This past weekend, I went to a reunion for the Harvard Glee Club, and it was nostalgic in all the best ways.

For an introvert like me, there’s no entirely non-awkward way to tell someone you went to Harvard. The best trick I’ve found is to immediately shift the topic of conversation to something related. “Oh yeah, I went to Harvard! I studied math and I sang in the Glee Club.” This leads the conversation either towards critiquing math education or towards singing, either of which I’d be happy to have a full conversation about.

But besides helping me navigate slightly uncomfortable conversations, the Glee Club was the best single part of my college experience. Some of my fellow singers are still among my closest friends, it’s the one space of primarily men that I’ve felt comfortable in, and the music itself was beautiful – whether delicate and contemplative or rousing and full of raw power.

So I was excited to take a weekend to celebrate and reconnect with the Glee Club, especially since I was just an Amtrak ride away. The reunion event was officially “Andy’s Sweet 16”, honoring the 16^th year of the tenure of HGC’s sixth and current faculty conductor, Andy Clark. As such, the event was mostly targeted at people who graduated in the past 16 years – putting the oldest class in attendance in about their late 30s. And alas, I’ve been out of college just long enough that I had to pay full price.

The Harvard Glee Club has all the trappings you’d expect of an august institution – especially the rich alumni who fund everything. It’s strange knowing that my classmates are expected to be the next generation of rich alumni, assuming we and the institution of currency are both still around in a few decades. I don’t exactly expect to strike it rich as an educational content creator (or whatever my LinkedIn says right now), but at least one person from my graduating class works at NVIDIA, so there’s hope.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone just wanted to sing. Some of us (including myself) still sing in various groups around the world, while many of us haven’t been on stage since we graduated. But we all enthusiastically pulled out our old favorites – both at the official sing-along with our old assistant conductor, and at plenty of other occasions. I know it’s kind of cliché, but I wasn’t the only one crying during Biebl’s Ave Maria. It really is that good, especially when you’re singing it with old friends.

And seeing so many of my old friends all at once was the main point. Even though some of us hadn’t seen each other in nearly a decade, the atmosphere was as if we’d never left. That’s not to say no one had changed individually. We’ve gotten new jobs, new partners, new stories, and even new names. One singer from my graduating class even has a nine-month old child. But the place we once had was back, even if it was just for a day or two.

Recreating a place is incredibly difficult to do. There’s probably a better word for this concept than “place”, but there’s a special creation when you combine of a group of people plus an environment (both physical and social) plus a shared experience. It’s like how your third grade class wouldn’t be the same even if you got all the same people together again. The Glee Club was a place that I thought had been torn from me forever when COVID struck and we were all sent home. It was good to have it back, however briefly.

The place had changed somewhat, of course. It was easy to tell that we’re all getting older. There were the life milestones and the subtle changes to our faces of course, but also we just seem like a much more mature group of people. Some folks who were infamously wild during college seem to have mellowed out, while others who were unsure of themselves seemed more stable and secure. Several of us commented on how nice the campus looked on an April afternoon when you don’t have a problem set due in 5 hours. Turns out, there are perks to being an adult.

But I, for one, know for sure it was the same place. The Harvard Glee Club has four cardinal virtues: “glee, good humor, unity, and joy”. As a student, having a list of virtues for a club felt like unnecessary ceremony; now as an alum I realize that they are simply the correct description of what made the Glee Club a place. I hope that everyone has the chance to find this much glee, good humor, unity, and joy in their own lives.

Coming soon: Going Back: The Moon

This is part of a collection of posts themed around “Going Back” for my Inkhaven Alumni Week.