Photograph courtesy of Meena Venkataramanan.
This year will mark the second time Harvard hosts its annual Housing Day for first-year students online—last year, in the rush of campus closing, and this year, with more time to prepare. On Friday, the College will reveal each freshman’s assigned House via Zoom, rather than hosting a traditional, raucously exuberant, in-person event.
For many freshmen, the previous weeks have often been dominated by “blocking”: Harvard’s distinctive, notoriously stressful process of moving them into the residential Houses where most will live for the next three years. House assignments themselves are churned out randomly by computer, but blocking allows first-years to choose up to seven other classmates with whom they’d like to be placed in the same House. These blockmates frequently end up rooming together as well and, in many cases, become close friends.