After looking at students’ preferences for rooming-group size, ADF’s look for is compatibility. “We try to find people who have at least one thing in common with academic interests, extracurricular, personal descriptions,” Nye Barth said. She said she also takes into account things like “messiness and hours, though those change dramatically when [students] get here.”

Nye Barth offered a hypothetical student name John as an example.

“Say John from Miami wants to learn how to rock climb. Then I flip through the housing applications looking for a rock climber. I find someone who is compatible from Alaska who is a rock climber. Fabulous!”

The ADF’s’ goal, however, is not necessarily to match up students who will be best friends 10 years after graduation, although Mancall and Nye Barth say that would be an added bonus. Instead, they look for people who can learn from each other.

“We are trying to add something to the educational experience,” Nye Barth said, “not find people who will live happily ever after.”

“My golden rule is to find a balance between people having things in common but also different enough to learn from each other,” said Mancall. “It’s more of an art than a science.”

Nye Barth, for instance, says she has put people together because of their shared love of The Onion or because she thought they would make a good band. But students’ shared interests could be far less specific, like a general interest in politics or a desire for a quiet, neat atmosphere.

Dingman said that the FDO also usually tries to honor general requests like having an international roommate. However, he said that they will not honor any specific requests by name or put people who went to high school together.

“[The freshman living arrangements at] Harvard will make it easy [for old friends] to keep up with each other,” Dingman said, “but it will be limiting. [By not putting friends together] you create a situation where students meet each other’s roommates and their community expands.”

In some cases, the FDO deliberately does not honor requests. Dingman, who worked on creating freshman roommates in the early seventies, gave the example of a student who wrote “put me with anyone but an effete southerner.”

“Our sense was, here is a learning opportunity,” Dingman said. “We thought we could find somebody who would be a congenial match but who might break from the stereotype he just pointed to.”

BUILDING BLOCKS

Once the ADF’s have completed roommate matches in late July, they turn their attention to assigning these matches to suites, which, in turn, build proctor groups and entryways.

“There aren’t formulas there, either,” Mancall said. “Students are assigned to entryways more or less randomly, in the hope that we create a microcosm of the college as a whole.”

There are no “themed entryways,” despite persistent rumors in the freshman class about which dorm is the “athlete dorm” destined to win the “Yard Bucket” awarded for exemplary performance in intramural competition.