Sure, if you like guys dancing with other guys. Only the Quad has a one-to-one ratio. For examples of the social life, North runs a weekly happy hour with cocktails and live music, while South runs at least 2 dances every three weeks, with free beer and an open cocktail bar. These are just the scheduled parties...The living rooms can be used by anybody who's throwing his own party, whether a private one or open to the house.

MYTH:

SPORTS aren't much at the Quad.

FACT:

Instead of trekking across the river on the gamble of finding enough people for a game, Quad residents just step outside their doors onto the best field on the Cambridge side of the Charles. It's one-fifth of a mile around, absolutely level, and big enough to sustain three or four different ball games at once. Despite its lower % of males, the Quad placed fifth out of the eleven houses in the Strauss Cup race. With house-owned volleyball sets, 3 weight-room, four clay tennis courts soon to be enclosed in a dome, backboards, a basketball court across the street, and a planned building of squash courts, we get our exercise far from the exhaust fumes of Mt. Auburn St. and Storrow Drive.

MYTH:

The plush River houses have the most COMMON FACILITIES.

FACT:

Besides the pianos, sports facilities, and expansion plans mentioned above, the Quad owns 15 TV's, 14 laundry rooms with 1-3 washers and 1-3 driers in each, a kitchen and a common living room on nearly every floor of every hall, 2 slate pool tables, innumerable practice, seminar, and study rooms, 6 ping-pong tables, pinball machines, 3 darkrooms, a film workshop with assets of over $2000, a sound recording studio (formerly Radio Radcliffe), 3 woodworking shops, two living rooms or lounges on the first floor of every hall, large art and dance studios, 2 prosperous grilles, plus use of all Hilles' facilities, including four computer terminals. Of all the college houses, the one with the most square feet of common space is North House.

A ROOM OF ONES OWN. Understandably, freshman friends want to room together as sophomores. But, in most River suites, either one person has to sleep in the "living room" or two have to double in the bedroom. So neither person has their privacy when they want it. One wakes up when the other comes home, gets a phone call, or has to go to the bathroom. Worse, in dorms like old Leverett the bathroom can only be reached through one of the inner bedrooms. These former friends spend the year wiping their hands on each other's towel, debating whose turn it is to empty the trash, and having to trade rooms each time one of them wants to spend the night alone with a visitor. What happens when both of them want an overnight visitor on the same night?...Have you heard the stories about the "floater"? Don't end up as the person who tells one. Room next door to your friend in the Quad's genuine singles, and stay friends. Only the Quad houses let rising sophomores choose their rooms.

BUT I WANT TO LIVE IN A SUITE and enjoy a strong dorm life too. So I'm moving to the Quad, where each house has a wide range of suites available to rising sophomores as well as to higher-classmen, from old frame houses to modern apartments. For instance, Wolbach Hall has room for 59 people in suites each with a bedroom, living room, dining room, entryway, kitchen, and bathroom for just two people. And most of these suites are usually available to rising sophomores. Can the River beat that?

By the end of reading period, did your academic tensions color your attitude toward your building, hallmates, and dorm events? Quad residents are spared that, because their classes and their homes are two very different sides of Harvard. They profit from the academic and extracurricular wealth of the Yard area, then come home to an intimate community whe)re a strong dorm life complements a strong house life. It's hard to sell abstractions like friendship and group spirit in an ad, so let me list a few of the by-products; newspaper subscriptimn costs shared dormwide, open doors, an unusually strong tradition of participation in house and college government, and yes, the "milk and cookies" whose misnomer contributes to the myth of the Quad as unsophisticated. River people can laugh, but we're not laughing, because it's rude to laugh with our mouths full. Not just with milk or cookies, but with everything from sangria and watermelon to beer to potato pancakes, at least once a week in every dorm.

When I first learned I'd been assigned to North House, I ran to my window in the Yard and yelled several unpleasant things at the top of my voice. But the shock soon wore off, and, deciding to be as reasonable as possible, I went up to the Quad with my roommate group for dinner.

What we discovered that night and through the next three years shattered the attitudes about Quad life that we'd all accepted as Yard freshmen. I realized that I hadn't known enough about the houses to judge which were best for me, that I'd been sold propaganda about the Quad's inferiority without questioning it, and that I'd been swept by a tide of peer pressure to completely ignore the Quad as a housing choice..It's a great place, although if I had lived at the River I would probably not have found that out. You can still socialize at the Square if you live hzre, but you have a retreat from the noise, the crowding, and the city when you want it... I also enjoy the more life-like sex ratio. After all, the real world is much closer to 1:1 than to 3:1.

NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL