By Robert Breckinridge

The dorky looking kid with glasses who is already balding at age 20 is the last person you might expect to be one of Haverford College’s Student Council (SC) co-presidents. But that is exactly who Will Harrison, class of 2010, is. And he pulls it all off pretty darned well.
Harrison is surely one of Haverford’s quintessential students; intelligent, driven, well rounded, and pretty nerdy. He has flourished at Haverford in spite of the fact that he said, “in high school I wasn’t particularly popular. I never would have been elected to this sort of thing [Student Council]. I guess college is different.”
Indeed, college has been different because he has been involved in almost every facet of student life at Haverford. Some organizations he’s been a part of include the housing committee, the council of 12, the Bi-college chamber singers, the Bi-College news paper, the cricket team, and an upper class advisor to freshman.
He is the only returning member to Student Council so students are lucky to have him as one of the SC presidents. Here is a guy who knows how to balance what ever is on his plate. And the SC co-presidents have more on their plate than almost any one of Haverford’s 1,200 students.
And for the sake of the students, Harrison has made his Student Council plate even bigger. Some of his causes include construction of a new dorm to free up what little living space students have, building a new theater, and syncing the major requirements at both Bryn Mawr and Haverford so students have more options for classes in their major.
Oh yeah, and helping to raise $300 million dollars to get all that done.
With 10 meetings a week for Student Council causes, it’s not surprising that he said, “I don’t do as much homework as I should.” But it is his electorate that reaps the benefits.
Regardless of the short term in office that the Haverford Constitution allows, Harrison feels that all of his forward looking projects are taken seriously by the administration, including the Board of Directors whom he meets with and presents to four times a year.
It was writing for the Bi-College newspaper that first got Harrison interested in student affairs at Haverford. The second semester of his freshman year, he co-wrote every front page of the weekly newspaper. But it took a special friendship with then senior and chair of Haverford’s Honor Council, Travis Green, to push Harrison to get off the sidelines and into the action.
Harrison first ran unopposed for a regular position on Haverford’s Council of 12, a 13-person SC constituent that, according to Haverford’s Haverpedia (a database for all things Haverford), “provides the information, resources, and representation necessary to implement Student Council’s broad, proactive, forward looking policy initiatives.”
But Harrison wanted more.
He has since ran for and won SC co-president on two separate occasions. The first time his co-president was Dan Kent, the second time was Harrison Haas, his current co-president. They joke that, “he’s [Haas] the writer and I’m [Harrison] the speaker.”
Harrison has lived an interesting life before his time at Haverford. Born in Manhattan, Harrison spent most of his childhood in Montana. He has since lived in 9 different states, including, Montana, Virginia, New Mexico, and Tennessee for 2 years.
Harrison attended Episcopal High School in Washington D.C. on scholarship after spending his freshman year of high school at a Montana public school. He has since lived on Haverford’s campus for the last three years including the summers.
This was probably to avoid having to work the night shift at McDonald’s, a job he held the summer before freshman year of college.
He has certainly moved up in the world since then.