As the school year nears a close, administrators in the Dean of Students Office reflected on students experiences during the past academic year amid the coronavirus pandemic in an interview with The Crimson on Tuesday.
Harvard held courses online during the 2020-2021 academic year due to the public health crisis. For the fall semester, the College only invited freshmen and a select group of upperclassmen to live in residence, while juniors, seniors, and a cohort of petitioning students were invited to campus in the spring.
Students living in residence had to comply with a spate of residential guidelines, including social distancing guidelines and Covid-19 testing three times per week.
Administrators at the Dean of Students Office discussed their planning for a virtual iteration of the Collegeâs admitted studentsâ weekend â Visitas â and potential College-sponsored outdoor activities in an interview last week.
Typically, Visitas spans across a weekend in April and welcomes hundreds of admitted students to stay on campus, attend events held by on-campus organizations, and learn about student life at Harvard.
Last year, the College canceled Visitas due to concerns of the Covid-19 pandemic and replaced it with Virtual Visitas, a series of online events and programming that took place over the month of April. This year, the remote version of Visitas is slated to take place from April 17 to April 23.
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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.