A passerby walking through Cambridge on a spring day in the late 1970s might have witnessed a most unusual sight: a large home raised on the back of a truck, deposited soundly on a plot of land at 6 Prescott St.

Apart from this move, the Freshman Dean’s Office (FDO)—and the structure of the Harvard freshman year—has remained largely the same since its conception in 1930, even as the University and the fabric of the student body have changed.

Today, as in decades past, freshmen are housed in Harvard Yard and its immediate satellite dorms. They still live in small entryways staffed by proctors, who serve as academic and personal advisers. Freshmen still face the daunting task of choosing a concentration and a blocking group at the end of their second semester.

But recent shake-ups in the College administration, along with the momentum of the ongoing Harvard College Curricular Review, suggest future modifications to the FDO and to the social and academic aspects of the freshman experience.

The Class of 2010 and beyond will likely encounter a Harvard first year different than the one the Class of 2005 has left behind.

In the last two years, various curricular review committees have considered such major changes as a shift to Yale-style housing—in which freshmen would be matched with an upperclass House from the start—a move to push back concentration choice to sophomore year, and calls for more formal peer and faculty advising.

While the curricular review’s Committee on Advising ultimately decided against the earlier recommendation to switch to Yale-style housing, top administrators say that a push for a new housing system that would bring freshmen in closer social and academic contact with upperclassmen is not off the table.

“It’s certainly possible that we would consider a different housing model in the future,” Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 writes in an e-mail. “But not as part of the advising proposal of the curricular review.”

And even if future freshmen are not matched with a House upon their arrival, their experience may more closely resemble that of upperclassmen today.

“Our goal is to change the freshman residential experience and make it much more like the House experience,” says Deputy Dean of the College Patricia O’Brien, who is also co-master of Currier House.

Administrators are pushing for greater alignment between freshmen and upperclassmen in order to address some of the central challenges of the current freshman experience, including the lack of a coherent advising system, an unclear role for proctors, and social isolation between the Yard and the Houses.

Shifting roles for freshman proctors and House staff may go hand-in-hand with efforts at integrating freshmen and upperclassmen, primarily through peer advising and College-sponsored social activities.

These changes will all be considered as the FDO sees new leadership for the first time in over a decade. As current Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans leaves this spring, Thomas A. Dingman ’67, another seasoned College administrator, will take the reins at 6 Prescott St.

Despite the weight of tradition, the first-year experience—one of the longest and most closely guarded rites of College passage—is on the brink of change.

THE STAGE IS SET