Termbills Reveal Rooming Clues

Last Saturday, Divanny Lamas ’10 was on a mission: she was looking for some way to find out her dorm room assignment before Harvard officially told her.

Even though housing assignments are not set to be mailed to first years until later this month, Lamas—and dozens of other members of the class of 2010—succeeded.

Lamas was searching my.harvard.edu for some glitch in the system that would give her the answers. Eventually, a fellow freshman told her that when users view their student termbills—accessible under the Campus Resources tab of the my.harvard portal page—their dorm room phone numbers were displayed at the tops of their statements.

Lamas eventually dialed her number and got the voice of a summer school student living in Canaday, who told her what room they were living in.

“I think they were more confused than anything,” she said about the student she called. “I was probably one of the first 2 or 3 people to do this.”

“I wanted a six-person suite. They put me in a four person one,” Lamas said.

She then posted her technique on a Yahoo! message board for Harvard prefrosh.

The message board quickly swarmed with freshmen posting their newly-found information and trying to find their roommates. Those who were unable to find their room assignments by employing the technique sought help in getting around disconnected phones or Google searches that proved unfruitful.

According to several freshmen contacted by The Crimson, their phone numbers have since been taken off of the student termbill Web site.

Lamas—who has found one of her roommates because of the leak—added that earlier in the month, freshmen addresses were posted on the freshman seminar registration page. But those addresses were soon removed from the Web site as well.

“I suppose when future Harvard students get bored in August as summer draws to a close, and the kids at Yale have known their residential college assignments for weeks, these kinds of things are inevitable,” James Alexander ’10 wrote in an e-mail.

Alexander added that first years also conducted searches on Facebook.com once they knew their telephone numbers in hopes of finding a rising sophomore who still had their freshman phone number posted.

Others, he said, were able to narrow down their options when they looked at their Faculty of Arts and Sciences’s Registrar Student Record online and found out what freshman Yard—Crimson, Ivy, or Elm—they would inhabit this fall.

Last summer, over 100 first years also found out their room assignments early through a similar technique; their phone numbers were listed in the online Harvard directory at the end of July.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.