Where rural America tops the agenda
“Where are you from?”
It’s a common question for Harvard College first-years. But for those from rural America, there’s no straightforward answer.
“We often have to describe where we’re from as between two places,” said Kevin Scanlan ’27, an economics concentrator from Grass Valley, Calif., a town of about 14,000 residents. People who’ve heard of his hometown, he explained, are generally Bay Area residents “who pass through on their way to ski up in Tahoe.”
Likewise, Justin Black ’27, a government concentrator from Bloomsbury, N.J. (population: around 800), situates his birthplace on the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “My high school mascot was called the Stateliners,” he said.
These experiences, which Scanlan described as “alienating,” moved the students to help launch the Harvard Undergraduate Rural League (HURL) in 2024. The initial goal was providing a sense of belonging to students from areas few of their classmates had heard of, let alone visited.
