When Christopher S. Howe '89 walked into his freshman triple for the first time, his roommate thought he was seeing double. Chris looked exactly like Kenneth M. Hirsh '89, who was about to spend a year with him.

"The other [residents of the dorm] couldn't tell us apart for over a month. We still tell people that we are brothers, and they believe us. People still mistake me [for Ken]," Howe says.

Other former freshmen recall roommate problems of a very different kind. My roommate "tried to burn down the dorm," a former Matthews resident recall. "He was wacko."

Although these situations have occurred in the past, the Freshman Dean's Office (FDO) hopes to avoid repetitions, so they devote a great deal of time to assigning freshmen to rooming groups.

The FDO is already preparing for next year's freshman class, by gathering together the application folders and interview files of the latest crop of would-be Harvard students. Once the members of the Class of 1992 have been selected, the FDO this spring will send them its two-page housing application form.

Using this form, which the future frosh return during the summer months, the six senior advisers will sit down and spend four weeks and close to $200,000 playing Harvard's unique version of the dating game--matching personalities and peculiarities in the search for the perfect rooming group.

The search is often successful, and equally often it is not "They took all of my characteristics, and tailor-made a rooming group to perfectly match them," says Sarah B. Wigglesworth '91, explaining that she and her roommates agree in both tastes and temperaments. But another freshman says her room is "turning into a war. I'm going to cry for the rest of the year."

For better or for worse, the process begins when a computer randomly divides the files of the freshman class into six groups representing approximately 250 students apiece. The computer then arbitrarily assigns each group to the north, south, east or west Yard, to Canaday or to the Union dorms. Each group of folders then goes to a senior advisor who spends several days carefully spreading them out in his or her office, on top of the desk and all over the floor.

The first separation each senior adviser makes is to divide the smokers from the non-smokers, says Robin M. Worth '81, the south Yard senior advisor who coordinated the rooming effort this past summer. The advisors then separate the messy from the meticulous, and the socialites from the studious. From within these sub-groups, each advisor tries to create rooming units that are diverse and yet share some common bonds, Worth says.

Having created the rooming groups, the senior advisors then divide the freshman rooms into entryways and proctorial units, once again attempting to balance the seemingly opposing goals of unity and diversity within these larger groups, she says.

"It's a challenging process. There's not a recipe [for a successful rooming group]. It's just intuition," says Worth. "We want to capitalize on the diversity of the class. But you must be able to draw some line between all the members of a group. Everyone should have something in common with everyone in the room."

C. Caroline Quillian Stubs '80, senior advisor for the east Yard, says that it is difficult to strike a balance between heterogeneity and homogeneity in a single room. "I'm mostly trying for unity in the rooms. I mean, it would be nice to have a diverse unity, but that's not always possible."

But she adds the large entryways of the east Yard dorms allow her to create diversity within the entries when it is not possible within the rooms. Even so, several entryways have managed to form identies of their own. This year, Mass Hall is known for housing a majority of the freshman football squad, and other dorms have gained interesting reputations in the past.

Last year, the C entry of Canaday was known for trouble, residents say. Former Canadayan Jeffery M. Bray '90 says that "We probably had 10 out of the 30 people in the entry [go before] the Ad Board. I guess you could call that troublemaking."

Bray recalls that one of his freshman roommates was caught stealing a sign during freshman week, and another was accused of following "improper test-taking procedure." In addition, Bray says, the entire room was Ad-Boarded for throwing a party that went out of control. "We were active kids," says Bray.