On Friday, March 12th, at approximately 11:15 AM EST, the Harvard College Class of 2024 logged on to Zoom to discover, either to their chagrin or pleasant surprise, what building and community they will live in for the next three years. First-years gathered—whether virtually on FaceTime with their soon-to-be blockmates or illicitly indoors in each other’s physical presence—to watch Harvard’s attempt at making the century-old tradition of Housing Day something that students could enjoy in the era of COVID-19.
Traditionally, Housing Day starts early in the morning, as students from each House gather in the Yard to dance, sing, and flaunt their House pride. Classes are canceled for the entire University, and the whole day is spent celebrating the distinct culture of each of Harvard’s 12 upperclassmen Houses. This year looked a little bit different. Unaltered class schedules and campus-wide radio silence replaced the conventional excitement that usually comes with this celebration. For students who did tune in to the virtual announcement, their results were released in House-specific breakout rooms; for students in different time zones or who could not be online at that time, their results were in an email.
The selection of each student’s House assignments was an outcome of a previous dreaded requirement: finding a blocking group. Unlike Housing Day, this process barely adjusted to the pandemic-friendly school year. First-year students are traditionally expected to self-select themselves into groups capped at eight people to determine who they would be living with for the rest of their time at Harvard. This year, the expectation persisted just the same.
For some students, the process was seamless: blocking groups formed naturally from teammates or first-semester roommates. Typically, Harvard athletes spend a substantial amount of time with their teammates, and this year, the trend of settling with the friendships provided by sports didn’t shift. Athletes had the chance to meet new people through their weekly lift and practice sessions that were held in-person, which students cherished after long days of taking class alone in their bedrooms.
Ryan Tierney ’24 on the Varsity Men’s Swimming Team recognizes the blessings of this opportunity. “I will admit that I was very fortunate to not only be on campus this semester but also have a built-in friend group through the swim team,” Tierney said. “I do wonder if I would have chosen to block with someone else if we were given more opportunities to actually interact outside of Zoom and the pool.”
Several first-years also found valuable friendships in their roommates. Since on-campus students lived in single dorm rooms to limit their face-to-face exposure, opportunities for roommate bonding were limited. Sean McCabe ’24, however, essentially won the lottery in finding close friendships with the individuals that Harvard randomly assigned him at the beginning of the year.
“Last semester I formed meaningful relationships with whom I lived. And those were the only really close friends I made, but they are now my blocking group,” McCabe reflected. Though “there was not a whole lot in place last semester for me to meet people,” his experience of choosing roommates was relatively simple: Quincy House, where he and five of the six members of his blocking group lived last semester, was conducive to cultivating friendships due to its layout of three students per suite. McCabe is thankful for the friends he was able to find: “At the end of the day, I know I have good friends, and wherever we are, we are going to do our thing and have fun together.”
For Madison Pankey ’24, the search for promising blockmates was a lot more challenging. “I definitely had to go out of my way to find people that I thought would be good blockmates,” says Pankey. “I wish Harvard had put more effort into giving kids on campus more opportunities to meet people besides their suitemates or entryway. Nobody wants to spend more time on Zoom than they have to, which is what Harvard expected us to do by only providing virtual platforms to socialize.”
A semester of social distancing and virtual learning resulted in few opportunities to meet like-minded classmates. Unless students challenged Harvard’s COVID-19 guidelines to meet with others in-person, their only exposure to students who weren’t in their dorm or on their sports team was with students they met on Zoom. Though the pandemic has normalized meeting people and forming relationships in virtual settings, this task was difficult, especially for international students.
Evan Macrae ’24 from Niagara Falls, Ontario, described how miles of distance and differing time zones strained students’ ability to make friendships. “As an international student, I can really feel for the other kids who are already on flipped sleep schedules. I can’t see them making much of an effort to log onto Zoom for an event happening at 3 AM,” Macrae said. He represents an entire subset of first-years who didn’t have the opportunity to live on campus in the fall and subsequently had to choose between blocking by themselves or with individuals they had only met virtually. “It would be difficult to form a blocking group mate in a breakout room,” Macrae admits. “Now put the breakout room weeks before blocking is due: it is an impossible task to create a group.”
Regardless of the students’ first-semester housing arrangements or whether they were a part of a team, all of them agreed that making friends was incredibly difficult in the fall and that Harvard did very little to aid this process. Luckily, some students were successful in their independent attempts to meet blockmates. William Lybrook ’24 ended up blocking with a student he met in Florida, far from Harvard’s campus. “We really like him, but it wasn’t something that Harvard helped to cultivate,” Lybrook shared. “It was something that we had to find on our own.”
Whether by meeting in a different state or in the room next door, first-years found that random circumstances—rather than Harvard’s active intent—shaped their friend groups and, ultimately, their future living situations. Though the pandemic has challenged the organic formation of friendships, many Harvard students still found each other this year, united by the promise of camaraderie and the sense of home that blocking groups and House culture provide.
Marbella Marlo ’24 (mmarlo@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Independent.