CAN I ASK YOU a personal question?"

The woman from downstairs dragged me into her room, shut the door, looked around nervously, and then whispered, "How many times do you need to masturbate a day?"

That was the highlight of Freshman Week in Stoughton Hall. It was not entirely unheralded: I had had premonitions of disaster when I climbed up the four very long flights to my cavernous one-room double and stared at my roommate with the calculator looped around her belt. I had worried about the place when I met the guy downstairs who bleached his hair ash blond and posted death poetry, embellished by skull and crossbones, on his door. I got nervous when I heard the strains of opera punctuated by very loud and horrifyingly off-key singing in the room next door. But I knew I was in serious trouble when I heard that question.

I had arrived late, hoping to avoid the first-night exchange of SAT scores. But it didn't take me long to realize that I was going to hate living in Stoughton anyway. The spring before, I had carefully filled out Harvard's rooming form; after three years at boarding school I had a good idea of what I wanted--and didn't want--in a roommate. Three minutes of conversation with Ellen convinced me that some joker in the housing office had read my thorough, if slightly arrogant, application and gleefully selected someone with every trait I detested. In our brief, mutually wary encounter, I discovered that she was a chemistry fanatic who went to bed at 10 p.m. and got up at 6 a.m. (I never go to bed before 3 a.m. and I never get up before 10 a.m.), loved Celtic harp music and Gregorian chants, and belonged to the Spartacus Youth League, a group of rhetoric-spouting Trotskyites who have done much to discredit leftist politics. "Chemistry is a communist plot," she grinned. "It's had free radicals for years." Then she turned and cackled to herself--a trait that would persist throughout the year--and I got the hell out of there.

I COULD RUN, but I could not hide. That evening, I staggered into the required meeting with Proctor Chuck, a nervous, wide-eyed moron whose insensitivity and comprehensive ignorance of Harvard perfectly suited him--in the eyes of the Freshman Dean's Office--to guide 30-odd freshmen through the year. Chuck welcomed us in his high, overeager voice and then, with the preface, "I thought you'd like to know something about yourselves," began to read each anonymous person's high school rank and SAT scores from computer printouts. We all stared at each other uncomfortably, trying to figure out who among us had graduated first in a class of 1000 and who had gotten the double 800s.

"I don't know much about Harvard," Chuck continued modestly, and proceeded to lecture us on the pitfalls of elitism and the greatness of his undergrad years at Colby. He then told us he would turn in any pushers, but would tolerate dope-smoking, and shoved us out into the perils of Saturday Night Freshman Week.

Total strangers wandered through the dorm, madly introducing themselves, in search of instant friends. The nauseatingly sweet smell of incense (burned to cover the odor of dope) and the stench of old beer permeated the dorm. Music blared from every corner of the Yard, while huge groups of drunken men huddled and leered at women going from party to party. I got asked the big four questions--name, school, career plans, SAT scores--so often I could recite them in seconds (although I refused, as a matter of principle, to talk scores). After one night of parties, I'd had enough. I didn't want to meet any more people out to prove to me that they deserved to be at Harvard. I didn't want to take tours and gape at the Yard, or watch people such up to professors in forced "discussions." So I boycotted Freshman Week, huddled in my half of the room with my best friend and fellow groupie from prep school, wincing as Ellen talked chemistry with the girl across the hall and paraded around in her orange pajamas and electric blue bathrobe.

I gave up on my roommate immediately (not the nicest move, but I could see the handwriting on the wall), but I did not give up on Harvard as fast. Then I met my dormmates.

I have never met anyone at Harvard able to match my tales of the people who lived in Stoughton my freshman year. Person for person, they were psychos. Zozo and Yarco, Stoughton's hulky Cuban sentinels, pouncing upon each girl as she entered the dorm: "What did you do tonight?" (Avuncular whine) "Who were you with?" (Leer) "Were his roommates there?" (Snicker) "A lady wouldn't do that." (Dismissed); Rob, the awestruck and disoriented Midwestern roommate of the Death Poet, wandering about sadly, latching onto anyone who would listen, occasionally making conversation with the two calculator-addled physics jocks who haunted the stairs and discussed their SAT scores; the tall silent guy we nicknamed Frankenstein, stalking out at dusk, headed for God knew what, and returning at dawn.

Then there were the Campfire Girls--two puerile Jewish American Princesses who dominated the floor in spirit by virtue of their loud, inane squels of girlish fun. They raced around in shorty nightgowns, short-sheeted beds, watched TV, hung out their windows and flirtatiously called down to men, and played cute little pranks like getting some guy to burst into my room at 3 a.m. and jump on my bed while they laughed maniacally outside. Welcome to summer camp. One of them, Lori, was a real space shot; she babbled in a soft, coy voice and wandered about in heavy makeup, glassy eyed. The other, Tamara, was an aggressive, competitive overachiever who raved about her work, her perfect, clean-cut, overachiever boyfriend, and her virginity.

Up on the fourth floor with me were the opera-nut (who also accompanied her music with an out-of-tune recorder) and her clean-cut roommate, along with a hodgepodge of very smart people who stayed behind closed doors studying most of the year. The women also had to cope with Chuck's completely inept attempts at seduction ("Can I borrow your typewriter?"). It was lonely up there, and I hated everyone.

FRESHMAN WEEK BEGAN MY RETREAT from Harvard, my frantic attempts to assuage my loneliness and frustration by clinging to memories of life and friends at boarding school. I know it's a little unfashionable to praise prep school, with all its elitist connotations, but for me it was a haven, an unrelenting series of academic challenges enlivened by warm friendships with students and teachers. I didn't think I had swallowed the social caste propaganda--I am proud of my Syrian Jewish heritage and my immigrant grandparents. I had gone to public schools until tenth grade, and I knew intelligence is not confined to prep schools. I had always hated the socialite, tennis-playing atmosphere of my suburban town, and I fled to prep school as a more, not less, diverse place.

But Freshman Week at Harvard I discovered I hadn't remained as immune to elitism as I had thought. I watched others' excitement at living away from home with an arrogant sense of superiority. It wasn't new for me. So I sought out people I hardly knew from school to commiserate with. And I insulated myself from other people, waiting for classes to start and for the intellectual challenge that three years of Andover had prepared me to expect.

I should have known--Stoughton should have warned me. I pored over the mammoth course catalog, marvelling at its range and breadth. Foundering, I decided to take my proctor's advice and fulfill my requirements first. I groped for some sense of direction and settled on the survey courses--I'll read everything from Plato to Marx, I thought excitedly. Then I went to my first class, and fought for standing room with hundreds of other people. I listened (there were too many people to see) as the professor told us to fill out index cards; she would select and admit to the course a fraction of those assembled.

As inane lecture followed inane lecture, I realized, with increasing dismay and anger, that this was it. Harvard: a professor mumbling about arcane and vapid subjects, in love with the sound of his own voice, while I sat resentfully, one of hundreds. In sections, wan-looking graduate students droned on and on about trivial points in lectures while pathetically overeager students fell over each other to answer stupid questions. My knowledgeable proctor had screwed up again--he hadn't warned me that huge survey courses are probably the least challenging and most poorly taught classes at Harvard. I felt academically betrayed.

BACK AT THE ROOM, things went from bad to worse. Ellen had grown increasingly resentful of my large group of old cronies and had developed a habit of throwing the telephone at me and snarling, "It's for you." I wasn't getting any sleep because she plodded around so early in the morning. When I came in late, she would wake up and make me feel guilty. Ellen best expressed her hostility at the one and only party I threw, when, dressed in the orange pajamas, she sat outside our door glaring at everyone who entered.

Things came to a head in the middle of the first semester, when I found out about a story she had written about me. Ellen had been vainly pursuing the roommate of my best friend, Chris, and she showed him her piece of fiction, which described a very nice chemistry student--Ellen--living with an obnoxious preppie who kept getting phone calls--me. One day these two have a fight over the chemistry girl's propensity for telling science jokes. The preppie flounces out and returns several hours later, asking for messages. "Your friend Chris was hit by a bus and killed," Ellen replied. The last line of the story read, "As the sound of retching filtered from the bathroom, she (Ellen) smiled over her little joke."

After that, I stayed out of the room. I auditioned in vain for plays, trying to regain the cameraderie of my old theater group. But I got rejected again and again, and I finally took refuge in libraries, trying to study my way out of my depression and loneliness. In this morass, I clung to the one human and intellectual contact of that first semester: a freshman seminar on China taught by a man who honestly cared not only about our intellectual development, but also about our personal adjustments to Harvard.

The course required one mammoth research paper on an individual who shaped public opinion on China, and I threw myself into research. I chose a famous Harvard professor active in public policy and spent hours in the Yenching library, digging up old correspondence, reading everything my subject had written, interviewing him and his colleagues. I would return to my room after the libraries closed and prattle on about my newest theory or the latest letter I had discovered to anyone who would listen. I ignored all my unrelievedly boring coursework and wrote the paper for weeks, finishing just before Christmas vacation. I gladly fled Harvard for home, where I spent the bulk of my time fighting with relatives, trying to convince them Harvard was a fraud. I told them I wanted out.

I returned reluctantly to my first reading period, arguably the most terrifying weeks of freshman year. My neglected coursework loomed before me, and my classmates' all too evident paranoia drove me from the Union. I never went back--it was too loud and the food sucked. I drank soup in my room, worked and fended off an inexplicable herd of admirers who had suddenly materialized when I didn't want to be bothered. As a maniacally drew up my schedules for studying, I discovered to my horror that I had three exams in three days. Had I read the catalogue more carefully, received better advice, I could have avoided that misery; as it was, I entered exam period with the sick feeling of a rookie paratrooper plummeting down onto a field of land mines.

Sick as I was then, I was soon to be sicker. Exhausted after my first exam and facing two more in the next two days, I took a No-Doz to stay awake and study. I stayed awake all right, and began hyperventilating around 5 a.m., when I realized that I would never get to sleep. Terrified, I woke up my proctor, who sleepily told me to go the the infirmary. "That's okay. Good luck." SLAM.

At the University Health Services, a nurse told me I had to take the exam anyway and sent me back to Stoughton. By now I was really desperate. I would fail my exams and all that frantic studying would be as useless as the entire first semester. After shivering by myself for an hour, I finally gave in and woke up a friend across the hall who sent me to stand, shaking, under the shower until the exam. I took it in a complete stupor, barely aware of what I was writing. I begged my section leader for mercy, staggered home, slept the rest of the day, took my third exam and collapsed. Typically, neither the UHS nurse nor my proctor had informed me that I could have gotten out of the exam by walking into the morning clinic.

THAT ENDED my first semester at Harvard. I sat in my empty room over the four-day break between exam period and second semester, washing clothes, reading, thinking, recuperating. I had spent my semester detached, passively accepting academic boredom and loneliness. I had cried and raged and stormed, but I hadn't done anything. I was as sick of myself as I was of Harvard, sick of trying to turn Harvard into Andover.

None of these insights came quickly or easily, but I did make an important decision--to find a place for myself at Harvard, an activity or group that would rekindle my enthusiasm. In quick succession, I got into a play and found a boyfriend. The former was unquestionably the worst play I have ever seen or acted in, a pitiful attempt to set Antigone in a Latin American dictatorship. The bumbling, pretentious director and the egomaniacal cast ensured the failure of the production. The boyfriend was even worse, a deceptively suave manipulator who enjoyed hurting people and watching them squirm.

By now I was furious. To hell with them all, I thought. This place is not going to destroy me. Searching around for something to do, I ran into an Andover grad I had barely known who had been trying for months to get me to comp for The Crimson. I told him I never slept much, and he said I was a natural. I marched into the building determined not to take any crap and to do well. My first day I tackled two stories, the first about a black student accusing a teacher of racism, and the second about a guy who fell off a fire escape and whose parent threatened to sue The Crimson if I wrote the story. It was my first real challenge at Harvard. I wrote both stories and nobody sued.

I began to spend more time at The Crimson. I still felt lonely, and sporadically angry, but I was often too busy to sulk. I took some more couses on Asia, and discovered that one actually made me think, as opposed to regurgitate. Eventually, I became an East Asian Studies major. While I still hated Stoughton, I discovered that laughing at the crazies made them less threatening, and I found two women there who eventually became my best friends. Ellen and I even worked out a cautious detente--she realized that I was not a preppie socialite and I began to see what was underneath her eccentricities.

The Crimson was becoming my home--a place to argue and laugh with people, talk politics and hone my writing and reporting. And although for months after my disastrous romance I looked through men as if they weren't there, I found that I could begin again at the end of that year.

Spring term reading period came, and I didn't panic too much. I had at least twice the amount of work to do, but ended up doing twice as well. My exams over, I walked back to Stoughton to pack, ecstatic at the thought of leaving the dorm that symbolized for me all the horrors of the year. No more Campfire Girls parties, with shrieking women and very drunk jocks; no more science nerds scuttling around nervously; no more of Chuck's inanities. No more freshman year, with that painful sense of being different.

I trudged up the four flights to my room, Ellen's half bare and spotless, my own strewn with notecards, crumpled typewritten pages and books. Sorting through the mess. I discovered a note addressed to me in Ellen's spidery handwriting. It read:

"Dear Sue,

Remember that in spite of our minor scrapes and antagonisms, I shall ever think of you as one of those who contributed to making this a grand fantastic year for me.

Much love,

Ellen Anne Warner '80

South House."

Thanks, Ellen. I felt a twinge of guilt about my aloofness toward her, but it's easy to feel compassionate when you know you're never going to have to deal with someone again. I put the note away, packed up the last box, and headed for the door. I did not dread returning to Harvard the following year; I had made good friends and found a niche in East Asian Studies and The Crimson. I looked forward to starting over, out of the Yard. But I savored every last step down the stairs, past Chuck's room and out of Stoughton forever. Chuck's still loose. And Stoughton's still there. Welcome to Harvard.CrimsonAnthea Letsou