Red Sox fans get their wish

Franklin twins are going to Harvard, By Beth Kalet Franklin — One of the best things about going to Harvard, say twins Robert Bowden and Paul Bowden Jr., is its proximity to Fenway Park. Avid Red Sox fans, the boys say they hope to catch a lot of ball games when they move to Boston later this month to start their freshman year at Harvard. But that’s only one of the many perks. Paul is excited about the food. “When we visited, they had this building. With unlimited food. Forty chefs at all times, going all day until 4 in the morning. It’s not just macaroni and cheese and bagels.” He also allowed that he’s “excited for the classes.” And that he’s a little nervous. “You have to be nervous a little bit.” Robert, his identical twin, says it’s “the new setting” that he’s most excited about. “New people, and everything, because I want to see how well, how quickly, I can adjust and meet all the teachers real fast. It’s cool thinking you can completely start over and meet new people in a new place.” The twins grew up in Franklin and graduated this past May from Wallkill Valley High, where Robert was valedictorian and Paul was salutatorian. Their GPA’s were a tenth of a point apart. They raked in a $1,000 scholarship each for taking top and second in the class and both will put that money toward their tuition. Both Robert and Paul took all the advanced placement classes their school offered, and when one wasn’t offered, their teachers helped them make it happen. They’d get the book to study from, have access to a teacher who knew the topic - that is if they had questions - and take the test. Often they were the only two students in such a class. It was like that with microeconomics, for example. “The book was only about 150 pages,” Paul said. He opened it two months before the test, “and I read the entire thing,” determined “there (wasn’t) much I don’t understand here...so I ended up taking the test and got a 5 on it.” That’s the highest score on AP tests. Identical but not clones This summer the twins are taking it easy, playing golf, hanging out with friends, “doing nothing really, relaxing before some hard college,” Robert said. They’ll head up to the Harvard campus toward the end of August for a pre-orientation program, where they’ll join others working to clean up and prepare the dorms for the coming year. Each will earn $400 for their efforts, “enough money for books,” Paul said. They’re not planning to room together. They want to have “different experiences,” he explained. “We’re definitely close,” Robert said. “We do like everything together,” he said, admitting that they have their differences. “We do fight...” But, “we have the same small group of friends.” Neither expected to be going to school together in the first place. They had applied to the nation’s top schools, and the notion that twins would both be accepted was far from their minds. “We were definitely prepared not to go to school together,” Robert said. As it turned out, they got into almost every one of the top schools they applied to. In a few cases one brother was wait-listed someplace and one was rejected by Cornell. But they never even had to fill out the application to Rutgers, their safety school, since they’d already been accepted at Harvard before the Rutgers deadline arrived. For the record Robert and Paul will be the first in their family to attend Harvard. They did not get into the prestigious university by what’s called “legacy.” It seems to be their solid academic record of achievement, ability and proven track record of intellectual inquiry. They’ve been involved in numerous sports, though neither is a star; they participated in many extra-curricular activities, keeping a dizzying afterschool schedule. They will be getting scholarship money from the university. Paul is majoring in biology with an eye toward medicine; Robert is looking to pursue math and sciences, but doesn’t want to commit yet. A spokesperson in Harvard’s admissions office said it is against policy to comment on individual students and calls to the school’s publicity offices were not returned. The boys said they had a chance to meet with an alum who was on the review committee and championed the pair to the admissions board, but didn’t divulge any secrets.