r/harvardextension

Just in case this interests you, registration is now open! My criend is also the TA and she’s awesome.

Post-Growth Approaches for Economic Transformation will be offered this fall at Harvard Extension School with Gaya Herrington and Katherine von Stackelberg.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality, and financial fragility are often treated as separate problems requiring separate solutions—but they arise from the same system. This course examines that system. 🌱
In this course, you will:
→ Examine the assumptions embedded in neoclassical economic models and the institutions built upon them
→ Explore what an economy operating within real biophysical limits requires, including how Indigenous communities have governed shared resources for centuries
→ Work with the metrics, tools, and policies used to make decisions within complex systems
→ Apply these ideas to the provision of food, energy, water, and housing—and examine the responsibilities of business, finance, and governance
→ Develop a framework for organizing collective action while avoiding the fear-and-paralysis trap
Guest speakers include Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse.
The course is online on Tuesdays and may be taken live or asynchronously. Graduate, undergraduate, and noncredit options are available.

People that have graduated from the ALB program, how strong is your support and community with Harvard alumni groups and clubs? Do they help extension students? Do they provide strong networking opportunities for ALB HES students?

Hey everyone,

I’m launching a collaborative computational neuroscience project and am looking to put together a dedicated 4-person team. The goal is to build and validate a novel machine learning pipeline that identifies exactly which neural oscillations (brain waves) dominate the shifting of executive cycles in the prefrontal cortex.

I currently have the theoretical framework and core pipeline mapped out, but I need to move on to the actual project development and real-world dataset validation and paper submission.

The Target Team:

1 (since I'm one already)Computer Science & Engineering Student: Focus on implementing a unified competitive stacking pipeline, handling robust multi-view feature scaling, and optimizing regularization boundaries without data leakage.

2 Neuroscience Students: Focus on sourcing high-quality public EEG/LFP datasets, validating the biological interpretability of feature selection masks, and aligning model readouts with prefrontal cognitive theories.

This is a serious collaborative project with the ultimate goal of submitting two papers to upcoming tech/neuro conferences. We will be coordinating tasks smoothly and pushing clean code to our repository.

If you are a CSE or Neuro grad looking to apply advanced ML to complex biological signals and want to get a published paper on your resume, drop a comment or send me a DM with your background!

Can someone who has been to HES’s convocation share their experience? Would you recommend attending? Is it worth traveling for? Thanks!

Hi all,

Is this training laggy for you as well? I tried different locations, different ISP's and it is laggy on my side.

I mean this with all due respect - what do you all learn in Expo-25 and Expo42B? I keep seeing posts that say "I learned so much in Expo - [25 or 42B]" or "my skills increased an order of magnitude" in those classes... but what is it that you learn? Is it that you read a bunch of papers you otherwise wouldn't have and analyzed them? Is it to move beyond the five paragraph structure we're taught in high school?

I'm coming at this from someone who has a STEM background and has taken multiple writing intensive courses already (in undergrad). I took AP Eng Lang and AP Lit in High School, do you think I could skip Expo E-25 and move directly to Expo E-42?

I've been contemplating attending Harvard extension school, but from my understanding the alm distinction is a big point of contention. I figured I would ask before I dropped $40,000 into this and asked if this has caused a trouble for everyone.

For context, I do live in Asia and I am a US citizen

Hello everyone! I hope you are excited and ready for Fall 2026.

I am planning to take either CSCI 103 (Data Engineering) or CSCI 109A alongside CSCI 106 this fall. I understand that this may be a demanding course load, but I have the time and a strong technical background.

If you are an admitted Data Science or AI student and have access to the QReports for CSCI 103 or CSCI 109A, could you please share them when you get a chance?

Thank you!

When can we expect acceptance or rejection letters if you applied for Fall 2026 admission?

Does applying for a less selective major actually improve your chances?
An admissions consultant advised me to apply for less competitive/niche majors at US universities (e.g. obscure humanities subjects) rather than highly selective ones, saying this could improve my chances of admission.
My school’s college counsellor, however, says this is complete nonsense and that US universities generally don’t admit students more easily just because they choose a less popular major.
Who is right? Has anyone actually seen this strategy work at selective US universities?

Hi all, I'm registering for Fall 2026 and stuck between two courses that would both fill my economics requirement:

• ECON E-1010, Microeconomic Theory, Zinnia Mukherjee, CRN 16157, Thu 7:40-9:40 ET
• ECON E-1615, Managerial Economics, Aleksandar Tomic, CRN 17451

Both are 4 credits and flexible attendance web conference, so I'd likely be doing a fair amount asynchronously.

• If you've taken either one, I'd really appreciate hearing:
• Realistically, how many hours a week did it take alongside a full-time job?
• What makes up the grade: problem sets, exams, papers, group work?
• Are the exams multiple choice? Open note? Proctored?
• For E-1010: how much math do you actually need? Is college algebra enough, or does it get into calculus?
• For E-1615: how big is the group case study, and how did group work go in an online section?
• Was the instructor responsive to async students, or did you feel like you missed a lot by not attending live?
• Anything you wish you'd known before week one?

Second ask: I can't find a syllabus for E-1010 on the DCE course browser or Simple Syllabus. If anyone has a recent one (any term, 2024/2025/2026, doesn't matter) and is willing to share it, or even just paste the grading breakdown and weekly topic schedule, that would help me enormously.

I'm in the process of making a decision about which path to take: My advisor has been saying, for years, that it's better to take the foreign language requirement at a different school and then transfer that in. UMASS Lowell has a Spanish class that gives 3 credits, and the HES requirement is 4 credits, but my advisor mentioned something about that being sufficient. (Don't quote me here! I'm meeting with her again in a couple weeks.)

I took 8 years of Spanish back in Middle->High school and feel like I could get through 'Intensive Spanish I' for 4-credits at HES this Fall semester. Does anyone have experience with this class? It's not the 2-credit split classes but the more 'intense' one. Is it reasonable to take, or is my advisor's advice the right path to take? I only have two semesters left until I graduate (fingers crossed, etc.) so I don't want to mess this up and time is quickly running out to make a decision.

Anyone take SPAN E-1 and have feedback?