If you were a Harvard student on campus in the fall of 2024, you probably remember getting a letter in your mailbox, seeing a poster in your dining hall, or opening up a message on your Canvas page that conveyed a crystal-clear message: take the Pulse Survey! 

You might also recall that the Pulse Survey was developed and administered by the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (OEDIB) to gauge feelings of inclusion across the university.

What you might not have known, though, is that some of the key contributors to the promotional efforts surrounding the survey—such as the decision to feature it on Canvas—were students themselves. The Student Survey Advisory Group, a tight-knit team of undergraduates working with the Dean of Students Office (DSO), has been meeting regularly since the start of the school year to help administrators brainstorm ways to extend the reach of school-sponsored surveys. To the Advisory Group, the positive buzz around the Pulse Survey is just one early example of the impact they hope to have on students’ engagement with administrative surveys. Members believe that if more students could be persuaded to take a few minutes of their time to fill out these surveys, it could make a big difference in the alignment of administrative initiatives with students’ needs and preferences.

Fittingly, the Advisory Group grew out of a survey question that encouraged interested students to volunteer to improve Harvard’s surveys. Ever since then, the Group’s four student members have been having lunch with DSO staff every couple of weeks, discussing students’ perspectives and wishes, strategies for increasing survey response rates, and ways to spread awareness of the tangible impacts survey results can have on students’ experiences.

And as if the Group’s dedication to their mission wasn’t clear enough, the team’s administrative overseers—including Dean of Students Tom Dunne, Assistant Dean Meghan Lockwood, and Senior Director of Institutional Research Karen Pearce—sent a “survey” to the students after their first meeting, asking if there was anything they could do to make their gatherings better.

In interviews with the College News, students on the Advisory Group expressed various reasons for joining. Kate Gilliam ‘25 related that she had previously known little about Harvard’s surveys, and she wanted to know whether they were actually making a difference. Ethan Myers ’25 had taken several courses dealing with survey methods and saw an opportunity to apply his knowledge. Elena Luo ’28 knew the benefits surveys could have for students, having previously worked to promote mental health resources at her high school and developed surveys to determine the demand for them. Madeline Armstrong ’27, who grew up in a small town, thought the group would benefit from hearing her perspective, knowing from first-hand experience that students from small towns often struggle to navigate Harvard’s big, complicated bureaucracy.

Whatever their specific motivations, the mission of the students on the Advisory Group is, in Armstrong’s words, to “bridge the gap between administrators and staff and the students who are filling out these surveys.” This gap is quite large. The staff who work on Harvard’s surveys are well aware of the difference they can make on campus: as Myers says, “What [they] highlight over and over again is that they see it.” Yet there continues to be a low level of student engagement with Harvard-administered surveys, as reflected in a sub-40% response rate to a previous version of the Pulse survey that was given in 2019. Armstrong believes this effectively shuts many students out of important decisions: “Harvard has so much money to go around, but not necessarily the input from students on where it’s meant to go.”

One of the Advisory Group’s aims is to highlight the changes that survey results can bring about. The previous Pulse survey led to the expansion of what is now OEDIB as part of a broader campaign to address feelings of exclusion among some groups at Harvard. Other surveys have had smaller but significant effects: Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) introduced new food “nights”—baked potato night, taco night, nacho night—to dining halls based on survey input. Depending on the findings of the most recent Pulse survey, affinity opportunities might be organized or extended for certain groups, such as first-gen students, students who have served in the military, and possibly others. Residential Life surveys can have even more immediate results for students, allowing administrators from each House to identify changes they could be making to House events, common spaces, and dining hall experiences.

However, it will be difficult to bring about these kinds of changes if the communication gap between administration and students persists. The Group’s message to their fellow students, as Gilliam puts it, is that Harvard administrators “truly do want to hear about the student experience, and their goal is to make it the best experience they can.” The very fact of the Group’s creation, and the respectful, conversational tone of their meetings, demonstrate their commitment to this goal.

It’s clear that the Advisory Group has a lot of work to do. The good news is that the group, which is still only a few months old, has plenty of time to do it. And they certainly have no shortage of ideas for tackling the communication gap. The team has been discussing the possibility of creating a web-based “landing page” for all sorts of information about Harvard’s surveys. Whether it ends up going on my.Harvard, Canvas, or its own website, the landing page would include links to active surveys, results from past surveys, and videos in which students discuss the importance of taking surveys. By putting all active surveys in one place and organizing them by class year, the Advisory Group hopes the landing page would reduce the confusion caused by the current email-based system, where announcements about surveys often get lost in the sea of messages that the typical Harvard student has to sift through.

Luo thinks that a survey showcase—a display of survey results and the kinds of changes they might entail—would show that the surveys students fill out don’t just go “somewhere in the universe” without being acknowledged or acted upon. By linking survey results to concrete actions, the Advisory Group hopes to embolden students to provide more feedback on how Harvard is doing. The Group also believes that it would be crucial for the landing page to feature student voices, which would be more engaging than appeals from administrators.

More than anything, Luo says, the ultimate goal of the Advisory Group, and the surveys it supports, is to make Harvard a better home for the people who live in it. “If you’re a freshman, it’s going to be your home for the next four years; if you’re a senior, it has been your home and it will be a home for other people after you graduate.” And everyone who lives in the same home should have some say in how it’s run.