The next few months will be a roller coaster of both temperatures and emotions. You’ll step into your incinerator, I mean dorm room, and turn right around to purchase an additional two box fans because you are expected to live on the surface of the sun with people who are expecting polished, Facebook-you, not this sweaty mess. You’ll spend the entire month of September perspiring in places you didn’t know you could, sticking to the seats in Sever, and praying for fall, until one day, you go outside in shorts and lose your left nut to the frost. The following is a list of essentials to survive the extremes of first-semester weather:

Box Fans

You read that right. Fans, plural. Your goal for the first month of school: create your own system of high and low pressure to cool your room to a livable temperature. Your resources include and are pretty much limited to precariously placed extension cords and box fans, best of luck! (FYI: the secret is to have at least one fan blowing hot air out an open window) 

A Reusable Water Bottle

Regardless of your sexual preference, if you don’t have a reusable water bottle on this campus you will most certainly be a thirsty hoe. Plastic water bottles are terrible for the environment and you’ll go through an obscene amount of them because of the heat. Do yourself (and the planet) a favor and invest $15 in a high quality bottle.

A Waterproof Winter Coat

So you come from the West Coast and you think snow is soft, white, and fluffy? Kind of like a white pomeranian (do those exist?), but fluffier. WRONG. Snow is gross. It’s wet. It turns gray after three people walk through it. It piles up. It hardens. It turns into ice. It melts, creating puddles the size of small ponds (warning: Harvard Yard floods). Yeah, it’ll come down looking like a magical fairy dusting of the land (signed Tinker Bell wuz here). But then it bites you in the ass as it pelts your face. HARD. You’re going to want to bundle up, baby. And you better make sure that coat can handle wet sleet or melting ice caps). Something with down fill or a shit-ton of polyester is a move. Trust us: better to be too warm than to freeze. Winter starts in November and sticks around until March like a clingy ex. 

Hillflint H-Sweater

These quality sweaters, adorned with a giant white or red H, are what 33% of kids wear to Harvard-Yale. They’re sort of like a wool magic mirror and can make even the ugliest among us look beautiful. For muggles, they’re expensive af, but Harvard students get a 20% discount at The Harvard Shop. Spoiler alert: the sweaters will still be expensive af. It’s totally worth it, though.

Sturdy Boots

Everything you just read above? You best believe your feet are going to suffer, too. No, Converse aren’t going to cut it. Neither are the running shoes some kids try to pass off as boots. You need boots that can get you through the piles of snow because Harvard doesn’t have the nifty snow tunnels like other Boston schools (looking at you, Northeastern). And no, they won’t cancel classes either. The worst kind of pain is feeling your feet freeze as you try to make it back to your dorm. We suggest buying a solid pair of boots on-sale in the off-season months (read: now), just to get the biggest bang for your buck, and the best bundle for your toes.