Where Does the Spirit Go After Housing Day?

It’s 8 a.m. on March 27, but it’s unlike any other Friday morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard feels like a completely different place. It’s Housing Day. Upperclassmen crowd the Yard with color-coordinated outfits representing one of the twelve residential Houses. Freshmen watch from their rooms, wondering which cohort of students will knock on their doors to welcome them to their home for the next three years. At 8:30 a.m., the upperclassmen start what the College dubs the “dorm storm,” a sequence of chanting, singing, and banging on freshmen suites with their housing letter. 

For my friends and me, the level of enthusiasm was surreal for that early in the morning, especially because we had gotten back from River Run just two hours earlier. Still, for a brief time, school spirit and house pride felt loud and magnetic, echoing throughout the Yard.

Yet, that version of Harvard is only temporary, and that’s precisely the problem. By the next week, or even the next day, the Housing Day energy had vanished. The Yard returned to its usual flow of students rushing to lectures and tourists wandering around. The same students who woke first-years on Housing Day returned to their busy routines. After my first Housing Day, it became clear to me how little school pride truly endures at the College.

Only the Harvard-Yale game comes close. Sitting on Harvard’s side of the stands this past November, surrounded by face-painted students in school colors, chanting for the football team, I realized this was one of the few times the school actually felt unified. But similar to Housing Day, that energy was short-lived. And over time, such camaraderie starts to feel like something the student body is performing rather than naturally embracing. In other words, school spirit is something that we switch on for a few hours before returning to normal.

Housing Day makes one thing clear: Harvard doesn’t completely lack school spirit—it fails to sustain it. And maybe undergraduates are just looking for spirit in the wrong places at other times of the year. What if a House feels like home not because of the loud moments on Housing Day, but through the quieter, everyday interactions that follow?  

Let’s backtrack. I am imagining the moment when my blocking group was dorm stormed—when upperclassmen banged on my blockmate’s door in Weld Hall, chanting “Cabot” along the way. We instantly went silent, exchanging looks and joking about not opening the door. When we finally got ourselves to open it, that’s when we realized that we had just been pranked. They revealed to us at the last second that we actually got Adams House. Instantly, our mood flipped. We went from being quiet to screaming and jumping up and down uncontrollably, hugging each other tight and crying happy tears. At that moment, we felt so incredibly lucky, as if everything was flawlessly falling into place.

Yet, when I returned to my room in Apley Court, things quickly returned to normal. I started to think that our House for the next three years would merely mean a residential place—an area to store my belongings and in which to eat and sleep.

Part of that might come down to where people actually feel invested. At Harvard, most students only feel attached to the communities that they actively choose to be in. Students invest time and effort into clubs, teams, and organizations where they feel that they have a sense of agency, almost abandoning the rest.

But instead of lamenting this reality, students can point to suggestions on what Harvard could be doing differently. Creating more opportunities for that kind of connection to happen regularly, not just during major events, might matter more than we think. That could mean organizing smaller, more frequent House traditions, better turnout for sports games, or even just events that make it easier for students outside their usual friend groups to show up and feel included. Events like Yardfest or the Crimson Key “Johnnies” already do this by bringing students together, and organizing more of these kinds of activities could help make that sense of connection feel more present in everyday campus life.

But what about those smaller moments? That gap also reflects something cultural about Harvard. Housing Day ends up shaping how we define “spirit.” Loud, put-together, and impossible to ignore. Once that definition of “spirit” becomes the standard for students, however, subtler forms of community start to feel a little less significant. A single day of spectacle overshadows the small, everyday moments that make a House feel like home. 

Housing Day remains one of Harvard’s most popular traditions, mainly because it brings the entire school community together all at once. What makes this day so successful at building school pride is the little moments that students have with each other. A true sense of belonging isn’t just created on a single morning, but is instead a result of day-to-day interactions that accumulate over time. The aim as we move forward is not to recreate Housing Day, but to create more opportunities for these moments to last.

Katherine Lam ’29 (katherine_lam@college.harvard.edu) has yet to find that same level of enthusiasm at the college again.