ADVICE FOR ’68 GRADS WHO CAN’T REGISTER FOR REUNION AND/OR
CREATE A HARVARD KEY
By
John Miller ‘68
Hi classmate,
Because I am a science journalist, I volunteered to write this short explanation to guide you around all the problems so many of us have experienced registering for reunion.
GOOD NEWS!! From now till our Fiftieth Reunion May 21 – 24, you won’t need to first create a Harvard Key to register for the reunion. Just call the reunion help desk M-F 9-5 at 617-496-7001. If that doesn’t solve your problem, the team assisting Harvard Alumni Association’s assistant director Lily Gillespie would like to hear from you at 50thReunion_haa@harvard.edu.
Now about scoring that elusive Harvard Key:
The most important thing for you to know is that THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR REGISTRATION MAY WELL BE SOMETHING YOU CAN’T CORRECT, no matter how long or hard you try. So if you try twice and fail, try no more. Instead, get help at 617-495-7777 or email IT Support at ithelp@harvard.edu.
The main reason that alumni fail in trying to create their Harvard Key is that they now use an email address different from the one they told the Harvard Alumni Association they were using the last time they changed it on the HAA web site. In January 2018, of all the unsuccessful attempts to get a Key from the entire living alumni community, almost 43 percent didn’t use the email address that Harvard has on file. No can do. So go easy on yourself--go straight to help.
To claim your Harvard Key without Harvard IT Support, go to https://reference.iam.harvard.edu/ and enter your 10-digit HAA ID number (explained below), the last email you registered with HAA, your last name and your graduating year. If you don’t know all four, go straight to help: call 617-495-7777 or email IT Support at ithelp@harvard.edu. If this doesn’t solve your problem, email Lily and her team of helpers at 50thReunion_haa@harvard.edu .
BUT BEAR IN MIND: EVEN IF YOU CORRECTLY INPUT ALL FOUR PIECES OF INFORMATION requested at the Harvard Key web site, https://reference.iam.harvard.edu/, THERE ARE SEVERAL OTHER REASONS WHY YOU MAY STILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET YOUR HARVARD KEY without Harvard IT Support help. So try it twice, but if it doesn’t work, it’s not your fault. Get help, Lassie:
If you have two or more different Harvard email addresses, you can’t get a Key yourself. That could happen if you have two or more Harvard degrees;
If you haven’t been assigned an eight-digit Harvard University ID, you can’t get your Key without help. Started in the 70s, these IDs weren’t assigned to our class until the last two years. BTW, you have never seen this number and you will never see it, so you have no evidence that one was assigned to you. But Harvard IT Support knows;
Almost last, if you and your spouse are both Harvard grads, and you share one email address, you can’t get Harvard Keys. You each need to declare your own unique email address with Harvard. Shove off, Sweetie!; and
Last, if you ever told Harvard not to communicate with you ever again in your life, you should still have gotten emails from our Reunion Committee anyway. But it’s possible that you might only hear about reunion through the snail-mail announcement that was sent out about two weeks ago. If you haven’t received it, call the help desk or let Lily’s team know.
About Your HAA ID: If you have kept any recent email from HAA, down at the bottom of the last page, you will see a 10-digit number. No label identifies it as your ID, but it is. When you find it, send yourself an email with it and file it away so you won’t ever forget it.
However, if you have never saved a recent HAA message or if you’ve never received one, look in your current email’s spam and trash folders to make sure there are no recent HAA emails hiding there. If there are, then you can find your 10-digit HAA ID. If not, go to help.
You might also want to go back and check the inbox and spam and trash folders of any email account you used to use, you don’t use now, but which you never closed. You might find all the HAA reunion messages you’ve never seen in one of those.
I urge you either to start paying regular attention to all your open email accounts, or permanently close the ones you don’t ever use or pay attention to. At the least, once you close these dormant accounts, senders will finally know that they aren’t communicating with you. So then they will be alerted to snail mail you or phone you to learn your current email address.
The Harvard Key program began in September 2015. Two and a half years into it, less than 31 percent of Harvard grads have Harvard Keys. Our class has done much better (hasn’t it always?). As of December 15, our number was already 62 percent, double. I recently asked HAA what our percentage is now, but they are super busy with our reunion, so they begged off until afterwards.
You might also be interested to know the reason the Harvard Key ID was created. It represents the first attempt since 1636 to assign all graduates a unique computer identiry. But Harvard might have been ok going another 383 years without a University-wide ID, because its 15 schools and faculties "float on their own bottoms," so they each had their own alumni ID system. But in 2015, the vendor for a few of those systems told Harvard it was going out of business at the end of that calendar year. Oops! Having to find a new vendor in much less time than that requires, Harvard decided to take this opportunity to create the first university-wide system itself, without any vendor. Brave Harvard!
Last, as of this writing on Wednesday, April 18, we have a new and different frustrating problem. Some classmates who do have Harvard Keys still aren’t getting Harvard Reunion email messages. That may have been resolved for two classmates, but other people’s problems are still being investigated. In the meantime, you might ask a couple of ’68 friends to copy you on all the reunion messages they receive, and you can do the same for them. Please email Lily’s team to report if one or more of you is not receiving HAA emails that another classmate got. Include whether or not you have a Harvard Key (but not your Key’s identification details).
See you at Reunion! I’ll be the guy behind the drum set in the Underground ’68 Dylan Band concert Tuesday night and the Central Park Zoo performance Wednesday night. Come up and say hi! It gets lonely hidden in the back in the dark sitting down behind all those rock stars!
Cheers,
John