While most students at Harvard live out their years beyond the Yard in the House they were assigned to first-year spring, there are a select few that opt to switch Houses. With a notoriously low acceptance rate, the inter-house transfer process is easy to apply to, but infamously hard to find success in.
For how momentous a change switching Houses is, many students who have gone through the transfer application process describe it as quick and simple. With just a few clicks in the resident portal, an applicant fills out a form ranking the Houses he or she wants to be switched into. Students can fill out the form with up to one blockmate, limiting the number of people that can transfer at once.
The housing office then runs a lottery on the applicants and surveys the preferences of the chosen applicants. If an applicant’s prospective House has enough space for an additional resident, and the applicant’s former House is willing to give up a resident, the student is granted permission by Harvard’s housing office to transfer the following term.
A student must have spent two full terms in their assigned House, with medical transfer applicants meeting other conditions, to apply for a transfer. The two-term rule gives students adequate time to get to know the community of their assigned House before opting to transfer out, the housing office explains on their website.
As a result, most students apply for a transfer the fall of their junior year, like Cassia Lee ’23, who transferred from Pforzheimer to Eliot House later that spring, and Ammaar Saeed ‘23, who applied for a transfer from Eliot to Lowell House—but was unsuccessful.
Students who apply for a House transfer do so for a variety of reasons. For students like Lee, it is location and convenience. “Just getting to and from places, especially for sailing, was difficult,” explained Lee who used to live in the Quad. “I would end up being near the River Houses until late hours and then have to shuttle all the way back.” For students like Saeed, it is more personal than that. “I thought I would feel more comfortable in Lowell,” said Saeed.
“I was a little upset after I didn’t get it, just a little bit,” Saeed admitted. Although given the choice to reapply one semester later, Saeed said he chose not to. “I sort of went with the flow and ended up spending a lot of my free time in Lowell anyway.” Saeed also described rearranging his housing arrangement this year to better accommodate his situation.
While the process of filling out the application may be relatively painless, students encounter a variety of challenges in the process of deciding to transfer—beyond being denied the opportunity to transfer at all. According to Lee, the most difficult part of the inter-house transfer process was choosing a single person out of her blocking group to join her in transferring. “You are allowed to transfer with one person max, and most people’s blocking groups are made up of more than just two people.”
By contrast, Saeed’s main issue with the application was that it was too brief. Saeed described the application as mostly consisting of drop-down menus without any space to write in his own words why he wanted to transfer. “It didn’t feel like any of the choices in the drop down menus encompassed what I wanted to say,” he said. “Nothing was sufficient to fully describe my motivations.”
Saeed said he’d like to see “at least one question where I could express my concerns and my thoughts” on the application instead.
Lee also noted that after transferring, she had to navigate the challenges of socializing with a geographically fragmented blocking group. But in spite of this small setback, Lee said she was satisfied with her decision to transfer. “I think it really worked out for me. Most of my friends from freshman year all happened to be placed in Eliot and it was nice to join them.” She also emphasized the comfort and convenience of living closer to Harvard Square and Harvard Yard.
While Lee was fortunate enough to find success in her first attempt, there are many students like Saeed who are forced to stick it out in their assigned House. “I know a lot of people who tried transferring but failed,” said Lee. “I lucked out.”
Lauren Hyomin Kim ’25 (lauren_kim@college.harvard.edu) writes news for the Independent