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Harvard's Temporary Student Employment, TSE

Harvard's creative president, James B. Conant, -- an electrochemist to boot -- started SAT testing in 1937 nationwide to filter college bound students for talent for Harvard. Those enlisted by that means needed financial support; the nation was in the middle of the depression, after all. They needed scholarships, and those that did not qualify for total support required school time jobs. So Conant had TSE jobs to offer them after the first year. The first year was cared for with student waiter jobs in the Freshman Union. These TSE jobs paid the princely sum of 50 cents an hour, so a 20 hour week yielded $10, tax free at that time. More than enough to pay for board. But the beauty part was that the students were assigned to professors who used them as assistants in ongoing research. I was indentured to Donald H. Menzel, an astrophysics professor with an office in the Harvard Observatory. The good part was that he proved to be an incredibly useful mentor to me in my career. The bad part was that, while the Observatory was at the northwest limit of the Harvard agglomeration, I lived in Dunster House at the southeast extreme. Maybe the walk to and from work 5 days a week in Cambridge was for my own good health.

I have reminisced at reunions with other classmates who had TSE jobs. The solid consensus is that the TSE job was a mind expanding drama. But that verdict is only anecdotal and not a statistically based conclusion. And I do not know how long the program lasted. The war came the Winter after I graduated, and no doubt after the war there were big changes. Look at the properties of the system. Students were selected by merit. They were assigned their job. The experience was intense; twenty hours a week is more than two courses demand. The relationship lasted three years. Are these advantageous attributes? The selection on the basis of merit might have assured the employer that the training of the student for usefulness would not be difficult. The random assignment to jobs got students into fields they might not have even considered if they were left to their own criteria for choice. Making choices without full knowledge can lead to all choices being bad. Random choices guarantee that at least half will be good choices. The long-time interface with a professor allows the student to learn not only about the substance of the professor's field but it gives the student knowledge of the sociology of academic research. After three years, and one Summer, working in Menzel's office while his life went on all around me, I knew all there was to know about funding research, academic politics, and astrophysics. As a result I discovered that I disliked the first, I learned to be careful about the second, and I avoided the third.