Every semester, each of Harvard’s twelve houses holds a student-faculty dinner. The dining halls get gussied up with tablecloths, flowers, nice dishware, and significantly better food.  Professors and groups of students (or single students, if they’re lucky enough to snag one-on-one time) get to converse outside of class and office hours. You can also invite teaching fellows, thesis advisers, or anyone at Harvard who’s been something of a mentor. Or you can not invite anyone at all and simply enjoy the gourmet feast — I know from experience that the event is easy to crash.

This year, I’m affiliated with Dudley House, which is a non-residential college made up of the entire Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student body, a contingency of ~40 undergrads who live at the bohemian Dudley Co-op, and off-campus students like me. Previously, I lived in Mather House (sophomore year) and Currier House (junior year). Because there’s only a few hundred students in each residential house, I’ve never dealt with a situation where seats for Faculty Dinner sold out. That’s precisely what happened with Dudley.

Whoops. Since I’d already extended a dinner invitation to my thesis adviser, I figured I might as well try to approximate at home what the event would’ve been like had I not been such an enormous flake about picking up tickets. And this is why I am currently knee-deep in mole sauce and chicken wings.

Alas, I don’t own tablecloth.