Joint Orientation Hosted by Harvard University Housing
Last night, I went to an event called Cambridge 101 Orientation, which was hosted by Harvard University Housing (HUH). HUH is an organization which offers housing to the graduate students, faculty, and employees. I now live in 5 Cowperthwaite Street, which is part of HUH. It is only a seven-minute walk to HKS, and it was newly built in 2007. This apartments in this building are for a single occupants or couples with at most one child. I have never experienced trouble since I arrived here, because my room has a bathroom and a kitchen, and the apartment has common study rooms, a laundry room, and a training gym.
Today's event is a joint orientation for people who recently moved to 5 Cowperthwaite and two other neighboring apartment buildings, 10 Akron and Peabody Terrace. Around fifty people attended the event. Four to five HKS students were there. In addition, there were students from the Law School and Graduate School of Education, PHD students, fellows of a research center, and their spouses. For the first hour, coordinators of the event explained safety issues, shopping, and Harvard's institutions such as libraries or gyms. After that, a networking social was held for one hour. Although attending the social was optional, most people attended it.
A Classmate from Argentina
At the social, I was happy to meet an MPA2 classmate from Argentina. He said that he would like to focus his study on economic policy at HKS. Since we shared the same interest in economic policy, we hit it off with each other. He taught me a famous saying, "There are four types of countries: developed, undeveloped, Japan and Argentina." by Simon Kuznets, a Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1971. Kuznets saw Japan and Argentina as exceptions: Japan rapidly grew from a developing country to a developed country after WW2, and Argentina dropped from a developed country to a developing country after the 1930s due to political instability and so on. I got interested in and looked up the Argentine economy. I found that Argentina is an interesting country which has a lot of topics to be talked about. As for its trade policy, Argentina continues to take a protectionist policy. In 2012, Japan, the US, and the EU requested the establishment of a WTO panel to resolve trade issues with Argentina. As for energy issues, Argentina holds the third largest amount of shale gas in the world. Argentina might be a key country to understand Japan's trade policy and energy supply strategy, which I would like to study at a HKS.
In addition to him, I talked with an Australian PHD candidate in physics who can speak Japanese and an Indian cartoonist who will be a research fellow in international affairs. I had a lot of fun talking with them. I think that interacting with students such as these with diverse backgrounds is one of the advantages of studying at Harvard. I would like to purposefully continue to participate in this kind of social event.
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