“I can have weird sleep schedules, but then it’ll happen that I wake up at 9 p.m. at night and the dining hall would be closed,” Reilly said. “It’s really nice to have food in my pantry and to be able to cook whenever I want.”

Like other undergraduates who live off-campus, Reilly said she can enjoy the social scene at Harvard but is also able to leave it behind and return to her own, quiet place, which she said she could not find in a dorm room.

“At home, I can just have silence and do my work.” Reilly said. “If I want that sense of community, I’ll go to Harvard.”

LOOKING FOR AN INDEPENDENT LIFESTYLE

Sahil A. Khatod ’14, who moved from Pfoho to the Dudley Co-op, said that he disliked the culture of dependence fostered by the Houses and their administrators.

“I didn’t like the fact that people did everything for you,” he said. “I wanted to go somewhere that was really community-based, where people needed each other, there was no social hierarchy, and people were very friendly to each other.”

Khatod is one of several students who said they moved off campus because they disliked the feeling of being coddled and controlled by the Harvard House system.

At the Co-op where Khatod now lives, students cook and clean for themselves in accordance with a system that requires residents to complete a certain number of chores each week. This arrangement, he said, creates a strong sense of community among its residents.

Especially with Harvard cracking down on alcohol through new policies like banning high-risk drinking games and setting guidelines for private student parties, some students who live off campus said the prospect of escaping the administrators and policies that govern the Houses served as a further draw.

Hernandez disliked the requirements that he shut down parties after Harvard’s 2 a.m. deadline and officially register gatherings with large groups of friends. He said he thinks the sense of community in the Sigma Chi fraternity house is stronger in part because of the absence of resident deans and tutors and the constant supervision they provide.

“It can be a bureaucratic process to simply have a few people hanging out in your room,” said Hernandez. “Here, I can do that whenever I want to without worrying.”

For Hernandez, living outside of the Harvard House system provides “a sense of freedom and autonomy” even while he is able to remain connected with the College community through his friends.

“I definitely wanted to experience a lifestyle that’s more similar to the ‘real’ world where I have to fend for myself rather than being in a glorified boarding school,” he said. “I love Harvard but I just grew out of it.”

Khatod said that even in the Co-op, where residents must adhere to some of the same policies as students who live in the Houses, he feels the impact of supervision from resident deans and tutors to a far lower degree than he did on-campus.

The Co-op, like the Houses, has its own resident tutors, but Khatod said he does not “feel they interfere much” with him.