Dorm Crew captain Duncan F. Moore ’11 says financial independence was the reason he started working Dorm Crew. Last summer, Duncan used the $3,500 he earned during Spring Cleanup—the four weeks of intensive cleaning after final exams end—to pay for a summer language program in Sweden.

And Andy A. Parchman ’11 says the money from Fall Cleanup his freshman year was “just extra spending money, so I could buy three more girls drinks on a Saturday night.”

NOT-SO-DIRTY WORK

Regardless of what dorm crew workers spend their extra income on, the question of class divide and social stigma always arises when the conversation is about cleaning toilets.

“It comes with ideas about social class that people want to hide from on all different levels,” says Dorm Crew captain Jack Cen ’11. “There are poor and rich students who wouldn’t want to do it for the same reasons.”

Cen says that when he first started, he was worried about interactions with the peers whose bathrooms he was cleaning.

“When people who know me see me clean they sometimes feel uncomfortably because it humanizes something they don’t think about,” Cen says. “People say, ‘You’re at Harvard, why are you cleaning bathrooms?’ but it’s a job that needs to be done—getting into Harvard doesn’t raise you above anyone else.”

Those students who do work Dorm Crew emphasize that they choose to do so.

“I could be doing other things,” says Sandler, “But I choose to spend more than the minimum number of hours working Dorm Crew.”

And apart from occasionally opening the door on a boy in his undergarments, Marlee Chong ’13 says she has never felt uncomfortable doing her job.

Daniel Gomez, whose daughter Alexis C. Gomez ’13 decided to join Dorm Crew after her experience with fall cleanup, says he was surprised but not opposed to his daughter’s decision.

“You don’t have to work Dorm Crew—there’s no one forcing you to do it,” says Gomez. “If you were assigned this kind of work, that’s when there would be a stigma.”

A DORM CREW ADVANTAGE?

Wolfreys says Dorm Crew alumni have told him their experience has helped shape their later career paths.

“One student said that he felt the only reason he got hired by Goldman Sachs was because he was working Dorm Crew,” he says. “They expressed amazement at his work—and this student was only working Dorm Crew to help his roommate, a captain, who was short on staff.”