Flaming hot mattresses, last-minute switch-ups, and missing boxes: campus move-in this year was replete with complications, handing students troubles and trifles as they moved into their dorms last week.
On August 22, a truck filled with the Harvard Student Agencies’s new bed-extending service, BiggerBeds, struck fire and delayed the delivery of many students’ mattresses by almost an entire week. The incident presented HSA’s president, Chris Doyle ’25, with his first major presidential test before arriving on campus. “Move in is always a crazy time at HSA since we have to deliver MicroFridges and water coolers to all our customers and onboard new students to our laundry plans, but this year’s BiggerBed fire was unprecedented,” explained Doyle.
When the news of the mattress fire broke, Doyle said, “we immediately got on the phone with BiggerBed to ensure that the BiggerBed employees on the truck and everyone else involved was okay. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and BiggerBed worked around the clock to deliver another shipment of mattress toppers before students finished moving in. It was a stressful couple days.”
HSA is not the only Harvard organization dealing with delivery issues. The Undergraduate Council, which disbanded in the spring of last year, followed through with its promise to offer students a subsidized storage service. While the UC had guaranteed quick and easy drop-offs, many students struggled to locate their storage boxes and could not access them for up to five days after delivery.
“It’s kind of been terrible because I put all my stuff in storage with the undergrad council and I haven’t gotten my boxes yet,” said Jake Greer ’24 a few days after arriving on campus, as he could not access his blankets and pillows. After repeated attempts to contact representatives of the storage program, he finally showed up in person at the facility. “They said, ‘give me your ID and we will get your box here in an hour.’ I came back in an hour and they still did not have it.”
Storing items independently might have proved more successful. Nikkhil Kamat ’25 left his belongings at a friend’s house nearby over the summer. After a 16-hour flight from India and an hour-long wait at the airport, he was relieved to find that the person had dropped his items off on campus.
Kamat moved in by himself, which forced him to think creatively when lugging items through the halls. “I didn’t have the key to my dorm yet so I loaded it all into a random entry way in Quincy,” he said. “And then I got my key but it turns out my room was quite a bit away from my stuff. So I segmented everything.” Kamat shifted his boxes from doorway to doorway to avoid losing any of them or having them stolen.
Romeo Dean ’25 and his roommates had to carry all their boxes up three flights of stairs in Mather House, an experience made worse by the lack of air conditioning in Mather. “The AC is terrible. It doesn’t work in there,” Dean said. “I didn’t get a fan or anything and we have no AC. I’ve been sweating.”
A week after Harvard’s first day of classes, many students are still feeling unsettled. Cardboard boxes line the garbage bins on the streets, and suitcases remain to be unpacked. But soon enough, the classic complications of the first days on campus will ease, and students will adjust to the rhythms of the semester. And as the temperature drops, even the lack of the AC will be less “terrible.”
Hannah Frazer ’25, hannahfrazer@college.harvard.edu, still has not put her clothes away.
Becca Ackerman ’25, rackerman@college.harvard.edu, still does not have sheets.