"I've been going to a few open houses, going to the parties, and going to the tests, I guess," Silverman says, stuffing a basketball through the indoor hoop that is the centerpiece of his common room.

But there's one activity he thinks he'll pass--the Yard plate hunt.

"If you find the plate you get ice cream," he explains. "You get ice cream everytime you turn around. I've got ice cream coming out of my ears."

Silverman, who comes from Princeton, says he isn't sure which college town he likes better, but that if Harvard is "like this all the time, it's okay. The parties have been great."

"I'm in a daze. You just go around and meet people. It's a little hard at first. Names don't mean anything," Silverman says. "I have met so many people and they come up to me in the Yard and say "Hey, Jake," and I don't have a clue what their name is, but if you wait too long to ask you just have to skip it."

Although at least one of his roommates has already mapped out a full schedule for the year, Silverman says he's devoted most of his week to partying and that he'll worry about classes when they start.

"I haven't even opened the course book," he says.

"We've also got to work on our decorating," Silverman adds, looking around the common room, which is an elaborate shrine to Chicago Bulls' star Michael Jordan, whose photograph stands behind the basketball hoop. "When you dunk the ball," Silverman says, pushing the basketball through the net once more, "you can see Jordan's face through the backboard."

"Every night everybody comes up here to play hoop until about 3 a.m. I think the people downstairs must hate us."

But many first-year students agree, whether they enjoy the activities or not, that Orientation Week sometimes makes it harder, not easier, to meet people.

"I thought it was hard because all the people were making an effort to run around meeting a lot of people as fast as they could. And I don't like making my friends that way," says Kim Zeir.

"It is an effort. You really have to be like 'Okay, I'm going to go out now and I'm going to meet people,'" Zeir adds. "It is supposed to make it easier, but I think it will actually be easier to make friends when the week is over."

And Alissa Kingsbury says, "It has been a little intimidating for me. I'm used to 100 people in my class, in a place where I don't need an I.D. card to get in everywhere and where there are no lines."

"I feel a little bit as though I have no identity, as though it has been stripped from me, and I haven't been able to establish one with the new people here," Kingsbury adds, calling out to her Wiggles-worth roommates from her seat on the edge of Widener Library. "But I like my roommates and I think it just takes time to adjust."

"It's nothing like I've ever really experienced," says Mark Kaplan. "Everyone is really friendly, which is a good thing, but it takes forever for people to remember your name. Sometimes I think that if I'm not out partying I'm missing something really important. I'm actually looking forward to classes starting."