First-Year Housing Released Early

Incoming first-years too eager to wait until mid-August to discover their rooming assignments have managed to get a tentative sneak peek this past week due to a computer error on the Student Directory Update (SDU).

According to Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98, some of the incoming members from the Class of 2008 had their temporary housing assignments listed in their profiles, though the rooms on the web were not the finalized housing roster released in a mailing beginning Aug. 9.

Dean of Freshmen Elisabeth Studley Nathans wrote in an e-mail that the Freshman Dean’s Office (FDO) first became aware of the problem when a concerned parent, “who happens to have two students in the entering class phoned me very early Monday morning, concerned that one student had ‘received’ a housing assignment but the other had not.”

Nathans then took measures to correct the situation by contacting Davis, who says he discovered the error with the new update system in people’s personal profiles on the SDU, and eliminated most of the problems by noon on Monday.

“Dean Nathans was at first concerned because she wasn’t sure how people might have found out what provisional or temporary housing assignments would have been,” said Davis, who is also a former Crimson editor.

Glitches continued to plague the system, however, and, as late as Wednesday, students were still able to figure out their housing situations, even if specific rooms were not listed.

Because phone numbers were listed in some cases, first-years were able to find past residents on thefacebook.com and discover their future room.

Davis said the problem was fixed later on Wednesday and that he believes the whole system has now been rid of any bugs. But he did mention that in some cases, information that was supposed to be on the SDU, such as an e-mail address, was accidentally eliminated for a limited amount of time.

Following the acknowledgment of the problem on Monday, a message was prominently displayed on the FDO website explaining that any information pertaining to housing “cannot be considered accurate information” since the deans continue to move around housing assignments until the last possible moment.

Many of the students found out about the computer glitch after Adam M. Guren ’08 sent an e-mail on Saturday to a Yahoo group organized by Sergey Trishin ’05, which is designed to allow incoming first-years to interact with one another and have questions answered. The e-mail explained how one could obtain his or her temporary housing information by going to the SDU.

The e-mail group Trishin set up, HarvardCollege08, is similar to an online group that he designed last year for incoming international students. Trishin explains on his website that he decided to expand the list to all incoming first-years this year, and acts as a moderator and knowledge bank for questions for the group, which has over 500 members.

“I was at the website looking for courses and instructions, and I came across the update, so I told some friends about it,” Guren said. “It was out in the open, so I thought [the FDO] wanted to let us know.”

Following the e-mail, students rushed to find out their tentative housing assignments, roommates and entryway mates, using a spreadsheet a student set up so that people could fill in their housing data they discovered on the directory update and on thefacebook.com.

One student, Deena S. Shakir ’08, was at first disappointed to discover that she may end up living in Pennypacker Hall because of its distant location, but became increasingly excited as she learned more about her housing situation.

“I found a girl who was in my room last year, the exact room, and she was amazing,” Shakir said. “She sent me pictures of the room and about a three-page long e-mail. I was so excited. She even drew out a floor plan on Microsoft Word. That was really cool.”

But there were many students who were unable to discover their housing assignments for several reasons. Many simply weren’t among the few who had temporary dorm information placed into their personal profile on the SDU, while others, like Alicia G. Harley ’08, knew about the problem, but chose not to check it out because they wanted to hear about their housing assignment the old-fashioned way.

Others just didn’t know about the bug.

“Really? That’s so cool!” said Pearl S. Houghteling ’08, who also hadn’t found out about the computer error, when told about the situation.

Nathans stressed in an e-mail that many of the students’ housing assignments have not been finalized, and could change by the time students receive their final housing information in the coming weeks.

She said she had “no idea how many of that number will prove to be ‘final.’”

“We’re all Harvard people so we’re pretty resourceful, so we were pretty impressed with ourselves,” Shakir said of the incoming first-years’ ability to find the tentative housing assignments.

—Staff writer Evan R. Johnson can be reached at erjohns@fas.harvard.edu.