First-year orientation is awash with advice about how to avoid impending disasters. Budget your time. Choose courses wisely. Watch your back at parties. Watch your belongings at Lamont. Heed these warnings and your world won't cave in. But, unfortunately, your ceiling may well.

Thus learned the residents of Stoughton Hall last week when Harvard's idyllic architectural charm turned into a harbinger of disaster. In North 29 plaster fell, dust clouds filled the room and three first years acquired a set of minor scrapes and bruises. The rest of the hall was spared the mess but not the ensuing mayhem. All of Stoughton's residents were evacuated by HUPD.

The University's response was particularly commendable in its creativity. Perpetuating the Camp Harvard charade the Crimson Key Society works so hard to sell, the displaced first-years were set up bunk style in Loker Commons and convinced that toting their toiletries across the Yard was more fun than bathing across the hall. Had they had any talent aside from their charming smiles and intimate knowledge of the Love Story script, the Key counselors would have sung them Kumbaya as they fell asleep, not to the crackling of a campfire, but to the sirens of neighboring fire trucks.

First-years were quick to laud Harvard's handling of the plaster disaster. Perhaps they were still awed by the grandeur of first impressions. Perhaps the closeness of the Loker barracks provided better opportunities to "get to know your neighbors" than the ice cream bash. Or perhaps it was the embarrassment that they should have known what was coming all along: If the holes in the pavement in front of your building date back to before the advent of electricity, then the support beams in your ceiling are probably that old as well.

In the end, the fiasco was a learning experience. And so to our peers we offer this sage advice: In next year's calendar of opening days, forget the lecture on how to survive your roommates; it's how to survive your room that counts.