How to keep type-A’s fitfully occupied between acceptance and admission.
“Congratulations – the answer is YES!”
It’s done. It’s DONE. You need read no further. You switch tabs and promptly delete the lease liability model you’ve been listlessly tweaking to the backing track of Microsoft Teams pings from your principal. You simultaneously pull up resignation letter templates and TikToks set to Kanye’s “What would it feel like if I didn’t win,” to add a little pizzazz and social media notoriety to that exit.
Sadly, no. Halt that derailing train of thought! Your principal wrote your recommendation and wishes for nothing but the best for you (and for your model in the next two hours). He will complement your giddy excitement with world-weary congratulations, himself now on the loan-payment side of the two best years of his life.
Outsource that lease model to a chartered accountant colleague and let me walk you through my “registration checklist” based on what my wild and precious brat summer was like.
Integrity Diligence: While the examination of (ostensibly) your life’s worth under a microscope is done, you will still have to wrest two more sign-offs on it. First from your recommender, whose submissions bore the timeliness of a superhero cameo at eleventh hour (looking at you, Captain Marvel); with the difference between IST and EST time leveraged to give fake “end-of-day” deadlines. And from your undergraduate college, that had one hour between 12 - 5pm (office closure) when you could catch them between lunch and leisurely tea; if you could physically show up and rat-maze between cubicles to facilitate.
Hopefully you will have feet on the ground to physically harass both parties into giving you your dues.
The Land of the Free: (for those of not-weak passports): Applying for the US visa is rather like being a part of an overinvolved literature fandom, like House of Leaves or Pynchon – why do I need a dissertation forum and comradeship to get through a seemingly simple task?
But, for a (hopefully) short period, you and 330k-odd Indian students will participate in the subversive US visa subculture.
You will peruse groups on Telegram (a remnant of pandemic pirating) titled “F1VISA” to check when the visa slots come online, starting at every ping (“I got my visa!”; 50 “Congratulations”; Pavloving yourself into a stressed sweat with each notification).
You will be locked out of the portal, and like a blocked ex investigating the disappeared WhatsApp Display Picture, check how soon you can go online again. (Did you know you could text people on Google Pay?)
Finally, with appointment secured, you will then gather every scrap of paper to legitimize your US claim in an unwieldy folder, which doubles as a human shield in the long line outside the embassy.
Best be prepared; the lovely lady I met in queue was forced to use elbows and wingspan to prevent the formation of a spontaneous second line outside the embassy at seven am. In a group of over 50 people whose populous motherland has engendered no faith in waiting for one’s turn, it’s a losing battle.
The real visa is the friends you make along the way.
In some cases, possibly the only one, as was the case for the applicant in line before me, who claimed to have applied only to Rutgers University, his “dream university,” on the advice of the aforementioned friends at r/f1visa, and was deemed not dream enough by the suspicious interviewer. By the time I made it to biometric verification, my hands were so sweaty I had to borrow a handkerchief from the guy behind me.
The Greenback Boogie: With Harvard’s own bank, HFCU, providing loans, you can spend less time worrying about a loan provider, and more time re-convincing yourself of business school after converting the 5-year monthly repayment number into your local currency. (Yes, it might be in-line with your current monthly salary.)
Douse the acidic tsunami in your stomach…(insert Gelusil here)…and input that monthly salary in your Financial Aid form for some much-needed monetary relief. Quell your anxiety of accidentally committing financial fraud by not including in your net worth change in forgotten neobank accounts and $500 in Vauld from your one run-in with crypto in 2021.
Apples, Vaccines, Preventative Visits (anything to keep the doctor away): Just like its appearance on this list, you too will likely remember the required immunizations too late. Never fear! You are, hopefully, in a third-world country where two million people visit for medical tourism yearly. Do your blood tests twice. When you’re in disbelief about your low measles antigen count, take it again, they cost $30 a pop! Beg a doctor for the miracle of completing six months of Hep C vaccines in 2 months before discovering that Harvard, one of the foremost universities in a country currently at the top of the hegemony has, in fact, provisions if you need to be vaccinated. Of course, fresh off the trauma of wrangling your lawfully-earned marksheet out of your undergrad, you might be justified in not believing any university has its sh*t together.
After you get through the battalion of mandated and preventative poking, pricking and prodding, it’s time to go shopping – at your local mom-and-pop pharmacy – to stock up. 1mg or any other online retailer will never win in this market because who else will give you five strips of Vasograin without a prescription?
45kg to Start a New Life: Several carefully-itemized packing lists will be circulated your way, so I will offer no advice here other than to beg personal discretion. One’s pressure cooker might well be a white elephant, especially if in your twenty-five odd years of existence no pull has propelled you to use it before.
And that’s it. You’re done with the big ones! Other significant items like phone plans, bank accounts, and cards can be deferred to a later date – or so I hope, as I sit here with no answers writing this out.
Please note, this author takes no liability for any consequences arising from following this listicle.
Ramya Vijayram (MBA '26) is originally from Chennai, India. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biotechnology. Prior to the Harvard MBA, Ramya worked at Warburg Pincus in Mumbai, India, and McKinsey and Co. in India.
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