Today, Harvard Yard is quiet as most students have gone home (or to a warmer place than Cambridge) for spring break, but on Thursday the campus was filled with yelling, cheering, laughter and tears. Thursday was Housing Day – the day when freshmen at Harvard find out which of the upperclass Houses they have been placed in for the next three years!!! Freshmen can form a blocking group of up to eight people that are guaranteed placement into the same House, and can link with one other blocking group that they are guaranteed to be placed into the same neighborhood with.

On the morning of Housing Day, students from all of the Houses gather early in the morning to deck themselves out in House apparel and deliver letters to students assigned to their House, followed by lots of shouting and cheering in front of Annenberg Dining Hall. Here, for example, is the Mather contingent (the best, in my biased opinion!) Of course, since Housing Day is right before Spring Break, students often have papers and midterms due that day (as I did freshman year), but generally the entire campus comes together for Housing Day, with professors laughing along as mascots from the Houses storm big freshman classes like Ec 10 and LS1b.

In honor of housing day, I went through my photos and found group shots of my roommates and I from freshman, sophomore, and junior year. Freshman year, my roommates and I were part of three different blocking groups, which were placed in Mather, Dunster, and Cabot. Every semester, we have a freshman roommate reunion at Nine Tastes, the restaurant where we went for our first roommate dinner together freshman year (which is where we were going when this photo was taken!)

Sophomore year! Here are my roommates and I right before winter break, sometime in the midst of reading period and finals, in the common room of our lowrise room in Mather.

Junior year! Here are my roommates (and our new roommate for senior year) right after the room lottery. We tend to have the worst luck, and got the lowest number in the lottery for junior year and for senior year. (Each house has a lottery to decide the order for picking rooms for the next year). We still ended up on the seventh floor of Mather tower this year though, so it was all good 🙂

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