"We hope that people will feel welcome," says new Cabot House Master James Ware, whose sophomores travelled yesterday to Groveland, an outdoor park in Harvard, Mass. that offers tennis, swimming and volleyball.

Also yesterday, Leverett sophomores travelled to House Master John E. Dowling's Woods Hole home.

Ware says that at this summer's orientation for new house masters, he picked up tips on fostering community spirit in his house, such as hosting a welcome dinner for sophomores.

Most house administrators say that they do not expect randomization to bring great changes to the houses, or at the most, that it is to early to say.

"I don't think randomization is a big deal for us, and I don't want to make our students feel that it is a big deal," says Lowell House Allston Burr Senior Tutor Eugene C. McAfee.

"I think that randomization has been made to appear more deleterious, both to students and to houses, than I think it's going to turn out to be," he says.

Under the previous policy of non-ordered choice, in which students picked four houses where they wanted to live, randomization meant being assigned to a house, like Leverett, Currier or Quincy, that didn't have enough takers.

But McAfee says that in a way, Lowell has been randomized for years. Since so many more students wanted to live in Lowell each year than there were slots, its residents ended up being randomly selected from a large and diverse pool.

Likewise, Kirkland House Co-Master Cathleen K. Pfister says her house has never had a reputation, so it won't be facing the types of changes some of the other houses might.

"Since our pool was so very large in the past, such a large number of students put down Kirkland as one of their choices, we feel that the population will not be that different," she says.

But many houses have maintained their reputation by never being randomized under non-ordered choice.

In just the first week of the 1996-97 school year, there is some indication that the newly randomized Class of 1999 is trying to shake things up a bit.

An Eliot Revolution

New Eliot House resident Marian J. Hennessy-Fiske '99, a Crimson editor, says she is attempting to change the house's conservative image by sponsoring a fashion show later this year.

According to Eliot Resident Tutor Richard F. Boulware '90-'93, who has agreed to be an adviser and participant, the show will be a full blown Adams-style affair.