The goal, again, is to force students to interact with people they might not otherwise meet. Mancall said that, with entryways constructed to be diverse as possible, students “learn from all kinds of people with different kinds of interests.”

The goal of diversity does not, however, mean that the ADF’s take little care in creating entryways. In fact, they go out of their way to set up groups with the potential for certain interactions.

For example, Dingman remembers that, when he was working on assigning entryways, one student asked to have roommates who were chess players. “We though that would be nice, but then they wouldn’t leave their room and there wouldn’t be any expansion,” said Dingman. “We put him on the first floor and put other chess players higher up in the same entryway.”

Rooming assignments are finalized just before they are sent out to Freshman in mid-August. This year, the mailings are slated to go out next week.

WHO IS YOUR ADVISOR?

When freshmen receive their rooming assignment, they also receive the name of their academic adviser.

While most members of the freshmen class have residential advisers—their proctors—a few hundred students also get non-residential advisers drawn from the faculty and staff at Harvard. The FDO assigns residential and non-residential advisers over the summer as well. But unlike rooming, which is exclusively done by the ADF’s, advising assignments are made by a variety of people at the FDO, including Dingman and Associate Dean of Freshman Rory A. W. Browne.

The FDO attempts to match advisers with advisees who share similar interests.

“The pairing of someone with a non-residential advisor doesn’t say anything about the freshman or our expectations about the freshman’s experience,” Dingman said. “But if someone says, ‘I know I want to do biological anthropology, I have significant experience, and so I am on solid ground to make that remark,’ we’ll look for a biological anthropology person to start [the student] with a meaningful connection.”

But sometimes the pairings are completely non-academic.

“Someone will say, ‘I’m going to miss being a beekeeper,’” Dingman offered. “We had a non-residential adviser who was beekeeper.”

BALLS IN STUDENT COURTS

Mancall, Nye Barth, and Dingman all say they are opening, not closing, windows of opportunity. Once a student receives the slip of paper announcing their roommates, they say, the students themselves are responsible for determining what their freshman years will be like.

“In the end, all we are doing is getting them in the door together,” Mancall said. “What happens after that depends a lot on them.”

The deans do, however, have a recipe for success. Mancall and Nye Barth said that “students who come into the college saying, ‘This will be a great opportunity to meet new people and learn from them and do something new,’ will have a good experience.”