At the end of July in 2023 I received my first-year housing assignment, and I was petrified.

Incoming students do not pick their roommates or buildings. The housing office sorts everyone into one of four yards (Ivy, Crimson, Elm, and Oak) which serve as neighborhoods for the 17 first-year dorms. From there, your Resident Dean, who also oversees academic and residential well-being, will hand pick your roommates and suitemates. I checked my email inbox every few hours until the email came and read: Entryway: Mass Hall. 

After some quick googling I learn a few things. Massachusetts Hall is Harvard’s oldest surviving building, finished in 1720. It’s named after the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the University’s original founders. It’s lower three floors serve as offices for the president while the top floor is home to 14 first-years. One that would become my own. Most of the 17 dorms house somewhere between a total of 200 to 350 people, making Mass Hall the smallest of them all.  

"No way they are putting me in a 303-year-old building, above the president of the University, with 13 other people." 

What I learned following this did not calm me down. The building was initially for 64 students, split into 32 chambers. A few of America’s Founding Fathers called it home; John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams all lived here as students. Then, during the siege of Boston in 1775, Harvard gave its dorms over to the Continental Army, and 640 soldiers moved into those 32 chambers. In their time, it's said that they stripped the building of most of its interior woodwork for fires and brass hardware to repurpose into ammunition. I thought I was going to be living in barracks that predates the country.  

Every photo I could find only showed the outside so for weeks leading up to move-in I was back and forth between curiosity and worry about what my space for the next 9 months would actually look like. I pictured horrid creaky floors and one outlet per room.  

I got to campus in mid-August; I schlepped my things up to the fourth floor and opened the door: a blessing in disguise. The room faced Massachusetts Avenue. It was a great size with two large windows, and a bay window, allowing tons of natural light during the day. It had a fireplace, which didn’t function, but the facade was nice.  

Just outside those windows facing Mass Ave was the giant clock. There has been a clock on the west side since 1725, and it took me a month to realize that it was attached to my room. I would often sit on my bay window, looking out on Mass Ave, at people looking up at the clock next to me. 

Mass Hall has two room configurations: hallway singles, or suites with two single bedrooms. I lived in a suite with one other person. Dean's do a diligent job of matching students with their roommates; most of my friends are still living with their first-year roomies years later. The 14 of us on the top floor shared three private hallway bathrooms. The building sits at the edge of the yard closest to Johnston Gate and Harvard Square. CVS was a minute away, so the mid-day or mid-night trips were efficient, and the Square was closer to my room than the dining hall was.  

The building was designed for 64 students and once held 640. Now it holds 14. A week into my time on campus I knew all of them by name, where they were from, and which bathroom would likely be free based on their routines. That does not happen in a dorm of 300, where you can go a full semester without learning the name of the person a few doors down.  

Living above the president’s offices, you share an entryway with staff, so some mornings I’d be carrying down a bag of laundry and run into people in suits on their way to work. Students joke that Mass Hall residents are the quietest and most studious people on campus. Having lived there, I will tell you that is not a fact. We are, however, hard to find around campus. Every first-year dorm has a mascot and ours is a golden-horned unicorn, because of how rare it is to meet someone who has lived there. I've met people who didn’t know that Mass Hall had students in it at all.  

We also keep pretty good track of each other. I know who lived in B-42, my room, the year before me, and the one who moved in after I left. Once a year, we have reunion for every student at the College who has ever lived in Mass Hall -  hosted by peer advising fellows and the proctor, your main resource and advisors in your first-year. 

At the end of our first year, Mass Hall students are invited downstairs into the president’s offices for a tour and dinner with the president. You spend a year walking past the same locked door and one random night you go through it. What once was John Adams' first floor room is now where the University is ran, a few flights under my own bed.  

Almost three years later, Massachusetts Hall, both the building itself and my experiences in it, are some things I treasure most about my time at Harvard.