It is mid-July, and piles of papers are scattered across the floor and tables of Assistant Dean of Freshman Lesley Nye Barth’s Hurlbut Hall apartment. As she sorts through the collection of papers, her cat wanders into the room, stepping on and destroying a few carefully ordered stacks—groups of four roommates that she had spent hours assembling as she culled 550 or so housing applications for the perfect match. The cat’s romp sends her back to step one, and she gathers the papers to rematch the students.

Such is the life of the three assistant deans of freshman (ADFs), Lesley Nye Barth, James N. Mancall, and Sue Brown, who spend nearly two-and-a-half months hand-picking rooming groups and then assigning these groups to create entryways.

It’s a process that takes hundreds of hours and turns the summer—when most administrators take a relaxing break from the frenetic pace of the school year—into some of the busiest months for the Freshman Deans Office (FDO).

“The process is enormously time-consuming,” said Dean of Freshman Thomas A. Dingman ’67, “but I think it’s Harvard at its best.”

While the freshman deans at Harvard spend hours hand-picking roommates, a number of other elite colleges—including the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, Brown, and Cornell—conduct the process mostly by computer. Other schools such as Johns Hopkins and Tufts first divide up students based on dorm preferences and then assign roommates by hand—working, by that point, with much smaller pools of students. Of the nine colleges The Crimson contacted, only Dartmouth and Stanford also match roommates entirely by hand.

AN UPHILL BATTLE

The whole matching process begins in late March, when the Admissions office stuffs a freshman housing application into the envelopes containing acceptance letters to Harvard College. The application contains three parts—a housing section, an advising section, and a records section.

The form itself is quite simple—it asks students to list their academic and extracurricular interests, music tastes, and the number of roommates they prefer. It also requests that students list—on a scale from one to five—how neat and how quiet they want their rooms to be. The form also requires students to choose one of three options for the times they go to bed and wake up. On the back, the form asks students to write an essay describing themselves and what they want in a roommate.

“The whole application is important,” Nye Barth said. “We are trying to get a whole picture of the student. It is more helpful when students say a lot in their essay.”

Mancall and Nye Barth both said that they assume students are honest in their application, although many of the questions are open-ended.

While the Freshman Dean’s Office receives the rooming forms, the Admissions Office puts the names of all the students who have accepted Harvard’s offer into a computer that performs a random sort. That sort is then used to divide the class into three “Yards” of 540 to 580 students: Crimson, Ivy, and Elm. A set of dorms comprises each “yard,” which is overseen by one of the three assistant deans of freshman.

THE PERFECT MATCH

In early June, each assistant dean receives a tall stack of rooming applications—one from literally every student in their Yard. First, the deans read the entire stack of applications from top to bottom. Once the deans read through all the housing applications, the ADF’s start matching up roommates.

There is no hard-and-fast rule for making roommate matches, but Dingman says that the common goal in all cases is “to find people who, based on their self-reporting, will be compatible and also have the chance to learn from one another.”

Each ADF goes about the process in a particular fashion, but all begin making assignments based on the size of suites in their yard. For example, Nye Barth’s Crimson Yard—which included Grays, Wigglesworth, Greenough, Hurlbut, and Pennypacker—contains a variety of room sizes, so before she begins assigning rooms, she sorts the pile into two groups: students who want smaller rooms of three or fewer and those who want larger rooms. On the other hand, Mancall’s Ivy Yard—which includes Claverly, Hollis, Holworthy, Lionel, Massachusetts Hall, Mower, Stoughton, Straus, and Thayer—contains mostly doubles, so Mancall focuses on making pairings of people instead of larger group assignments.