Freshman Dorms

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Our House!

March 12, 2011 in Alumni Blogs by Alissa D'Gama | 4 comments

Today, Harvard Yard is quiet as most students have gone home (or to a warmer place than Cambridge) for spring break, but on Thursday the campus was filled with yelling, cheering, laughter and tears. Thursday was Housing Day – the day when freshmen at Harvard find out which of the upperclass Houses they have been placed in for the next three years!!! Freshmen can form a blocking group of up to eight people that are guaranteed placement into the same House, and can link with one other blocking group that they are guaranteed to be placed into the same neighborhood with.

On the morning of Housing Day, students from all of the Houses gather early in the morning to deck themselves out in House apparel and deliver letters to students assigned to their House, followed by lots of shouting and cheering in front of Annenberg Dining Hall. Here, for example, is the Mather contingent (the best, in my biased opinion!) Of course, since Housing Day is right before Spring Break, students often have papers and midterms due that day (as I did freshman year), but generally the entire campus comes together for Housing Day, with professors laughing along as mascots from the Houses storm big freshman classes like Ec 10 and LS1b.

In honor of housing day, I went through my photos and found group shots of my roommates and I from freshman, sophomore, and junior year. Freshman year, my roommates and I were part of three different blocking groups, which were placed in Mather, Dunster, and Cabot. Every semester, we have a freshman roommate reunion at Nine Tastes, the restaurant where we went for our first roommate dinner together freshman year (which is where we were going when this photo was taken!)

Sophomore year! Here are my roommates and I right before winter break, sometime in the midst of reading period and finals, in the common room of our lowrise room in Mather.

Junior year! Here are my roommates (and our new roommate for senior year) right after the room lottery. We tend to have the worst luck, and got the lowest number in the lottery for junior year and for senior year. (Each house has a lottery to decide the order for picking rooms for the next year). We still ended up on the seventh floor of Mather tower this year though, so it was all good :)

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We Are Going To Be Friends

December 9, 2010 in Alumni Blogs by Alissa D'Gama | 2 comments

Last night, my roommates and I were all in our suite at the same time—we weren’t at medical or graduate school interviews, The Crimson, our labs, a UC meeting, an evening section, or an IOP event…we were all home, and we were excited to spend a few minutes catching up before finals begin.

When anyone thinks about going to college, they think about what it will be like to have roommates. I remember how nervous I was the day of my freshman move-in—picking out my outfit (a striped pink-and-orange polo with jeans, as my current and freshman roommate Cara ’11 still remembers—in retrospect, her striped shorts and grey t-shirt was a much better idea as it was a ridiculously hot day), wondering who I would be sharing a room in my suite with, and what my roommates would be like.

All freshmen at the College live in one of the dorms in or around Harvard Yard—I lived in Weld, one of the dorms next to the University Hall and the John Harvard statue. After filling out my housing application, I found out over the summer before freshman year that I would spend the year in a six-person suite with two doubles and two singles. Our first day, my roommates and I picked our rooms out of our recycling bin (the only container not packed into a box of duffel bag) and I shared a long but somewhat narrow double with Cara ’11 the entire year (and it worked out! We have been roommates ever since :) ).

During the second semester of freshman year, we got to form a blocking group, which is a group of up to eight students who will be placed together in one of the twelve upperclass Houses. Cara and I got placed in Mather House, along with a surprisingly large number of other Weld residents! Mather is an awesome house, and all of the undergrads living there get singles in suites all three years. Sophomore and junior year we lived in the lowrise, which has five floors and consists of duplexes, with a common room on one floor and bedrooms either on the floor above or below. This year, we are living in the tower on the seventh floor. I got pretty lucky and have an amazing room overlooking the Charles River. Here’s the view from my window!

We also have three other roommates—Ashley ’11, Camille ’11, and Emma ’11. One of the best parts about all the students at Harvard is the diversity of interests and activities everyone is involved in. Cara is a Psychology major who is an Exec on The Crimson’s Design Board, Emma ’11 is a History of Science concentrator who is one of The Crimson’s Design Chairs, Ashley ’11 is a Government concentrator who worked for First Lady Michelle Obama two summers ago, and Camille ’11 is a Physics and Astrophysics concentrator who has gone all over the world to take measurements and collect data on awesome telescopes—pretty cool!

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Why I Love My Dorm

November 2, 2010 in Kate's Blog by Kate Meakem | 2 comments

I still remember getting the long-awaited letter in the mail, the letter that would seal the fate of my freshman year, the letter that contained the names of my freshmen roommates.  I had been waiting in anticipation all summer long.  What would they be like?  How many would I have?  Would the housing gods at Harvard even read the rooming application that had caused me so much angst last spring?

But when I finally got the letter, I couldn’t help but feel that the event was a tad anticlimactic.  After all, the only thing it contained were names, names of four girls from different areas of the country and the name of our dorm:  Pennypacker.

“Pennypacker?” I thought.  “What kind of name is Pennypacker?”

I immediately asked Google to give some insight into this strangely named dorm.  The results were not comforting.  Pennypacker was the farthest-reaching freshman dorm, situated three blocks from Harvard Yard, and had had a historical scabies infestation only a few years before.  Great…

Facebook, on the other hand, delivered more promising results.  My roommates all seemed very friendly.  I immediately friended all of them and initiated a “Roomie Message Thread!!!!” in which we shared novel-length biographies about ourselves and decided who would contribute what to our room.

On move-in day, I didn’t know what to expect.

Now, a month and a half into the school year, I can confidently say that I live in the best dorm on campus.  The community fostered in my dorm is unrivaled, partially due to geographic location, but mostly due to the dynamics in the dorm itself.  First, it is a widely acknowledged rumor that those On High purposefully place the most social people in Pennypacker due to its secluded nature away from the Yard.  While I am not sure this is true, as I have found many freshmen in different dorms to be social, Pennypacker is definitely packed (note the pun) with social people.  Second, the fact that Pennypacker is slightly farther away means that we avoid tourists desperate to snag photos with Harvard students (I mean, I know I’m a celebrity, but sometimes enough is enough) and the noise of the cars and buses and street performers in Cambridge, which lends itself to excellent Sunday morning sleep-ins.  But most important, every room in Pennypacker opens onto a central stairwell, and most of the students leave their suite doors open, inviting others to stop in, study, get to know each other… and, of course, procrastinate.

These are my lovely roommates and me!

While I am obviously very happy with my dorm, I think this happiness is reflective of the wide range of students that populate Harvard as a whole.  I came to Harvard buying the stereotype of introverted, socially inept students who ruthlessly compete with each other for the top spot in the class as they step on each other to further their future careers.  I have yet to find a single person to fit this model.  People here are smart, sure, but in a nonchalant way, and they are focused more on learning than on showing what they already know.  And as I am reminded every night as I sit in my common room in Pennypacker, they all come from different backgrounds, are good at different things, and have different stories to share.

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