Aurora's Blog

While we’re talking about Harvard Extension, I thought I’d throw in a story about how cool their administration is.

The school in general is very helpful. It’s all about arming students with information and trying to help people make the most out of the school.

When you sign up for a class, you’re offered an advising session just to see what would transfer over from any previous schools. So, I took Harvard up on it.

My Harvard advisor is incredibly nice, and generally completely lovely. She makes me all that much more excited and confident about starting here.

Harvard will take way more credits than I expected. (And I wrote that sentence back when the estimate was only 42.)

I thought since many of my music classes were only 2 credits (and were music) that they’d basically count for nothing. But Harvard counted 8 credits of studio art (8 being the maximum transfer credits allotted for that category).

Then some of my music business classes counted as either professional or social science classes. Throw in my CLEP exams and that semester of community colleges online (that I took to knock out the Berklee liberal arts that couldn’t be Clepped out of), and boom! We’re up to over 40 credits going for me at Harvard. Not a bad start.

And, the counselor gets even more amazing. When she estimated 42, I was practically elated. “I can’t believe you found that many. That’s great!”

She said she’d send me a detailed email with everything we’d talked about on the phone. She did. But in it, she said she wanted to see if she could get more credits out of my transcripts. So she asked me for some course descriptions.

I sent them to her. She sent a very prompt reply saying she’d be going over them with a colleague and giving me a date I should expect an email from her.

Then she sent me that email saying she’d met with a colleague and they figured out a way to make 64 credits (the maximum allowed to transfer in at Harvard Extension).

I was happy with 42! I didn’t even expect that many. I hadn’t pushed, her or even asked her to check for any more, yet she totally went the extra mile for me.

Keep in mind, I hadn’t even been officially accepted as a student yet. (You don’t become a full-fledged student until you’ve taken 3 classes with at least a B or better, and you’ve gone through an application process.)

I was just some random girl who signed up for a class (who honestly didn’t even have that stellar of a transcript). So why my Harvard counselor had such drive and belief for me, who knows.

But I very much appreciate her!

Later, we’ll be comparing this experience with one I had with Berklee. (But not quite yet.)