers Beacon Hill (the “real” one). Make sure you get to Quincy Market and the Cheers bar – throwing tea into the ocean is just a tourist trap.
5. Go to Dumpling House one last time. Treasure the flavors of your favorite dish.
6. People watch in Harvard Square. If you haven’t done it yet, you haven’t fully lived. Anything can transpire there! Find a comfortable spot and let the world happen around you. You’ll see people putting on performances, exercising their freedom of speech, getting arrested, making things, selling things, taking pictures of nothing, fighting over who gets to stand at the top of the T escalator, and generally being outrageous.
7. Ride the T. Take it to one of the locations in #4. Be sure to hold on.
8. Take a selfie with the Cambridge Turkey. Turkey’s don’t just walk around on the street anywhere, you know.
9. Host or travel for a final Safari dinner. Those will also be hard to pull off in the real world when all your best friends no longer live in the same two buildings.
10. Go to The Donkey Show at the Oberon Theater in Harvard Square. It’s interactive theatre at its finest, and there’s glitter.
11. Organize a bar crawl along the Freedom Trail. Signal it’s time to move on to the next bar by yelling, “The British are Coming!”
12. Ride on a duck boat. Enjoy the thick Bostonian accent of your driver.
13. Go to Fenway for a Red Sox game. See the Green Monstah.
14. Rent bikes and ride them anywhere. Along the river, around Cambridge, at Martha’s Vineyard, up and down the Cape (when it’s warmer…).
15. Pull off one last stunt in class. Finally wear that top hat you have, or do the Macarena during a cold call.
16. Email a professor and ask to be cold called. Prove to yourself you’ve still got it.
17. Share a scorpion bowl with your RC section. Go to dinner, go out for drinks, then do it.
18. Learn a new sport at Shad. Sign up for a class
19. Be on time to Commencement (May 26th!).
20. Go to every single thing you are invited to. Revert back to being the “Yes Man” or “Yes Woman” you were when you started your RC year.
Have other “must do” ideas before the end of the year? Email us at general@harbus.org!
