Welcome to Harvard! Here are your roommates.

Something that immediately puts Harvard on the map of differences compared to other schools is that first-years do not get to pick their roommate(s) or first-year dorm. It may sound scary at first, but trust me, it will be alright. 

Over the summer, before your first year at Harvard, you will receive a housing form in your email. This is the form that will essentially match you with your future roommate(s)/suitemates. The form is a way for the housing committee to get to know you better and properly match you with the best people to share your dorm with. 

The form consists of questions such as: What time do you go to bed? How messy are you? How many roommates do you hope to have? What are your hobbies? It is very important you answer honestly and as the person you are, not who you want to be. 

After filling out this form and making your preferences, the housing committee, who are your resident deans, will self-select your roommates/suitemates. Then in August, a couple of weeks before your arrival on campus, you will receive an email of your roommates' names and emails. Along with what first-year dorm you got out of the 17 available.

 From there you can reach out to one another and plan for the upcoming school year how you would like to share the space. For my first-year I was extremely lucky and gifted the two best roommates in the world, Luisanny and Audrey. We all lived in Matthews, where they shared a double bedroom and I had a single. On paper I think the three of us look very different. 

I’m not actually sure if we would have ever met if it wasn’t for us being selected to live together. We are all concentrating in different areas of study and are not in the same clubs. In fact, I have never had a class with any of them and rarely see them throughout the school day. 

However, they are my two best friends on campus and one of them is still my roommate to this day as a junior. Although this process may seem scary, I think for the most part it works out. Even better, you just might be lucky enough to meet your closest friends for the reminder of your four years at Harvard and beyond.