Maya ended up receiving acceptance letters from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, everywhere. But when Charles Vest, the president of MIT, called her to see if she had any questions, the answers worried her. "What attracted me to MIT was their school of architecture, but I thought that outside of my architecture classes, I would be very unhappy academically," she says. "I was looking at what my freshman year schedule would be...it would be, like, chemistry, chemistry, biology, biology, physics, physics, calculus...writing class."

Instead, she picked the school down the road, Harvard. "And I think, in the end, it was that I could cross-register at MIT and still take architecture classes there," Maya says. "Otherwise, I definitely would not have come--if there were no way to cross-register."

She spent her first semester at Harvard preparing her application for a special concentration in architecture. She and Michele paired off immediately as the night owls and would stay up late laughing and writing papers in the messy common room decorated with Monet and Van Gogh posters on the walls. Maya would blast Sarah McLachlan before a test to psyche herself up. She started dating a guy in Canaday.

None of the roommates were prepared to see Maya's uncle arrive in the middle of reading period, helping her pack--and leave.

Demian Sanchez '00 took CS50, the introductory computer science course, with Maya. He recounts a meeting with the Ad Board just before Maya left school: "I was just trying to give Maya a hand with a difficult class and she was just trying to get her assignment working. In the administration's view, I ended up helping her too much, which was unfortunate because we both had good intentions in this collaboration."

Maya confided in Michele, who gave her a hug and told her things happen for a reason. "Don't worry about it," Michele remembers saying. "It's a setback, but it will give you a chance to think."

On the night before Maya left, the four roommates sat on the common room futon and took a picture--their last together.