STUDENT PROFILE:
JENNIFER PEGG
By Lori Valigra

If you see a shooting star streaking across the night sky, it just might be Jennifer Pegg, a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University.

Photo Credit: Steve Shelton, Black Star Jennifer Pegg at the waterfront in Olympia, Washington.

Jennifer, an astrophysics major who wants to be an astronaut, has boundless energy to take on any subject that strikes her fancy, and there are plenty of them. Freshman year, she started her days at dawn with a Welsh language class—she tried so hard to improve her pronunciation that she got a sore throat. For good measure, she piled on calculus, expository writing and a freshman seminar that tackled a problem with NASA's X-ray telescope. Even Harvard's freshman dean, who has seen a great many overachievers, refers to Jennifer Pegg as a polymath.

And Jennifer, a native of Olympia, Washington, will do just about anything to get access to classes of interest. Lacking the prerequisite courses for an evolutionary psychology class, Jennifer followed Professor Marc Hauser around until he gave her a job feeding the monkeys in his primate lab. He finally relented midyear and let her perform some cognition experiments.

"If you sound desperate and pathetic enough, the professors will let you study with them," Jennifer explained, with a characteristic combination of humility and hyperbole. But it is easy to understand why a professor would want to take on such an eager student.

After about five hours of class a day and another two hours of studying for each class, Jennifer still makes time to audit some classes, do her job of feeding the monkeys for eight dollars an hour and get involved in track and field.

Jennifer's love of the heavens started in third grade, when she read Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet and A Wrinkle in Time. At the time, she was interested in biology and poetry, but that quickly changed in the fourth grade. Her teacher, Mr. Barry, had the class build rockets, and that's when Jennifer saw a future for herself in space.

She became engrossed with astrophysics, physics and mathematics, the "language of the universe." "Mathematics is tied to history, poetry, religion, music and how people see themselves in the world," Jennifer said, eager to share her love of the sciences with anyone within earshot.

In the fourth grade, Harvard also entered the picture. "Most of the interesting articles in Scholastic magazine were by Harvard professors, so I associated wonderful learning with Harvard," Jennifer said. Her mother had always encouraged Jennifer to go to college, ever since she was a young girl.

By her junior year at Olympia High School, a public school, Jennifer was broadcasting her interests over the Internet. As part of an extra credit activity for Ms. Smith's chemistry class, she set up a home page, proclaiming, "Not only do I like physics, and plan to be an astrophysicist or an aerospace engineer, but someday you'll be watching me hike around Mars, as an astronaut!"

Her high school coursework included Advanced Placement biology, English literature and U.S. history. She also was in the Key Club, played volleyball, pole vaulted, rode horseback, got involved in journalism, read lots of books, played piano, sang in the chorus and entered an academic decathlon competition. "I did as much as I could without driving my mother crazy. She became a taxi service," Jennifer said.

By then, Jennifer's heart was set on attending Harvard. Her parents and older sisters all went to college, but Jennifer is the first to attend an Ivy League school. To find out more about Harvard, she started visiting Internet pages set up by Harvard students, where they posted their interests, links to their papers, and other information. Jennifer started with the class of 1996, and says she looked at hundreds of students' Web pages.

She also met Owen Allen, a Harvard sophomore, online, through their shared appreciation of music. The two struck up a correspondence, and Jennifer asked Owen all the questions she had about Harvard.

Jennifer had written half a dozen essays for the Harvard application the summer before her senior year of high school. "But they all turned out horrible," she said. So she decided to fall back on something she loved, a formula that has worked throughout her life. She had been working on a photo essay of used book stores, which she loves to visit, and decided to write her essay about the stores and include her photos.

She applied for early acceptance and interviewed locally with a Harvard alumnus in Olympia. Her acceptance letter came on December 15. She still seems surprised: "I don't know why I got in," she said. "I never expected to get into Harvard, so I didn't consciously prepare specifically to get into Harvard."

Once she started classes in Cambridge, she was worried about making the grade. Even in a class of 300 students, Jennifer thought the others were "40 times smarter than me." She blames her own attitude for the B's and B plusses she received for her first semester's work. Determined to do better, she ended the second semester with one B plus and the rest A's. "If you really love what you do and study hard, even at Harvard you can do well," she said.

Even though she has her eyes set on the heavens, she admits to liking every subject—she wanted to take a Zulu language class, but didn't have time for the commute across the river to Boston University, which offered the course. During her freshman year, she also helped write the freshman musical and helped coordinate faculty lunches to meet freshmen.

For a month and a half this past summer, she worked in Bangladesh for Phulki, a nongovernmental organization focused on women's and children's issues. She went to Bangladesh through the Harvard International Development Group's internship program. While in Bangladesh, she wrote reports on the programs sponsored by Phulki, which include providing daycare for women working in garment factories. "Otherwise, they have to tie down their children to keep them safe at home while they work," said Jennifer, who readily adapted to daily life in Bangladesh.

Phulki paid for her room, board and internship materials, but Jennifer and her mother paid for the airline ticket and spending money, which came to about $1,400. Jennifer insists on repaying her mother. "I still owe my mother around $400, which she would just as soon give to me, but I don't want any of my activities to ever be a financial burden on her," she said. Jennifer and her mom are a strong team, jointly paying for her Harvard education. Some of the cost, which is about $32,000 a year, is offset by a faculty scholarship and loans.

Photo Credit: Steve Shelton, Black Star Jennifer Pegg, a 19-year-old from Olympia, Washington, is a sophomore at Harvard University majoring in astrophysics. Last summer she worked in Bangladesh; her future travel plans include an expedition to Mars.

Jennifer still pinches herself at times when she realizes that she is at Harvard. But she isn't sure that Harvard has embraced her as readily. "I'm a random student from Olympia, not someone from a rich family. I have no connections. Yet I can stop by a professor's office and they will spend an hour with me," she said.

She recalls stopping one day to read the comic strips outside the office of chemistry Professor Dudley Herschbach and falling into a long discussion with him about the nuclear test ban. But not all the talk is about academics. Anyone who talks to Jennifer hears about her cat, Olliver, a terror to rodents and rabbits who brings home "trophies" to present to Jennifer on her bed.

Is Harvard everything Jennifer Pegg hoped it would be? Yes, and quantifiably so. "Harvard is a thousand percent better than I expected," she replied.